productive.dk

This week I launched a new site for The Scrum Training Institute at scrumtraininginstitute.com. If you’re getting started with Scrum or Agile these are the experts you want to learn from! Currently their team consists of Jeff Sutherland (co-creator of Scrum), Jens Østergaard (a fellow dane), Gabrielle Benefield and Pete Deemer.

Working with them has been just great. As a developer I just love having clients, that unasked will send me emails going:

Jesper, here’s the story:
As a customer, I want to be able to…

The site is live now and we will be adding more features over the coming weeks, as I work my way through the backlog.

If you are running the just released Rails 2.1.0 and have disabled ActiveRecord, you will likely run into problems launching script/server.

The culprit is the new config/initializers/new_rails_defaults.rb, which should test to see if ActiveRecord is loaded.

The bug report is here and the patch “AR can be disabled, new_rails_defaults.rb should check” has already been applied.

It’s a very tiny patch, so until the next Rails release is out, you can easily apply the patch manually.

I don’t usually work on “plain old websites”, but I had an itch to try out Radiant CMS, and so I decided to take a small gig building a showcase site for a real estate developer (or property developer, depending on which side of the pond you’re on).

So far Radiant has been a pleasant experience and I’ll definitely use it for a couple of other sites. Initially my impression was that it had way too few features to be of any real use, but it has the 20% features that you use 80% of the time. For the rest there’s a bunch of extensions, some which are almost mandatory for any site, like the page_attachments extension, that enables file-uploads on all pages. Also, Radiant is based on Rails, so if you can’t find an extension with the functionality you need it can be easily extended.

Working with Radiant also gave me a chance to look into Rails hosting options in Europe. Most of the dedicated Rails hosting companies have data centers in the US, so I needed to look elsewhere. I ended up hosting the site on a VPS from RimuHosting, who have a data center in London. They don’t specifically promote themselves as a Rails host, but they do have instructions for running Rails on their servers and they will install a complete Rails stack for you if you just ask when ordering the VPS. Setup was a amazingly fast even though it involved a real person handling my order. Within 15 minutes of submitting the order I had an email back saying they were working on my order and about 30 minutes later I was logging in to my new server!

The site is live now at korpus-sundhedspark.dk (in Danish).

Pragmatic Dave on Passion, Skill and ‘Having A Blast’:

... you should be investigating your tools set and you should be trying different techniques and different ways of doing things. And maybe then, more and more it looks back into practices. And that’s not just to make you better at your job, it’s also to make you safer in your job. Because, at the speed things are changing, in 10 years the job description for Java programmer is going to be “maintenance.” And that’s just the case, just the way things work in this industry.

So, what are you waiting for? Get moving. Learn a new language. Today.

David just announced RailsConf Europe ‘08:

The conference is returning to Berlin and the conference will happen between the 2nd and 4th of September.

Registration will open in May 2008. Hope to see you there.

You can now submit your proposal for RailsConf 2008 taking place May 29-June 1, in Portland.

With that off my chest, I can move on to the real purpose for this post: The photo, taken at RailsConf 2007 and featured on the frontpage of the RailsConf 2008 site, has yours truly and Morten Christensen smack in the center!

Exploits of a Mom

Now why didn’t I think of that? Naming your kids Magnus and Frida suddenly seems very unoriginal. From xkcd.

Just got in. Looking forward to lots of fun in the coming days. I’ll be tumbling my notes at railsconf07.productive.dk.

If you need a freelancer for your (next) project, come find me and lets talk. If you don’t need a freelancer, come have a chat anyway ;)

Or as Joel Spolsky puts it:

I’ve been using Vista on my home laptop since it shipped, and can say with some conviction that nobody should be using it as their primary operating system—it simply has no redeeming merits to overcome the compatibility headaches it causes. Whenever anyone asks, my advice is to stay with Windows XP (and to purchase new systems with XP preinstalled).

and Fake Steve comments on outgoing PC Magazine editor Jim Louderback’s “Vista sucks” farewell column:

... Jim Louderback, the newly departed editor of PC Magazine, who uses his farewell column to do something I suppose he has wanted to do for ages—tell the truth about Vista. “Why, nine months after launch, am I so frustrated? The litany of what doesn’t work and what still frustrates me stretches on endlessly.”

... “I could go on and on about the lack of drivers, the bizarre wake-up rituals, the strange and nonreproducible system quirks, and more. But I won’t bore you with the details. The upshot is that even after nine months, Vista just ain’t cutting it. I definitely gave Microsoft too much of a free pass on this operating system.”

(via Daring Fireball)

As described in the Calling TextMate from Other Applications chapter in the TextMate Manual

There is one command which does not support giving arguments in the EDITOR variable, it is crontab (which is sort of obsoleted by launchd). If you need to use it, you can create a symbolic link to mate with a _wait suffix which implies -w.

Well, as I found out a while ago, there’s another command that has the same problem: sqlplus. But if you follow Allan’s instructions, you can make TextMate work with sqlplus:

ln -s mate ~/bin/mate_wait   # run this once to create the link
export EDITOR='mate_wait'    # use in your ~/.bash_profile

Assuming you’ve already created a symlink to mate and that ~/bin exists (you could also use /usr/local/bin or some other preferred location). Now, in sqlplus simply type ed or edit as usual, and your commandline will open up in TextMate. Yay, one less reason to ever edit any text outside of TextMate.