I'll be visiting Portland, OR for the first time ever for RailsConf 2008 at the end of May. Sadly, my contacts in that area have all moved to other parts of the country. Anyone with suggestions for someone stuck near the convention center?

"Brian Jones, an Office program manager at Microsoft and the sole Microsoft employee on the Ecma Technical Committee, revealed the total number of comments that had been received in a blog posting this week."

The joy of having extremely common names means that I get to read about my other selves quite often while living in relative Internet obscurity. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone celebrating it today!

I wonder why they did that instead of this?

A couple of years ago my primary editor for my mostly Java work was Eclipse. I'd arrived at Eclipse from exploring the options and having no budget for editors went with what I thought worked best for me. Fast forward a couple of years and I've spent considerable time working via ssh and using vim to edit or write a good deal of Perl code.

So, with the move into Ruby and Rails I've given IDEs another try. For a while I used RadRails. It works well enough and did what I needed it to do. I made it through a project cycle with it at least. I've lately been using the NetBeans 6.0 beta for Ruby (the Ruby only version) which I find a little snappier and with what seems like real code completion though honestly in the beta I'm using it seems to just list every method known to man. My primary problem with NetBeans in the past had been how big and slow it was and the lack of Emacs key bindings. I even mentioned these to fellow from Sun who helped manage the NetBeans project several years ago now. For my Ruby work at this time however, both of these problems appear to be resolved. Many thanks to all those who work on NetBeans.

So I've been taking the first preview release of Rails 2.0 out for a spin and noticed a few header changes I hadn't recalled seeing mentioned before. The following headers are now being emitted by Rails.

X-Runtime: 0.00010
ETag: "0dcbff3e9590802a55be3eeb2c91cb6f"

Will need to dig into how it is constructing the ETag, since these are for proper HTTP caching and it is possible it could be constructed from something potentially containing a current date/time rather than based on the static representation of a particular version of something.

Cache-Control: private, max-age=0, must-revalidate

Previously the Cache-Control header was just being set to no-cache.

No significant troubles found in using the new Rails 2.0. Looking forward to a version that has ActiveRsource properly tagged into the release.

After a long time of working within the Java universe, even to the point of implementing parts of the core API in GNU Classpath, I'm more often than not caught off guard by the APIs encountered in other languages. This brings me to my subject, Ruby's String.center(), which is defined as "If integer is greater than the length of str, returns anew String of length integerwith str centered and padded with padstr; otherwise,returns str." I could suppose such a method might be useful, at least in some circumstances, but I fail to see how it is essential to the nature of String nor how it is so often used that Ruby developers everywhere need it. In fact, it boils down to a wrapper for a method also used by String.ljust() and String.rjust(). You can guess what those do. That said, I'm enjoying learning a new language, which is something I haven't done for far too long.

So, someone pointed out that google wasn't loading and sure enough, it wasn't. That doesn't happen very often, and a few minutes later it worked again. I guess the apocalypse will have to wait for another day.

In cleaning out some mail at work today I see this message.

"Hello, I am away until January 1, 2010 and am unable to read your message."

Clearly, some people get more vacation time than me.

Nov. 13, 2006, is a notable bookmark in history of free software. Today, Sun has announced their selection of the GPL + Classpath exception as the licensing choice for their free implementation of Java. A long time ago now, three college computer science students formed a company for the purpose of marketing and selling a system for the development and delivery of online quizzes. A version of this system was built on Java. During the course of development some problems were encountered that could not be fixed due to the licensing of Java, and so began GNU Classpath, in May of 1998.

Many people deserve credit for creating the free Java implementations available today, prior to release of Sun's implementation in a few months. I'd like to thank all who are mentioned in the AUTHORS and THANKYOU files of GNU Classpath.

Congratulations to all of you! And a huge thank you to all the free virtual machine implementators who have supported GNU Classpath development over the years. The next chapter in the history of free Java is yet to be written, but I expect Java to now take its rightful place in every free software developer's toolbox.

Tags: java

So hap failed to note to the world earlier this week my blunder into diagnosing a small electrical problem at the house. When I got home one evening the living room floor outlet had lost power, she noticed, when her laptop started trying to shutdown because the battery was drained. I went about making dinner and started looking into the problem. None of the other outlets in the room were affected. The GFCI receptacles in the kitchen and garage appeared to be okay. I even took the floor outlet cover off and took a look at the outlet to see if something had come loose. I spent 15 or more minutes putting it back down since it was over carpet and was exceedingly difficult to get the plate back on correctly. I also checked the electrical box outside and nothing. The next day she noticed her hair dryer in our master bath was not working and she used the reset button on a GFCI plate in that room and voila, the floor outlet in the living room was fixed! I can't believe I didn't check that...