Gears Within Gears

The Economist’s economics blog, Free Exchange, explains why punditry veers into the bizarre. Read the rest of the post for the justification, but here’s the key bit:

If you want to be on television, you need to be the chap saying something that is

1. Unequivocal
2. Something no one else is saying
3. Testable

There’s no money in sensible, predictable advice. Anyone can give you THAT. People latch on to sensationally successful, novel predictions and tend to ignore or write off the failures. To become a pundit, predict something remarkable that no one else is predicting and be right about it once. Then make sure everyone hears about it.

That having been said, it is possible to lose your credibility eventually. Just look at John C Dvorak.

Gonzales, Mueller Admit FBI Broke Law

Transparency and accountability will never stop being a bad idea. It’s good news that their internal audit process apparently functions correctly. But their stunning arrogance at every juncture prior to the current one is dangerous and disheartening.

Secrecy is dangerous. It’s not enough to trust the current administration (not that anyone does anymore) or its chosen administrators. If you accept the precedents they set of secrecy and of the newly-expanded powers of the executive branch they you must also be prepared to trust anyone who might ever follow them, Democrat or Republican. And I’m not.

News comes in today that the RadRails developers are turning the project over to Aptana. RadRails is a plugin for Eclipse that aids Rails project development.

I confess that I’m a wee bit cynical about RadRails. It always seemed to me like the bulk of the work of integrating Ruby into Eclipse came from RDT, the Ruby Development Toolkit, but that the RadRails developers were in the right place at the right time and caught most of the press. The features they did add often didn’t work, or worked inconsistently; I remember a period last year where the RHTML syntax highlighting was completely broken and prevented you from even opening certain files. I’m not sure how long it took them to publish a fix, but it certainly felt like an eternity.

Here’s what RadRails adds, as far as I can tell:

• RHTML syntax highlighting
• Nice server stop/start interface
• Create a new Rails project with File -> New
• Awkward UI frontend for Rails generators
• Integration of a third-party Regex checker

At least, those are the features that I used. What have I missed?

It’s hard to blame someone for wanting to move on from an unpaid open source position, and they clearly did the right thing by ensuring the project found a new home. It’s also worth noting that marketing can be everything, and the RadRails guys were much better at selling their project than RDT (and I mean that in the best possible way). But RadRails always had huge dependencies on RDT, which has missed its latest release deadline and migrated to yet a third home. Does this mean that Aptana plans to lend a helping hand to the RDT project too? That would be welcome news indeed.

Of course, I use Textmate now, so, you know… whatever.

I should have done this years ago. Very cathartic. Although I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to do when the number of links I’d like to include exceeds the size of my wacky checkerboard box. Details, details. brianguthrie.com

I built a Ruby module for a class recently that’s designed to allow for flexible de/serialization of XML documents into and out of classes. The syntax looks something like this:

class Foo
  include XmlSerializable
  xml_element_name "foo-element"
  xml_has_attributes :id => Integer, :name => String
end

class Bar
  include XmlSerializable
  xml_element_name "bar-element"
  xml_has_children [:foos, [Foo]]
end

For convenience, and because I am both peachy keen and silky smooth:

# Generates a constructor and equality methods.
class Baz < XmlStruct
  xml_element_name "baz-element"
  xml_has_attributes :you_get => Integer, :the_idea => Float
end

The syntax is a little bit odd because of the constraints placed on us for this particular assignment (some very strange, arbitrary, not-really-XML grammar definitions) which is why the children in the example above are defined in an ordered list rather than a hash or something. But that’s easily cleaned up.

I’m thinking of releasing it as a gem, which is not something to which I’m accustomed. Would this be useful to anyone? It’d be cool to be able to define the deserialization grammar and the actions on a class simultaneously–say, for an RssFeed class, with RssItem children. I mean, not that there isn’t already an RSS gem. Because there is. But the idea of it makes me giddy, very much like a schoolchild of either gender.

I’ve had a glorious time setting this thing up, a time of sunshine and love. Blessed are the editors of config files, for only they live life to its fullest.

I had originally wanted this blog to be a subdirectory of the main domain but after hours of effort I’ve largely given up. It essentially comes down to aesthetics–do I prefer blog.brianguthrie.com, or brianguthrie.com/blog–which I freely admit is a highly esoteric issue, especially given that the former is considerably easier to set up. But I followed these instructions to the letter, and many others, and I found that no matter what I did, all of the URLs worked fine within Mongrel and were completely broken after they got passed through the proxy.

Once you’ve gotten so deeply into the problem that you start to classify the explanatory articles in your browser by their color scheme it’s probably time to look for a simpler solution. Perhaps someday I will move this blog to another URL, but I fear, dear reader, that today is not that day.

Welcome! I’m Brian Guthrie. This is my blog. I think that covers the bases.

I’ve been sitting on this domain for a long time because I’ve had a hard time deciding how I wanted to host it. My original goal was to use my desktop at home to host the domain, because I don’t use it for much of anything else anymore, but my cable provider blocks incoming requests on port 80, so that was out. I finally ponied up the money for real hosting and I’m running on Slicehost, which has more or less the nicest signup page I’ve ever seen for anything, and with which I’ve been very happy for the approximately 12 hours I’ve been a customer. I’ll be sure to let you know how it goes.