Wednesday, April 19, 2006
When a spade is not a spade
Hello all!, this entry sat around a while before posting. I'm working on some new content, specifially for microformats, standards development, and ruby on rails.
I know I have been a bad blogger. No Posts for a week and abit! There was a good reason. I got busy working on solving problems and lost track of the days. So I'm back and have some stuff to blog about.
First off, desk ergonomics. I think a desk is like a bed, you need to roll over every now and again so I have moved from the 90 degree corner of my desk that I like to work in to the full 180 degree space availible. Boy am I uncomfortable but its still refreshing to simply move a foot to the left. It has the effect of giving you a new perspective on your work and can actually change your mood about a grate many things.
Eclipse rant: Do you see that image above? Ya? Well I'm sick of seeing it for 10 minutes at a time. It kills workflow and makes me wonder sometimes if eclipse is broken or what. Its a small rant but some one needs to look into that for me. A viable solution would be to place execution threads into hibernation after a time out and let waiting methods execute. This would involve some sort of concequence rating on operations. I'll have to think about this some more...
CSS the Fun the Joy: So I have to bring myself up to speed on creating specific generic style sheets. That is, the normal way style sheets are used is that the html gets written and then you create the style sheets to go along with it. In our case we are doing it the other way. Can anyone say "nail in the foot". I thought it was a good idea at the time but now I just need to learn to dig in an upward direction. I got a fe books on it that we are passing around the office here I'll let you know what I think of them after I have them read.
Saturday, April 01, 2006
Some times beta is bad....
Some of you may recall that a few posts ago I mentioned a tool called Performancing that hooks into your Fire Fox and allows you to write blog entries when ever you want without having to login to your blog system. You know all the cool kids are doing it. Well mine stoped working yesterday as I prepared an entry for this blog. Sucks too because I had some killer material... Ok, I guess I can put the killer material in this post. But first "What happened to my cool blog tool?" well, here is the error I keep getting 
which sucks because I have NO IDEA WHY ITS TELLING ME THIS! Also, as a direct result (I think) I am unable to post to this blog using the tool. Oh, well thats why I'm doing it the "old fashioned" way. You know, logging in through the web, and clicking links instead of buttons. Wow I feel like I'm back in March...
Ok, enough griping about my blogging tools, I have big news about something I actually may infact like to know more about before determining that it sucks or not. It's called Ruby (Some of you may have heard the term Ruby On Rails) and some of you should know what it is but for those who don't here is the jist. Ruby is a dynamic language that has some very cool tools and toys. First I grabbed the download of version 1.8.2 from the Ruby Central Site then after playing around with the FreeIde that comes packaged with it (btw: I'm a windows user but ruby works on all major platforms - Chris there is a mac flavour) boring ide but it works. It has some nice things like syntax colouring etc. but not really all that great for real development work. For that kind of power I turn to my good pal Eclipse 3.1 and then I look for a plugin that will allow me to code and run/debug ruby code. I found this great artical at IBM that deals the dirt. So I follwed the directions as listed and all is good. It works and its nice. But then what can you do with Ruby anyway?
In my last post (not counting the one that was not posted) I was talking about ebay and their api, well from my perspective ebay and their api are dumb. They must not believe in standards because although they go to the trouble to provide a wsdl and xsd for their service, their service only losely follow it. For instance, their xsd defines an Item with a set of attributes that are defined in alphabetical order, yet in their response xml that is supposed to follow the xsd the Item attributes are not delivered in alphabetical order. Now, its well formed XML but its invalid when validating against its xsd which I did using Altova XML Spy. It tells me what I had to discover from my JAXB code, that the returned xml does not conform to its schema. Baka!!!!!
So what the heck does that last paragraph have to do with Ruby? Here is my thought: I can use Ruby to write a webservice that handles the xml in a different way and spits out an xml format that I have control over. That way it wont matter that ebay, amazon or anyone else is a tool and I can make it play nice with my brain and way of making the web work.
I'm gona try to code up the solution to this intresting problem in a few hours (maybe Sunday) and I'll post my findings here. So stay tuned and keep coding...
Remember its in that place where I put that thing that time....
which sucks because I have NO IDEA WHY ITS TELLING ME THIS! Also, as a direct result (I think) I am unable to post to this blog using the tool. Oh, well thats why I'm doing it the "old fashioned" way. You know, logging in through the web, and clicking links instead of buttons. Wow I feel like I'm back in March...Ok, enough griping about my blogging tools, I have big news about something I actually may infact like to know more about before determining that it sucks or not. It's called Ruby (Some of you may have heard the term Ruby On Rails) and some of you should know what it is but for those who don't here is the jist. Ruby is a dynamic language that has some very cool tools and toys. First I grabbed the download of version 1.8.2 from the Ruby Central Site then after playing around with the FreeIde that comes packaged with it (btw: I'm a windows user but ruby works on all major platforms - Chris there is a mac flavour) boring ide but it works. It has some nice things like syntax colouring etc. but not really all that great for real development work. For that kind of power I turn to my good pal Eclipse 3.1 and then I look for a plugin that will allow me to code and run/debug ruby code. I found this great artical at IBM that deals the dirt. So I follwed the directions as listed and all is good. It works and its nice. But then what can you do with Ruby anyway?
In my last post (not counting the one that was not posted) I was talking about ebay and their api, well from my perspective ebay and their api are dumb. They must not believe in standards because although they go to the trouble to provide a wsdl and xsd for their service, their service only losely follow it. For instance, their xsd defines an Item with a set of attributes that are defined in alphabetical order, yet in their response xml that is supposed to follow the xsd the Item attributes are not delivered in alphabetical order. Now, its well formed XML but its invalid when validating against its xsd which I did using Altova XML Spy. It tells me what I had to discover from my JAXB code, that the returned xml does not conform to its schema. Baka!!!!!
So what the heck does that last paragraph have to do with Ruby? Here is my thought: I can use Ruby to write a webservice that handles the xml in a different way and spits out an xml format that I have control over. That way it wont matter that ebay, amazon or anyone else is a tool and I can make it play nice with my brain and way of making the web work.
I'm gona try to code up the solution to this intresting problem in a few hours (maybe Sunday) and I'll post my findings here. So stay tuned and keep coding...
Remember its in that place where I put that thing that time....
