Walt Gordon Jones

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.

I was told about a strange and intriguing fact: that Tuscany, Italy is at the same latitude as Ontario, Canada. Based on my incomplete understanding of European geography (as well as that of the Great Lakes,) this seemed kind of improbable. Given that Wolfram Alpha had just debuted, this looked like exactly the kind of query the “computational engine” had been designed to handle. Unfortunately, it was not able to provide any response for either location.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have an auto-complete that includes phonetically similar results? And what if the same code also handled misspellings in search forms, played nice with other ActiveRecord plugins, and could be configured to varying levels of strictness?

I’ve used this code over a few projects, and originally developed it based on a Ruby Soundex function provided by Alexander Ermolaev at snippets.dzone.com. The original algorithm requires a full-length match, so it is not suitable for auto-complete. I also thought it would be nice to support fuzzy full-text search, and arbitrary match lengths.

One of the cool memes going around Twitter is Follow Friday. Each Friday, people broadcast lists of names that are worth following, with the hashtag #followfriday. So this is my “blog” Follow Friday, or as I call it, Follow Friday: Long Form.

Adam Singer posted an excellent article on creativity and self-actualization. He includes some insightful advice from Abraham Maslow, the psychologist who coined the term Peak Experience and gave us the Hierarchy of Needs. Maslow wrote a lot about creativity, and Adam’s post got me thinking about how values fit into the picture.