http://livollmers.net Optimistic reflections based on hard-won pessimism Sun, 17 Aug 2008 16:53:22 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en It takes a brave author to give a book this title and keep it at 150 pages. The number of jokes about the proportionality of the "good parts" to the size of the book are endless. Be that as it may, when I saw this book at the Powell's stand ... http://livollmers.net/index.php/2008/08/14/book-review-javascript-the-good-parts/ Alan Cooper's About Face is one of those pillars of UI/UX design, the reading of which is a rite of passage. I figured few books would be more appropriate as a capstone to my long list of design-oriented reads. It is nearly an institution in and of itself. Last night ... http://livollmers.net/index.php/2008/07/29/book-review-about-face-3/ I've just spent the last two hours pulling my hair out trying to get Single-Table Inheritance (STI) working with associations in ActiveRecord. After essentially walking through all of the possible ActiveRecord options in this setup, I finally stumbled upon a configuration that seems to work. So this post is an ... http://livollmers.net/index.php/2008/07/23/activerecord-fun-thay-may-stump-only-me/ You like command-line parsing, but you hate all of the bloat. Why should you have to create a Hash, then create a parser, fill the Hash out then throw the parser away (unless you want to print out a usage message) and deal with a Hash? Why, for Pete's sake, should the parser and ... http://livollmers.net/index.php/2008/07/10/clip-version-006-has-been-released/ In addition to technical geekery and social commentary, one of my favorite intellectual pursuits is the study of military history. It's one of my many interests that makes me so very thankful that I met my wife when I did or I would never have had a date in my ... http://livollmers.net/index.php/2008/06/28/military-history/ This week I stumbled upon Stephen Celis' awesome bit of shell-fu, gemdoc, which allows you to quickly get to the HTML docs for installed gems via command-line. Unfortunately I abandoned bash years ago for zsh and Stephen's shell bits needed a little porting. For me, zsh, is a bit like ... http://livollmers.net/index.php/2008/06/25/gemdoc-completion-in-zsh/ I've spilled a lot of (virtual) ink in this blog, but almost none of it about what I do all day. That's because I've been working at a startup in "stealth mode" for darn near two years and haven't been able to really say much about it. Until today. Today at ... http://livollmers.net/index.php/2008/06/23/launch-day/ While on vacation last week, my wife and some friends of ours solved the age-old problem of melting the chocolate and the marshmallow in a s'more. You stuff a chunk of chocolate (we prefer good old-fashioned Hershey's waxy American milk chocolate) inside the mallow and then toast the entire unit. Do ... http://livollmers.net/index.php/2008/06/20/smorgasm/ I've been on a usability/design kick for about the last six months. Somehow I stumbled across a link to Robert Hoekman Jr's site which was described as great design books for programmers. I fully recognize the fact that I really don't have that little spark that good designers have, but ... http://livollmers.net/index.php/2008/06/19/book-reviews-designing-the-obviousdesigning-the-moment/ When I see a forecast like this, I gotta think that life just isn't fair sometimes... http://livollmers.net/index.php/2008/06/19/somebody-hates-me/