I’ve haven’t posted for quite a while. Here’s what I’ve been upto for the past few months:

• Started working with merb + activerecord for a major project - no need to abandon ruby for django now … unless I need django-admin. My primary reason for choosing merb was its loosely coupled architecture (read: freedom of choice). I also choose to stick with AR until DM is stable enough for production use.
• Started working with git, which has been a good experience so far.
• Abandoned Gentoo Linux, though I still have a soft spot for it. What I don’t have is the time or energy to manage it. Thank you, Gentoo, for a proper linux education, but now I just need a Desktop with a low maintenance overhead. Installing Ubuntu 8.04 on my desktop and laptop was a sobering reminder of how far Desktop Linux has come.
• Reading - various stuff. One standout book that I recommend is Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb., an accessible rant about randomness and uncertainty in the real world.

My first Rails app went online on 1st Sep (more on that later), and I was subsequently busy with those ‘trivial’ changes that drain your time and energy … I also have a looong list of feature requests to work through.

My other excuse for being inactive is that I’ve been working on 2 static sites and it is sooo boring What little free time I had, I spent writing a wordpress theme for my chess blog !

I’ll profile the rails app, soon … I promise !

I tried out Apple’s Safari for Windows (beta). It’s not bad at all.

However, I did uncover the annoyance of being unable to minimize it by clicking on the taskbar ! You have to either use the shortcut CTRL+M or Windows+D. Worse, when you maximize it, the window is ‘restored‘ instead of being maximized. I hope they fix this in the final release.

I would like:

• To view RSS item headings in a menu as in firefox. Safari opens an admittedly nifty Feed Viewer with all the feed items. But I’d really like to see the headlines at a glance.
• To use CTRL+TAB to cycle through the tabs instead of the given shortcut, which is CTRL+{ or CTRL+}. On my keyboard, this entails pressing three keys: CTRL + SHIFT + [
• A lighter theme ? The current one is too dark and gray. An option to switch to the Macintosh theme would be nice.
• To be able to click on an item in the auto-completion menu for the address bar. You have to press ENTER in Safari.
• The status bar to be visible, by default, upon installation.

Otherwise, I like Safari.

• Compared to IE, Safari is swift (to the naked eye).
• Font smoothing is configurable.
• There is an amnesiac mode called Private Browsing where, like TorPark, Safari does not record anything in the History or Downloads and form entries are not saved in AutoFill.
• History items are accessible date-wise from a recursive menu (History -> ‘Wednesday, June 13th 2007′ -> Item …. ), which, in my opinion, is far easier than opening a sidebar and navigating a tree menu.
• I haven’t noticed any website rendering incorrectly, so far.

I need Firebug at work, so I’ll probably stay with Firefox. I’m on Linux at home, so I don’t have the option of Safari there.

That said, I’ll definitely give Safari’s final release another chance.

I know this is perverse but I wish the Django Template language was available for Rails.

Beat this:

{%extends ‘base’%}
{%block leftnav} a link {%endblock%}

{% block content %} this is the content {% endblock %}

{% block footer%} another link{%endblock%}

If you leave out a ‘block’ it will pick up the default content from its parent ‘base’ template. Everything between the blocks is rendered as per the parent template. In short, you can ‘extend’ the bits you want, or just render the parent template. A more detailed explanation is available here.

Compared to that, Rails lacks nested layouts. You can only have one level of inheritance: application-wide. There’s a nested_layout plugin that provides the required functionality, but it isn’t as elegant as the above Django example.

I’ve been looking at liquid, which looks similar to Django’s Templates, but it doesn’t seem to be documented well. I’m now looking at HAML, which seems promising, but I may just be too deep into the project to change now. I may have to survive on partials !

Hi,

I intend to jot down stuff that people might find useful, code snippets, links, and my thoughts on the latest technologies.

I’m currently working on a Ruby on Rails project, so expect to see that covered.