Month: April 2005

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Ruby on Rails and REST

I’ve spent a little while over the last few days looking at Ruby on Rails. It seems to live up to the claims of its proponents. You can develop applications very quickly indeed, and it’s easy to get a good separation of concerns. If you haven’t played with it before, have a look at the TODO list examples: Making a todo list and Four Days on Rails. Overall, I’m really, really impressed.

I do have one gripe through (hey, it’s software!) and that’s the lack of RESTability. I’m really keen on using REST interfaces where possible, as I’ve found them remarkably easy to reuse. Ruby appears to go some way towards this, by focusing on a very nice clean URL structure. But one key aspect is missing: dispatch on method names. As Mark Nottingham pointed out, to get a good RESTful interface, you need to dispatch on both URI and method name.

The good news is that Ruby is architected really well, so to get this kind of behaviour should simply be a case of subclass ActiveController::Base or perhaps the Dispatcher itself. I dunno. But it looks eminently doable.

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Jabs

Last weekend we had all the jabs for the honeymoon. It’s only today that my arm is starting to feel normal. Ow. Ow.

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Firefox / Thunderbird Extensions

There are two things that I could really, really use:

  • A firefox extension to summarize all live bookmarks by download time, so you can immediately see which ones have new items.
  • A thunderbird extension to understand Mailing List headers, so you can have a Reply-To-List button.

I suppose I’d better start cracking on them…

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Vets

Last night we took the cats to the vets in order to get their injections sorted out. For apparently healthy cats, they sure cost a lot!

In fairness, they did have two jabs (leukemia and flu) and a pill (worming) each. Surprisngly, Lucky made more noise about the jabs than Lola did. The vet said tortoiseshells are always more temperamental.

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Library

I’ve just visited the new Library in town at lunchtime. It’s a brand new building and rather impressive. It’s been a long while since I’d been in a library and I got a shock—they’ve got graphic novels. I think I will have to register properly and plunder their collection.

Not only the contents, but the space is rather impressive too. It has a distinctly cafe sans coffee feel. I spent a very pleasant 15 minutes nonchalantly browsing the papers on a sofa.

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Walks

Last night, we went on a nice little walk. It was basically taking the old railway route from Hove to the Dyke. Of course, most of the walk was simply getting to the beginning of the (now disused) railway line. It was probably around 6 or 7 miles in total.

The weather was incredibly foggy all the way. It was really surprising to come back towards Brighton and see nothing. Only when I got a bit closer could you even begin to see the lights on the A27.

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Cat Presents

This morning was the first time that the cats saw fit to deliver us with presents. I heard a racket at 4am and found Lucky cornering a mouse in the hallway. Too tired to do anything about it, I left her and came back in the morning. Then I found not only a mouse in the hallway, but another in the lounge. Busy cats!

So I had to clean up the mess and discovered bits of my dwelling that I’d forgotten about. It turns out that Lucky had been playing with mouse in the hallway extensively. When I looked behind the chair where I’d seen her, there was vast amounts of mouse blood covering the floor and skirting board. It looked like the introduction to an episode of CSI. Lots of detergent later, the place is finally demoused.

I’m actually far less upset about this than with yesterdays behaviour. We’d attempted to take away the litter tray. Unfortunately, Lucky got a bit confused. She knew that there was always newspaper at the bottom of the litter tray. So when she found no litter tray, she went on the next best thing—the newspaper on the bathroom floor. While I was shaving. Cow. The little cow. I had no idea that one cat could piss so much.

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Moggies

We are now the owner of two lovely little cats. A friend was moving and needed a good home for them, so we took them on.

And in grand Internet tradition, here are the cat photos!

lucky cat

That’s Lucky, female. She’s quite large and very friendly.

lola cat

That is Lola, female. She’s smallish and quite nervous. And she still acts quite kittenish.

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Bad Bike Luck

My poor bikes. Firstly, riding into work one day a few weeks ago, I managed to snap the pedal off of my brompton. I have no idea how. Unfortunately, it was the folding pedal, at £32 a pop. And the part had to be ordered. So I started using my mountain bike instead.

This worked fine, until I took my mountiain bike home to my mothers for Easter. Whilst I was there, I managed to snap the derailleur hanger off, again I have no idea how. Unfortunately, this left the bike in a state where it couldn’t even be wheeled along. Thankfully, it was close to the house so it could be carried.

The bike’s still under warranty, so I was going to send it back to Halfords to get fixed. Except that they’re busy. And when I call back they’re still busy. And then they have to order the part first. Net result is that I have no idea when my mountain bike will be working again. They’d just better fix it before the warranty runs out. 😦

But to really top things off, my brompton broke again. This was my fault. When the pedal sheared off, I also managed to break the front mudguard. So when I got the pedal repaired, I took off the front mudguard to look at mending it myself. And I must have put the front wheel nut back on badly because when I looked at the bike on Friday morning, it was missing. And it’s not terribly safe to ride around with wheel nuts. I managed to talk to the very lovely Andy at Freedom Bikes and he gave me another wheel nut to try. So, on the mend we go. Thankfully, the mudguard is all mended now so I’ll have a stab at putting everything back together this morning.

I do love my bikes, but they’re such a pain when they go wrong.