Advogato blog for fxn

2 May 2008

Fri, 2 May 2008 22:39:55 GMT

Interview in Rails TakeFive

FiveRuns has published an interview with me which is part of their Rails TakeFive series.

1 May 2008

Thu, 1 May 2008 15:48:46 GMT

Goodbye signature

Some years ago I started to systematically skip "Hello"s and "Regards"s in mails. Most of my mails are written to just say something and courtesy formulas like those add nothing but length. There are times where you feel you need to use them, but nowadays for me those are just a few.

I still use my signature in most of my mails:


  -- fxn

and I am getting tired of that. My name goes already in the From header, and since the mail is so direct that signature sometimes may look even assertive. It brings no information, it is inertia from previous standards. So I think I'll systematically cut that one as well.

12 Apr 2008

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 01:06:12 GMT

doc-rails

It's been a few weeks working in doc-rails.

The Rails API lacks writing conventions because that's the aggregate work of a lot of people. You know, different tenses, lack of consistent typography, etc. The purpose of this project is not necessarily to fix that, though I'd say that's within scope, but when you revise and write new documentation you need to make choices. So one of the first things we did was to write a few guidelines.

Now, there's a lot of work to do and by now there are systematic revisions going on (that is going file by file in some Rails module), new documentation chunks here and there, tweaks, and transversal revisions (me myself grepped the source tree to find symbols in regular font for example). We monitor and fix doc patches in Rails Trac as well.

Once a week Rails core member Pratik merges the changes into Rails edge.

Being able to contribute to this project is great because you know, if you find something to fix you have the mean to do it right away. A few days ago for instance I wanted to understand a patch to ActiveRecord::Associations::AssociationProxy, and that class lacked documentation. I needed to figure everything from the source code. Not the following guy! I sat down, wrote it, and git pushed. That's fantastic!

28 Mar 2008

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 14:43:55 GMT

Barcelona.pm

After Tim and Joel, I am honoured to have been elected as president of Barcelona.pm.

MacBook Stolen

Precisely after the votation I realized my backpack had disappeared! There was my MacBook inside. Fortunately my private data is safe at Google, and Time Machine will prevent any data loss, so in the end it wasn't as bad as it could have been. I leave the serial here in case someone does a web search: 4H62911WVMN.

19 Mar 2008

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 20:10:38 GMT

doc-rails

Patches in Rails Trac need +1s to get the verified status and eventually be committed. Fine small doc patches sometimes just don't bring enough attention and they don't get applied.

Rails committer Pratik Naik has setup a git repository aimed at easing contributions to the docs. I think this is going to be very good. If you are qualified and have a github account you can get committer rights, just follow the instructions in the announcement.

1 Mar 2008

Sat, 1 Mar 2008 01:42:20 GMT

Picture

Me and my little daughter on the Segway coming from her school.

14 Feb 2008

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 18:40:40 GMT

1000 km in the Segway

I've already done 1000 km in my Segway i2, in about four months and a half.

So far I've used and enjoyed the Segway even more than I expected. It's become my default mean of transportation in the city.

It amazes me as much as it did when I first tried it. Next step is to actually levitate, haha.

3 Feb 2008

Sun, 3 Feb 2008 13:47:34 GMT

Contributions to Rails

My humble contributions to Rails are small bits and pieces here and there, but well they made 2nd in the past Rails Hackfest. That means a book for free from the entire O'Reilly catalogue. I'll order the forthcoming The Ruby Programming Language.

Perl classes are over

Yet another semester done at the UB. Time to relax!

Pilates

Since I've finished the classes I've got some spare time in my spare time :-), and I've decided to start doing some Pilates, I like what I've heard about it. I've scheduled a class per week with reformer by now, in a small group of three people.

Powered Paragliding

I spend most weekends in a town of the seaside near Barcelona, and frequently you see people in paramotors pass following the coast. There's a little voice in me that says that experience has to be amazing, and enriching since it is so different to anything I do regularly.

A couple of weeks ago I had the chance to talk with one of those guys. He kindly responded to all my questions and recommended an instructor. My impression is that they do not quite see themselves as paragliders with a motor, they see powered paragliders (PPG) as the smallest aircarfts on earth. The propeller helps you getting airbone and going up, and the wing does the rest. If the motor quits you become an ordinary paraglider.

Point is, you don't need to get into a van, go up to a risky amphitheater high in some mountain, wait if you have luck with the wind direction and speed range (or else you practice parawaiting), and run into the void, ready to abort if wing inflation goes wrong. And being a beginner you need to add the sensory overload I've read you feel. Depending on the conditions, if you succeed you are done in the ground after say 10 minutes (although you can be there for much more time if there are thermals and you know to soar with them).

Nah, I don't like that. That's why I have never been interested in practicing parachuting either, it is very expensive, you need an aircraft, and the fall just lasts some minutes.

But with a PPG you just need some pasture or whatever flat stretch of ground with enough space to run a bit and fly. That guy I talked to left the car near the beach, got airbone, flew for a couple of hours, came back to the origin point, and gently landed in a few meters. With a PPG you can fly in two days what you can fly in two months with a paraglider, and with much much less risk for a beginner. When he finished he unmounted the PPG and packed it into the trunk of his car.

Well, I don't know whether I'll actually take any class in the future, but I am reading Running into the Sky, which describes the experience of a guy in the process of learning this stuff, and I am completely hooked!

5 Jan 2008

Sat, 5 Jan 2008 11:40:09 GMT

Rails

Small ultra tiny little minimal contributions to Rails: #10648, #10610, #10594, #10511, #10434.

31 Dec 2007

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 13:00:39 GMT

Field picker filter by Mark Dominus

A little jewel for your shell-fu by Mark Dominus. Adding an option for the field separator is left as an exercise.