Geek Mama

The Kickbee is a fetal kick detector that Twitters each time the baby kicks!  While Corey Menscher has come up with the most interesting use of Twitter yet, seems like these tweets would actually get rather annoying after a while.  

At present, I am 20 weeks pregnant and this baby feels like its dancing in my belly in the afternoons and evenings.  I can only imagine how many tweets baby would have posted today.  Still I bet the grandparents might be amused if only they knew what a Twitter was.

So a few posts ago I wrote about BetterNestedSet.  At the time, this seemed like a great solution to store and quickly search/access multiple URLS.  But we have a large database and thousands of nodes per tree causes the nested set model to break down.  Reseting all of the left/right values down the tree just takes too damn long.

We threw around the idea of pulling out tlds and storing the rest of the urls in many, many flat nested sets.  But I just don’t like the idea of little branches hanging around in my table.  It’s inelegant and confusing.  I’ve refactored the crap out of my original code only to find out that BNS throws an ArgumentError error when you upgrade to Rails 2.1.  


wrong number of arguments (3 for 2)

So, rather than upgrading to Awesome Nested Set (which has yet to live up to its name) and hacking my table to death, I’m throwing in the towel and embracing plain old Acts_As_Tree.  Unless someone can give me a reason not to….

In the office today, we played a silly game that only a coder could love.  Basically we tried representing various movie references via code.  Try it at your next family gathering!

Can you guess these easy ones?

misfits << Herbie
misfits << Rudolf
misfits << Yukon Cornelius

christmas_ghosts.each { |ghost| scrooge.annoy(ghost)}


Here are a couple of awesome ones from my coworker, Jason Callina.

if zuzus_petals.exist? then george.dead == false end

if frosty.temperature > 32 then
print "look at that frosty go"
else
traffic_cop.holler()
end

if Time.now() < midnight then MOGWAI.feed() else nil end

if self.god? then zuul.reply end

Wanna share some of your own?

Okay, so I know that RoR development on Windows is not ideal.  But I’ve been faring okay so far using RadRails for Aptana.  But Aptana is a memory hog that (in conjunction with firefox and other heavy apps) can slow my laptop to crawl.  So in looking for something leaner, I fell in love with NetBeans.

NetBeans is light, subversion integration rocks (color coding allows you to easily track the status of your files) and I love love love code completion.  But I can’t use it.  I can’t use it because I can’t get the debugger to work!  

There were bugs reported in version 6.1 and now it appears that the same problem exists with 6.5.  Basically, the web server refuses to start (mongrel or webrick).  You get the error “Could not connect to the web server… cannot show /http:localhost:3000/“

Past workarounds from the FAQ do not help, like adding ARGV[0]=”webrick” to the scripts/server file or simply manually opening the webpage.  And there’s no help out there on the net.  Probably because most folks have wizened up and made the switch to Apple or Linux.  *sigh*

Has anyone else out there gotten the debugger to work using Windows and NetBeans version 6.5?