Pseudorandom

Pictures from Colorado

I got some good pictures during our recent trip to Boulder in spite of losing the camera for about two days. Read the rest of this entry »

Rails: First Impressions

Due primarily to overwhelming peer pressure, I’m finally trying Ruby on Rails.  Overall, it’s living up to its reputation.  Rails makes it very easy and fast to get a web application off the ground and it gets the boring, repetitive code out of my way so that I can focus on the interesting parts of an application.   Ruby itself is a very nice language.  It lets me write powerful and concise code, a la Perl.  At the same time the code is attractive and readable, like Python.

Rails exhibits one of my favorite principles of system design: The right way to do things should also be the easy way.  Web developers should seperate presentation and logic, and with Rails that’s the easiest way to code an application.  You would have to do extra work to mix the two.  Developers should do unit and functional tests, and Rails includes tools to make it easy to do so.

While I recommend that any web developer should check out Ruby on Rails, I’d especially like to recommend that new or aspiring web developers give it a try.  The structure of Rails encourages and supports good development practices, so a new developer can learn them while learning Rails at the same time.  Those good coding habits will then carry over to other development environments when it becomes necessary to use them.

Easter Egg Hunting

This year all three kids went out for the Easter egg hunt.  Overall the results were pretty good.

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Josie’s First Visit to the ER

Josie ran smack into the corner of a desk on Saturday and split her forehead open.  She calmed down pretty quickly, but Lisa and I realized that this injury needed a little more than a simple band-aid.

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Pictures from the Keys

We all had a good week in the keys. The kids especially enjoyed the chance to play outside in the sun.
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American Hops - A New Online Video Series

I am a huge beer fan and enjoy checking out the local beers wherever I go.  American Hops is a new online video series that looks at some of the thankfully large and growing number of craft beers made around the United States.  Their first episode features Pennsylvania’s Stoudt’s Brewery.

Max Gets a New Belt

Max took his tae kwon do gold belt test last Saturday and today he received his new belt.

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More Information About Kids Online

On January 25th I had a good conversation about issues confronted by young people online as part of St. Paul’s Hot Topics discussion series.  One thing that became very clear is that there is too much information to cover in an hour, so I’m following up with some posts about this topic.  I’ll begin by offering a few links to more information.

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Powerpoint Considered Harmful

Today, as we inaugurate a new president known for, among other things, his oratory I’d like to point out this example of how a good speech can go off the rails.  Enjoy.

Josie’s First Podcast

Josie can say a handful of words now.  One of her latest is “yeah”.

Listen for yourself.