New Rails beta-Book

Dave Thomas and DHH have released the beta-version of their book Agile Web Development with Rails. I need to grab this book, both to learn more about Rails and to support a great idea.

See more progress on: write an application on Rails

Moving

Okay, the big news (and my major time sink right now) is that my family and I are moving. After 3+ great years in the Pacific Northwest, we're headed back to Utah. I've taken a job with the Family History organization of the LDS Church.

We've lived in a lot of places (in New England, the MidWest, the Intermountain West, and the Pacific Northwest), and have good memories about all of them, but the time is right for our family to head back to the Wasatch Front. We'll be down there in the latter half of June.

Fragility of Judgement

I love this term, which I just saw at radar.oreilly.com. Tim O'Reilly blogged about Malcolm Gladwell's talk at an IT conference.

In his overview, Tim points out how much our judgement is swayed by non-essentials -- for example, an increase from 5% to 50% in hiring female musicians when using visual screens and the poor record of ER doctors in diagnosing heart attacks because they tend to focus on predictive factors rather than symptomatic diagnosis.

My question then is what kinds of extraneous factors blur our judgements?

test first with Ruby

I wrote a tutorial about coding test first for ibm. Hopefully, it’ll help more people start writing code this way.

See more progress on: test first all the time

Update: By the way, I did a lot of the organizational/background work of this using BackPack, which I'm still really enjoying. I'll need to get a bigger review up later, but something a bit more urgent is taking up my time at the moment.

New Google Home Page

It's not a new idea, but it is done pretty well. You can get see your google home page (at least if you're already 'cookified' by google. I'm pretty happy with my first 30 minutes of use. We'll see if I stay happy.

My only nit is that the gmail preview shows the senders for each email instead of the subject.

I want to read 'Higher-Order Perl'

but not enough to buy a copy. MJD is putting it online though, so I’ll have to read it that way. I really don’t care that much about Perl, but I think I can translate the concepts over to Ruby.

On the other hand, maybe just learning haskell or scheme would be enough.

See more progress on: read higher-order perl

more Ruby Brigades

It looks like there are two more Ruby Brigades meeting soon. Columbus.rb and the Phoeniz.rb (though this one seems to have been around for a while). It’s good to see the growing number of Ruby Brigades.

I’m hoping the next step is to have more regional cooperation—like the Seattle.rb, pdx.rb, and Vancouver group’s upcoming code fest.

See more progress on: help build local Ruby Brigades

Backpacking it!

I got a golden ticket to to try out backpack this weekend, and I’ve been loving it. It’s a great way to organize a lot of the little stuff that’s floating around in/on my head, my calendar, a bunch of post-it notes scattered everywhere, and emails in my inbox.

I think this will be a great addition to basecamp, and tada lists. Together, I think they might even be able to bring order to my disordered life.

See more progress on: make better use of basecamp

Exciting Ruby Stuff

In the last week, I’ve seen a new group pop up in Omaha, NE and Tulsa, OK. The Omaha.rb will be meeting on Monday, May 2nd from 7-9PM (directions on their web page). I don’t know when the Tulsa.rb will meet, but hopefully it’ll be soon.

By the way, the Utah Ruby Users Group is set to start meeting on the third Wednesday of the month (May 25th). The Seattle.rb is meeting tonight. Wow! That’s a lot of Rubyists.

See more progress on: help build local Ruby Brigades

Home Teaching Survey

Home Teaching in our ward is pretty bad, getting to 40% of the families assigned to the elders quorum is looked at as an achievement. To help understand the problem a little more deeply, we passed around an anonymous survey in Primary, YM, YW, and RS. I knew it wasn't terribly scientific, the sample was poorly chosen among other things, but I thought we could use the data anyway.

I worried that even though this was anonymous, people wouldn't respond honestly. The first several forms I got back all said (essentially) 'All is well, no problem here.', and I thought my fears were confirmed. Gradually, I started to see some of the concerns that I knew were lurking. Here are the results.

I asked six questions:

('Yes' or 'No')
Do you know who your home teachers are? 70% did
Do they visit as often as you'd like? 50% did

(sliding scale)
Do they present an appropriate message? 68% positive
Are you comfortable asking them for service? 65% positive
Would you be comfortable asking them for a blessing? 64% positive
Do they help you to strengthen your family? 56% positive

(Comments)
How could they help you to strengthen your family? I got a lot of answers to this one. Here are a few:

---

Personally, I see no value in home teaching. I sit there while he talks to my husband, wishing I could be somewhere else. . . . Rather than share what he wants to share, think about us and focus on us, then prepare an appropriate message for us.

---

He strengthens us each time he comes because he really does care and calls us often

---

To help, they should actually come!

---

Have lessons for young children so they'll sit and listen.

---

Instead of asking if there's anything they can do, be more specific. For example: "Can we help you with your garage sale next week?" Take initiative: "I know you've been sick so we brought you a lasanga."

---

Know my children and take an interest in their lives

---

Come!

