http://www.rickylui.com/blog Musings through my coloured lenses. Or you can call this Ricky Bobby's musings. Wed, 04 Feb 2009 07:38:41 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en As an Agile practitioner, I pride myself on delivering business value for our customers. But sometimes, software developers (myself included) tend to think that we know what business value means (to us anyways), but that's potentially dangerous. Sometimes I caught myself saying "this is only a minor formatting bug... low ... http://www.rickylui.com/blog/2009/02/04/perceived-quality-and-business-value/ I thought I'll just give a new search engine, Cuil, a try, and so I tried to find a firefox plugin for it. And while I'm thinking "Hmm... should I use Google to find whether there's a firefox plugin for Cuil?", then I realize the bottom link "Add Cuil to Firefox". http://www.rickylui.com/blog/2008/07/29/cuil-indexes-120-billion-web-pages-but-it-forgot-to-index-itself/ Ye Zheng wrote quite a detailed account (in Chinese) about our first CodeJam in the Beijing office already, so I'll just be brief. I had a great time pairing with other colleagues that I haven't worked with before. In hindsight I was quite amazed how much we accomplished ... http://www.rickylui.com/blog/2008/04/20/codejamthoughtworks-beijing/ Thanks to Justin and the comments on his post (No, Be a jerk), for expanding on my blog post and taking the discussion to a much more sophisticated level than I started. Instead of "Don't criticize code", I think this will be more suitable title of the paragraph: "Give ... http://www.rickylui.com/blog/2008/02/20/dont-be-a-refactoring-bigot-follow-up/ (The title quotes Joshua Graham's comment here) I agree completely with Josh. In a casual conversation with Tim Cochran of Thoughtworks, we both felt that using RESTful controllers does not mean exposing all of your model objects, or database tables. Thoughts still need to go into designing the ... http://www.rickylui.com/blog/2008/02/14/services-distributed-object/ In the examples given in ActiveResource Rails API, when ActiveResource does a PUT (e.g. update) to a remote RESTful rails controller, the rails controller is supposed to return a HTTP code of 204 (No Content). But if the remote rails controller actually does that: head :no_content #204 The Http response that ActiveResource receives ... http://www.rickylui.com/blog/2008/02/09/activeresource-and-handling-a-weird-204-response-from-a-remote-rails-controller/ Recently I started using ActiveResource to talk to a RESTful controller (which is also done in Rails 2). It is very nice and simplifies a lot. With Rails 2, out of the box you can create a sample RESTful server and client in 3 minutes: Server: >> rails test_server >> cd ... http://www.rickylui.com/blog/2008/02/09/trying-out-activeresource-in-3-minutes/ Developers want to write simple and elegant code. I do too, and so sometimes I catch myself being a little bit of a "refactoring bigot", that when I came across code that I deemed not good, I became critical, or I just wanted to fix it all at once. ... http://www.rickylui.com/blog/2008/01/28/dont-be-a-refactoring-bigot/ I was searching for simple JSON parsing in Rails and found only the Rails 2.0 way: ActiveSupport::JSON.decode. In old version of Rails (1.2.6) there's only JSON.encode... So I googled and found here that you can do YAML::load '{"key":"value"}' http://www.rickylui.com/blog/2007/12/10/json-is-valid-yaml/ 1. after_create does not get inherited class Animal < ActiveRecord::Base after_create :feed_on_milk def feed_on_milk self.immunity_level += 1 end end class Cat < Animal end The after_create does not get inherited, and so our poor little cats won't get milk! To retain the after_create hook, you'll need to do: class Cat < Animal after_create :feed_on_milk end 2. after_create is an array of symbols If ... http://www.rickylui.com/blog/2007/11/02/a-few-things-i-learned-about-activerecord-after_create-and-other-callbacks/