We have been very quiet lately. Last post on the blog was 2 1/2 weeks ago. Not what you would expect from folks who are supposed to be on the cutting edge of development. But there are good reasons.
In the past month two new members have joined our team, Michael Lascarides and Trevor Thornton. Both [...]
Why are the instructions always wrong?
In the middle of developing yet another internal application in Ruby on Rails for metadata entry, it became clear this week that I needed to be able to type a name into a search box and have a dynamic dropdown generate with matches on that name. There’s a plugin called [...]
I am here to make a plug. Is it a plug if I don’t stand to profit?
Maybe profit constitutes a shameless plug, but I digress. I have been watching a tutorial called Ruby on Rails: Beyond the Basics, produced by a company called Lynda.com. It is really good. The narrator encourages the viewer to [...]
One can get pretty far with a bit of confidence and Google. It came as a surprise to me that anyone who can read can install and troubleshoot open source software. It’s as simple as jumping in and running with it until you hit an error message, copying said message into a Google search box, [...]
My boss has been organizing the Labs project schedule and in turn we are all organizing our individual project schedules. I am a librarian stereotype in my love of to-do lists. I love to make them, and I love to cross things off. I have a good memory and I rarely [...]
It’s a dusty word: documentation. Look at it. It practically makes you sneeze just looking at it there on the screen. Documentation is not particularly lively. It doesn’t like to go out. It doesn’t like to dance. It has a natural aversion to sunlight. It’s happy in a museum so long as it doesn’t have [...]
Should there be internal stylesheets (such as the ones used by magazines, journals, newspapers, or the like) for anyone in a department or organization writing code and comments about that code? While developing my Ruby on Rails applications, the process has been (up until this point) a little opaque to me: I mean, isn’t some [...]
