Ariejan.net

I get a lot of questions about how I bought my Kindle and what it cost to get it shipped to the Netherlands. So, for all those Dutchmen (and Dutchwomen) who are considering a Kindle, here’s a short how-to in Dutch:

From stopsoftwarepatents.eu:

Our petition aims to unify the voices of concerned Europeans, associations and companies, and calls on our politicians in Europe to stop patents on software with legislative clarifications.

Your webshop is already patented!

The patent system is misused to restrain competition for the economical benefit of a few but fails to promote innovation. A software market environment is better off with no patents on software at all. Healthy competition forces market players to innovate.

European court decisions still accept in many cases the validity of the software patents granted by national patent offices and the European Patent Office (EPO) that is beyond democratic control. They not only continue to grant them, but also to lobby in favor of them. Despite the current deep crisis of the patent system, they are unable to reform and put at risk too many European businesses with their soft granting policy.

On 2005 the Commission appeared to be more supportive to the interests of major international conglomerates than of small and medium sized enterprises from Europe – who are a major driving force behind European innovation. The European Parliament rejected at the end the software patent directive, but has no rights for legislative initiatives.

We urge our legislators

• to pass national legal clarifications to substantive patent law to rule out any software patent;
• to invalidate all granted claims on patents that can be infringed by software run on programmable apparatus;
• to also strive to propagate these rules to the European level, including the European Patent Convention.

Sign the petition now!

For some time I have been eyeballing Sony’s e-reader in the local bookstore. I tried it a few times, but I didn’t like it – actually I had serious doubts about e-books in general because of the experience. Sony’s e-reader was not really easy to use with only one next-page button in a not-so-easy to access place. It also had a slow e-ink screen. It took a second to a second-and-a-half to show the next page. I didn’t like it and had serious doubts about buying any e-reader at all.

But, reading about all the “epic win”-stories of the Kindle by @johnnybusca I just had to give it a try – I bought one.

Okay, I’ve wanted to make a custom TextMate theme since I first installed the thing on my MacBook in 2006. Today I present you with ‘Epic’.

Installation

Grab the theme here: EpicBlue.tmTheme.zip (1.5k). Unzip it and open it with TextMate. That’s all. Enjoy!

There’s bit of a discussion between me and @ludooo about which word has the most significance when measuring the greatness of something.

I say epic is bigger than awesome. @ludooo says awesome is bigger than epic (he’s not right, of course).

Please help us decide!

I haven’t seen a schedule yet, but I’ve been told by Mark that I’ll be speaking at Rails Underground this year.

My talk will be on the topic of Git. In about 45 minutes time I’ll show you all the basic git features you’ll need on a daily basis. Not only that, but I’ll also explain how git manages all those commits and branches so you can be on your way to become a git power user.

I just released version 0.4.0 of the IMDB Ruby Gem into the wild. There are only a few minor updates:

Changes in 0.4.0

• Updates to the console ‘imdb’ utility
• Show the IMDB ID
• Show the full IMDB URL

Installation or upgrade

$ sudo gem install imdb

$ sudo gem update imdb

Issues, source or contributions

Git is quite an awesome version control system. Why? Because it’s lightning fast, even for large projects (among other reasons).

But, how do you use Git effectively for development on a daily basis? Let me explain to you.

Branches

Active Records provides callbacks, which is great is you want to perform extra business logic after (or before) saving, creating or destroying an instance of that model.

However, there are situations where you can easily fall into the trap of creating an infinite loop.

class Beer < ActiveRecord::Base
  def after_save
    x = some_magic_method(self)
    update_attribute(:my_attribute, x)
  end
end

Let me pose a typical Rails situation:

class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_one :fancy_hat
end
 
class FancyHat < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :person
end

Now, how can you get all the people that don’t have a fancy hat?

class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_one :fancy_hat
 
  named_scope :hatless, :joins => 'LEFT JOIN fancy_hats ON fancy_hats.person_id = people.id', :conditions => 'fancy_hats.person_id IS NULL'
end

Now you can find all the hatless people you want.

FYI: Finding fancy hats that have no one to wear them is a lot easier, because the foreign key is stored in the fancy_hats table.