---

I haven't got a husband, or parents, or children, so I need home teachers

---

If the active, easy to visit families feel this way, I think we've got a long way to go to straighten out home teaching. How is it going in your ward? What are you doing well? Where do you need to improve?

skipping stones

skipping stones,
originally uploaded by pate.

One of my goals over at 43 Things is to do more hiking with my son. I posted some pictures of our last hike over at flickr.

r43 is being built test first

It’s so nice to watch it build like this. Add a test, watch it fail, write some code, watch it succeed. Here’s how it looks right now:

% ruby test_r43.rb
Loaded suite test_r43
Started
.........................................................................
Finished in 0.611202 seconds.

73 tests, 112 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors
%

If you’re not writing your code this way, you should give it a try.

See more progress on: Practice religious test-first development for a month

'This I Believe' from NPR

It sounds like NPR has turned up a winner. "What I believe" based upon a radio series of the same name from the 50s. You can post your essay explaining what you believe at the website. All the submissions will become part of an archive, some will be selected to be read by their authors.


I plan on submitting an essay. Maybe you should too.

r43, seattle.rb, and stuff

We had our March Seattle.rb meeting last night. It was huge we had 18 people there including at least 5 folks from Amazon. It was also pretty cool to have Chad Fowler with us.

Ryan kicked things off with a discussion of our upcoming code fest. I'll post a date when we get it figured out, but if you're a Ruby hacker and are going to be in the Northwest in May you should consider joining us. We're going to be working on Ruby Gems -- cleaning out some dark, scary corners and working on some enhancements. There's already interest from the Vancouver.rb, pdx.rb (Portland), and even a Ruby Hacker from Yakima.

Ryan also talked about MetaRuby and Ruby2C. The work that he and Eric have been doing is incredible. If you're interested, take a look at Polishing Ruby (Ryan's blog).

Once Ryan finished up, I botched a quick preview/presentation of r43, my new library for the 43 Things API. Ryan pitched in and helped me mock out the live site for testing. The coolest part was probably seeing Chad playing around with it even in it's pre-alpha state. Now that people know about it, I'm under the gun to get a formal release out the door on Monday.

Eric finished the evening off with a working tour through Rails. He took a cemetary information application (which will be open sourced and a hosted version available soon), worked on adding some functionality and tests. A lot of the people at the meeting were there just to look at Rails, so this was the biggest (and most appreciated) part of the evening.

Another Ruby book announced

Pro Ruby by Andrew Patzer from Apress. This looks like it's fast becoming a crowded field.

I loved it!

Beowulf is a great read. It’s very different from the Latin/Greek poetry (and the poetry influenced by them). My favorite translation is this one by Seamus Heaney.

See more progress on: read beowulf

Train Station Scenery

dscn0006_5,
originally uploaded by pate.

Last year, my son and I went out to shoot some photo's to help him fulfill a Webelos requirement. We spent the morning down at the Sounder commuter rail station in Kent. I always thought this was a cool looking building, and his picture of it is great. Digital cameras and kids seem like a wonderful combination.

When I finally get around to building my dream N-scale railroad, this building is going to be a part of it.

Busy week

It looks like the coming week is going to be a busy one. In addition to the YW broadcast and general conference, I'm headed down to Salt Lake City on Wednesday on a one-day business trip, then heading over to the Seattle.rb meeting on Thursday.

Hopefully I'll get a chance to sit down to some smothered burritos with cheese and onions at La Frontera while I'm in Salt Lake -- they are one of the things I've really missed from the time I spent there.

The Seattle.rb meeting should be really cool. We're going to do an advanced session on Ruby on Rails and try to build a web application for storing and searching information (including inscriptions, data, and photos) from cemetaries.

a bit of a change

I've been semi-maintaining two separate blogs (a technical one, and this one) for a while. Since I keep falling behind on both of them, I've decided to bring them together under one umbrella and add some toys from flickr and 43 things, two sites that I've also been playing with. I'll be trying to clean things up a bit over the next week or so, but hopefully this will help me be a bit more 'engaged' in keeping both kinds of blog entries up to date.

Priesthood Preparation -- Lesson 1

Here's my draft outline for the first Priesthood Preparation lesson.

I Gaining a testimony of Jesus Christ (Alma 32)
A Why does it matter?
B How can I do it?
1 Personal and family scripture study
2 Personal and family prayer
3 Regular attendance at meetings
4 Giving service
II Priesthood Organization
A Aaronic
1 Role
2 Offices and duties
B Melchezidek
1 Role
2 Offices and duties
C Quorums
1 Purposes of
2 Membership in
3 Activities of
III Keeping Covenants
A Many kinds of covenants
B Basic principles
1 Understanding the covenant
2 Having a testimony
3 Having integrity
4 Making a daily effort
IV The Oath and Covenant of the Priesthood
A Group reading of D & C 84:33-41
B Discuss individual application
C Magnifying callings


Does this look reasonable to everyone? What would you add/change?