As much as I like the idea of Apple’s Spotlight, the implementation sucks just a little. While tinkering round on the DevonTHINK site I ran across EasyFind. Macworld has a nice writeup if you’re interested in searching for your stuff quickly without using Spotlight.
If I were a designer, maybe I could tell you exactly why the new at&t logo sucks.
Since I’m not, I’ll just say that I think it looks stupid and leave it at that.
And then, depression set in…
This post on 43Folders reminded me of why sticking with David Allen’s GTD is oh so worth the effort. It’s not necessarily about getting more things done, but rather about how things get done - and being much less stressed about the process. Say it with me now; ”Much…less…stressed.” Aaaah.
One of my more famous sayings has always been some form of “If you wait long enough, someone will do it for you.”
Case in point. Validation in Ruby on Rails is awesome. Just add :validates_presence_of “title” in your model and you get a nice error message “Title is required” without doing any real work. Sometimes, however, it’s desirable to override that message with something a little nicer, say “Please enter a title for your new article.” Simple? It should be. There’s an attribute to all of the validation messages, :message. Great, so the following should work nicely…
<code>validates_presence_of :title,
:message => "Please enter a title for your new article."</code>
Easy, but it doesn’t work. Instead, you get back “Title Please enter a title for your new article.” Rails always prepends the column name to the message. Not great. I had planned to try writing a simple plugin yesterday to fix this but stopped because (a) I wanted to write other stuff and (b) I’m lazy and was still pissed that it didn’t already work as expected.
Sure enough, Hammed Malik posts the following to the Rails mailing list…
“Validation messages prefixed with the field name have always bothered
me and it seems like I’m not alone. This seemed like a fairly easy fix
to attempt for my first plugin so here it is:”
Now I can type “./script/plugin install http://estound.com/svn/rails/plugins/custom_validation_messages/” and move on to greater things.
See, just hang out and whistle - someone will do it for you. Thanks Hammond! Anyone wanna write me a decent CMS? I’ll be waiting.
Yes, those are my feet. And yes, that is really the carpet in the bowling alley.
I have read Jeremy Zawodny’s blog for quite a long time. He’s tight with Yahoo, knows really everything there is to know about MySQL, and is generally interesting. On the other hand, there’s his rant about Apple and iTunes, which starts out off the tracks and just gets worse. You can read it if you wish, but the gist is that he upgraded iTunes (on XP) and somehow the process missed some of his songs. Here’s how the whole thing sounds… “I ran and old version of iTunes…waaah, waaah… something broke…waaah, fuck you apple…waaah…” and so on. He clearly states that it’s going to be a rant, and that seems fair, but what’s the point, really?
Rants, unless very well written (and few are), are seldom more than simply bitching for the sake of hearing oneself bitch. I suppose that could help the ranting person in some way, but I don’t want to hear it. I suppose if you want an audience of unfulfilled entitlement society crybabies shouting “Yeah, me too!” then go ahead. Otherwise, do what my mother always suggested: If you don’t have anything good to say, shutthefuckup.
(Hey, that does feel kinda good, though.)
This post by Dave Winer in 1995 has always struck a chord with me. Probably because I make shitty software and it’s nice to hear that not only am I not alone, but I’m in the 100% majority.
“Software is a process, it’s never finished, it’s always evolving. That’s its nature. We know our software sucks. But it’s shipping! Next time we’ll do better, but even then it will be shitty. The only software that’s perfect is one you’re dreaming about. Real software crashes, loses data, is hard to learn and hard to use. But it’s a process. We’ll make it less shitty. Just watch!”
I have built dozens of web app administration areas which consist basically of a table/search/add interface. Adding the ability to sort the table by clicking on a column header is something I frequently leave out. Why? Because it’s a PITA. Jeremy recently pointed me to SortHelper, a simple Rails helper which makes implementing sortable tables just cake. Now I’ll need to find a different excuse.
“Before you decide that everyone knows something (or no one does), take a second to realize that you’re wrong.”