During the last few weeks I did a bunch of me(di)tation. This is, at least in part, a result of reading Andy Hunt’s book Pragmatic Thinking & Learning. Metation is a neologism that came to my mind when writing this post and it means doing meta things. When the things you are metaing are thinking [...]

As announced in the last post, I published treetonin as a replacement for Jreepad. During the last few weeks most of the time I was taking notes, it were just time tracking notes. I tried several time tracking tools over the years and I think time tracking, as it is somewhat of a meta task, [...]

I read Eric S. Raymonds book The Cathedral and the Bazaar about a year ago. In this book he seeds bits of wisdom as lessons. I found most of these lessons interesting, clever, amusing when reading the book, but I don’t really remember them. With one exception, and that’s the very first one.
1. Every good [...]

I just received a patch. It fixes one bug that was a terrible pain in the ass for quite some time, so I applied it immediately. I just had to adapt some tests. Here’s what’s new.
< me.student.should == true
< me.degree.should be_nil
—
> me.student.should == false
> me.degree.should == Factory.build :degree, :title => ‘Diplom-Informatiker’
> me.degree.should be_equivalent_to Factory.build :degree, [...]

Drum roll, please. This is the third post about pair programming in a row.
On my own box I use mostly TextMate, while my pair mate Tim prefers vi, so there’s no point in taking settings from one environment to the other. By contrast, we both use git directly from the shell, without any wrapping GUI [...]

Even the greatest ideas have aspects that are not that shiny. In my last post I reported with excitement about my first experiences with double shot pair programming, that is pair programming with an own keyboard for each developer. Now I discovered a side effect of this technique that is so dangerous that I just [...]

This crappy image shows the work environment we now used for the second day. Pair programming, double shot flavor. Two developers, one machine, but two keyboard attached.
I started this as a hoax more or less, since I don’t like my pair partners’s ultra-flat Apple keyboard and he kind of doesn’t appreciate my obviously superior Das [...]

A few weeks ago we migrated jovoto from Gettext to the new I18n that became available with Rails 2.2.
In the Gettext approach we had the following workflow for collaboration with a translator.

Add code with new/updated calls to Gettext’s translation methods
Run rake gettext:updatepo to pull new English strings into the po file
Put po file on a [...]

I like bitflags. They keep your database columns clean, provide efficient storage for boolean values and with some nice wrapper code they are just as cozy as real boolean properties.
When I had to write some code for jovoto that just screamed for bitflags I started searching for a plugin that did the heavy lifting. Guess [...]

As far as I know there is general consensus that writeboards suck. Still they exist, so we need to get along with them. One thing I find particularly annoying is the lack of a sorting function in the overview of existing writeboards.
Fortunately, basecamp is generous and provides the date of the last update in a [...]