Schrade.Blog

Seaside, my other favorite framework, released version 2.8 today. This release has been optimized and optimized some more, as it doubles the average page rendering speed, and now uses up to 4 times less memory. Plus it supports Gemstone, which is the feature that I'm most excited about playing with.

The official release page is here, and if you still haven't tried Squeak, a great new tutorial can be found here.

Congrats to the entire Squeak team on this one.

(Seriously though, who does a release on a Sunday? You guys are nuts.)

I've been on vacation down in LA for the last week.

A couple of days ago, my friend James pointed to the horizon and said something along of lines of, "look at all of the smoke from the fires up North."

Well, I had no idea how bad things were until today, when I was driving back up I-5 and literally 10 minutes didn't go by where I didn't see a caravan of 5-10 firetrucks heading South. This was over the course of a 5 hour drive, so I figure that I saw about 200 firetrucks.

We also drove just East of the fires under two lines of helicopters, one that was flying in and dropping water on the blaze, and another that was returning to load up their water tanks again. The suburbs that we could see from the highway all had police cars stationed in front of them to keep people from trying to return to their homes.

It was more than a bit surreal.

Hopefully they get the fires out soon and everyone down there is safely evacuated.

Scary, scary stuff.

Ever since I started writing Ruby code I've used Textmate as my editor. Recently, however, I've found myself using Netbeans more and more, to the point where I usually have Netbeans and Textmate open next to one another. Netbeans' refactoring support, ability to jump to method definitions, and ability to autocomplete code is just too good to ignore.

However, a couple of features have kept me from switching to Netbeans full time, namely its lack of Haml support and the fact that it couldn't run a focused Rspec example.

Well lo and behold, I just checked the Netbeans Ruby Recent Changes page and found the following:

• October 12
  • Lots of bug fixes
  • RSpec module (not part of 6.0 but available in the continuous builds on deadlock)
    • TextMate RSpec snippets
    • "Run Focused Test" action which runs test under the caret. Locate the action in the Keybinding options (see the "Other" category) and bind to something convenient.
    • "Debug Focused Test", which starts the debugger on the test under the caret.
  • Preliminary support for HAML and SASS - see announcement

They solved both of my issues on the same day!

I did have to install the Haml plugin from here, but it looks like I no longer have a compelling reason not to switch to NetBeans fulltime.

And the obligatory screenshot:

Awesome!

A recent disturbing trend that I've noticed is that more and more programmers I run into seem to be really bad at math. At the very least, I'm starting to think that a few semesters of calculus in college wouldn't have hurt anyone.

Example 1:

Mint is a financial website that recently won first place at the Techcrunch 40 conference here in San Francisco. It aggregates your bank accounts and tells you how you can save money. While checking it out his evening I came across this, which, incidentally, is the same thing that it's been telling me since I signed up:

Come on Mint, this is the core feature of your website. (I'm not counting the account sign in and aggregation piece, as they seem to contract with Yodlee to do that.) How hard is it to properly calculate the above value?

I hate it when a startup spends so long on design that they forget to write solid code. People aren't going to come back if you can't even get this right.

Furthermore, check out the account that they want me to switch over:

Where did they even begin to pull these numbers from? They want me to switch an account with no money on it from a lower rate card to a higher rate card in order to save $278 a year.

At this point I've stopped thinking about math though, and starting thinking about all of the security holes that are probably in this site if they got something this fundamental wrong.

Unfortunately, there's no way in their interface to cancel my account. Wonderful:

These just seem like basic, basic things to me. I don't even know how you say that you're in beta when things like this don't work.