Walt Gordon Jones

It was through Eno’s words that I fully appreciated that enjoying sound for its own sake can be just as must a first class experience as enjoying music. Sound, on its own merits, is just as interesting and beautiful as melody, harmony, or rhythm. And it justified what I had always felt in those moments when the “music” parts of music momentarily disappear. What is left in that unstructured space?

I’m in the offices of Design Commission and I just noticed this on the wall above where I’m sitting.

How To Work Better

1. Do one thing at a time.
2. Know the problem.
3. Learn to listen.
4. Learn to ask questions.
5. Distinguish sense from nonsense.
6. Accept change as inevitable.
7. Admit mistakes.
8. Say it simple.
9. Be calm.
10. Smile.

I was just reminded how much I have learned about Ruby metaprogramming in just the past few months when I looked back at the original code I wrote for the soundex_find plugin. The code worked great, but relied on excessive eval calls.

It turns out that a feature built into the HTML standard allows any website to test your browser history against a set of “interesting” URLs and send that information back to their server, associated with your IP address and browser cookie, and of course your login if you have one on that site.

Here’s the part that baffles me. Most of the smart, technical people talking about this seem to think it’s pretty much OK.

Railroad is a great tool to to help document your Rails projects. It automatically creates class diagrams for Model relationships and Controller relationships in DOT format. With Graphviz installed, you can automatically generate nice looking SVG or PNG diagrams. Even better, Roy Wright has improved the original to work with both Rails and Merb projects. However, when I tried to use Railroad with a Rails 2.3 project, it suddenly couldn’t find my controller files.