Epic Banality

Well, today I downloaded the beta of Safari 4 and in general I liked it. The cover flow style history was particularly cool. However, there are some things I didn’t like–mostly interface related. Here are some settings that can change things back to Safari 3 style things. (I’m not using all of these, just some.)

From the terminal, these commands will change things:

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop 0

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4IncludeFlowViewInBookmarksView 0

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4IncludeFancyURLCompletionList 0

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4IncludeGoogleSuggest 0

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4IncludeToolbarRedesign 0

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4LoadProgressStyle 0

I’m using the bottom two because I don’t like being forced to have a “add bookmark” button on my bar and I’m not loving the placement of the stop/reload button in the new setup. On top of that I like the blue progress loading thing.

I’ve spent most of my off and on coding life with web development of some sort. First it was IDC files, which later transformed into ASP. Then I kicked the Microsoft habit and went with PHP. I did a little time with Python and Django after that then tinkered briefly with Rails. What I learned during my time with Rails is that I really, really like Ruby. I also learned that I was far less enamored with Rails. I don’t like a framework that’s too opinionated.

For the past two weeks I have been devoting a considerable amount of free time (and thankfully, some work time) to playing with Merb. This appears to be just what the doctor ordered. I’m lucky enough to be a Johnny-come-lately and I happened to start just after Merb hit 1.0. One thing that Merb is lacking though is documentation. So, I figured that as I go, I’ll write down my questions and when I answer them, I’ll write those down too. Hopefully, this helps some people out and serves as a reminder for me.

First off, if you’re new, here are some resources that have really helped me:

• Merbivore: All you need… nil you don’t.
• DataMapper: Although Merb is ORM agnostic, the stack uses DataMapper by default and if you’re beginning, I suggest sticking with it. (Mind you, I plenty of other reasons for using DataMapper!)
• Merb — RDoc API Documentation: Don’t miss this. I missed this the first few days until someone on IRC pointed it out to me. This is not an ideal starting place, but as you get going it’s a good reference. (Duh. It’s RDoc.)
• Merbunity: It’s not exactly teeming with information right now, but there’s enough and it’s sure to grow as time goes on. Its tutorials aren’t bad.
• MerbCamp Videos: Watch these. Some of the performances aren’t exactly Academy Award winning, but there’s a lot to glean from these.
• The Merb Google Group: The guys on this list have been very friendly and have answered all my questions thus far. The discussions are also worth reading and it’s a good place to search for answers. The core devs are also on the list and are quite active.
• The DataMapper Google Group: I’m not as familiar with DataMapper as a project as I am with Merb, but I can say this group is also friendly and has been very helpful.
• Katz Got Your Tongue?: Yehuda Katz’s blog. He’s the current maintainer of Merb and appears in the MerbCamp videos and is quite active on the Google group.
• Brainspl.at: Ezra Zygmuntowicz’s blog. This is the guy that got Merb started so, you know, his blog is probably worth taking a look at.
• The Merbist: Matt Aimonetti’s blog. He’s one of the core devs. He also appears in MerbCamp videos and he’s also a regular on the Google group.

There’s also #merb and #datamapper on irc.freenode.net which haven’t been as nice as #django was, but they can be helpful in a pinch. (I prefer the Google groups for both projects.)

There’s nothing super secret about any of this, and it’s been posted elsewhere, but hey, it can’t hurt to have another place to find this stuff if you’re a budding merbivore. Also, let me state, that my experience with Django and even my limited work with Rails really helped. Merb does follow some of the same patterns and conventions as Rails.

Let me add, if you’re interested in picking up Rails or Merb, make sure you have a decent understanding of Ruby by itself first. I strongly suggest against trying to learn Ruby as you learn Rails or Merb. I started with “The Pickaxe Book” which I can’t say I’m in love with, but it does the job. If you’re not a new programmer and are simply coming to Ruby, you might want to just swallow The Ruby Programming Language, I enjoyed it a lot.

Anyway, as I tinker I’ll write document my questions and their solutions. I make no promises that any of my methods are best practices or that I’m some kind of Merb, DataMapper or Ruby wiz. I’m not. However, given enough time, I could be I suppose.

For better or for worse, I have a feeling my writing will become increasingly boring and technical for a while.

For the past few years, the bread and butter of my web development career—presuming that you could call it a career anyway—has been PHP coding. I know a lot of so-called “real programmers” will boo and hiss and whatever, but it’s served me well enough. When I made my initial exodus from ASP in 2000, PHP was a breath of fresh air. I preferred the syntax to that of ASP (and I was one of those “mavericks” coding it in JScript and not VBScript because I hace class) plus it was free and ran on my home grown Linux server. Those were good days.

In the past eight years, I’ve done more programming and gotten better at it. Some of my projects have been larger in scale and PHP becomes much less fun to work with. I’ve been working with Python in my free time and really like the Django. In fact, if any of you out there are fledgling programmers and are looking for a place to start, I can’t help but recommend Learning Python by Mark Lutz. Python has a lot of good free tools, runs on many platforms and this book is very, very good in my opinion—not just as a primer on Python itself, but on beginning programming in general. I even picked up a few things from it. (And, if you’re a Monty Python buff, you get a bunch of extra bonuses.) I much preferred to Programming Ruby by Dave Thomas.

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I suffer from some strange compulsions. There are the simple ones, like the fact that all the cash in my wallet must be sorted by denomination and series date and if I see some change sitting on a table or a counter I feel the need to arrange it in an orderly fashion. When I eat at In’n Out Burger I have two hamburgers—no cheese—and some fries and consume them thusly: burger, fries, burger. It must be this way. I generally like symmetry and order and my family has categorized me as “anal” since middle school. There are also the more annoying ones, like the resulting problem with the table IDs in Wordpress and the mess and hell that is the newest version (2.6).

Wordpress 2.6 introduced something that, at first, seemed like a damn cool feature: it keeps track of revisions. Every time I change a post it keeps a history of the changes. Cool, very cool. That is, until you combine it with their auto save feature and the fact that it’s just not a very well thought out system. It could be—and I hope they do something about it—but for now it grates on my compulsion for tidiness in data.

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