keeran.com

I was going to post this on GRTD but I figured this is more of a general topic. It seems the blogosphere is in the process of jumping on another productivity enhancing bandwagon, going by the name of “Flow”.

I hadn’t heard of this before…maybe I’m in the process of hitching a ride on that bandwagon, but I found out about it at this blog (which is now added to my daily reading) and the author’s comment in it’s relation to Ruby On Rails has hit the nail right on the head:

The point here is people are doing Ruby on Rails not because it comes within some whiz-bang IDE (it doesn’t) or it has a bunch of wizards and graphical builder dohickeys (it doesn’t) or even because it promises productivity boosts (they’re there, but as a result). Rather, they’re excited because with only a text editor and a copy of Pickaxe by your side, you can do some amazing things and get into that state. And that makes you happy. And that makes you productive, because you actually want to do the work.

I have been trying to get others fired up about Rails for months now. People would ask me ‘does it do x?’ ‘can i achieve y?’ etc and more often than not, I could come up with the answer or provide some kind of insight as to why doing x or achieving y might not be the best solution in the first place. What I couldn’t put my finger on is why *I* enjoy coding with Ruby/Rails so much and I think the above quote and it’s parent post sums it up perfectly.

Just as I start to design a small db app to manage our business cash flow projections, I get an email from the folks at DabbleDB telling me I can now register for a trial account.

I haven’t had a chance to give it a thorough test drive, but from what I’ve seen with a few click arounds, and from watching their screencast demonstration, it looks to be able to do some very funky things with minimal input or configuration.

Check out the screencast here, I’ll post again if/when I’ve managed to implement something useful with it.

I’ve noticed for a while now that every time I try to download something via Firefox it takes a ridiculous amount of time for the ‘Save as’ and Download Manager dialogue windows to pop up and actually do anything. Very frustrating!

Turns out it’s because I never clear my download history…probably not a good idea, but it never occured to me. Today I hit ‘Clean up’ on the bottom right of the download manager, and now everything is nice and responsive again.

There has been a shed load of hassle with World of Warcraft this week. Granted I’m not as involved in the game as I used to be, but it makes me sick to see these MMO companies treating their customers with such disrespect.

http://www.trickery.net/vb/showthread.php?t=34864

Quote:

The lack of professionalism in handling this issue, particularly in terms of poor testing, inadequate customer communications and in keeping thousands of people up all night for two consecutive nights under fear of missing the migration and being stuck on poor hardware without their friends really should not go undocumented.

Follow the link, it’s an accurate account of what has happened to thousands of people this week and I think it’s about time the player base tried to raise some publicity about the shocking quality of service we actually receive for our monthly subscriptions.

It’s going to be impossible to get players unionised to gain any kind of upper hand against these providers, so I guess the next best thing is a load of negative publicity.

Don’t bother with them – absolutely useless!

I’ve set up a new VPS at www.memset.com for now, seems to hold up OK but will need upgrading from the low to the high end of the package scale before it takes any serious load.