See my freshly updated post to find out what Dr Oetke had to say about my thinly topped The Deep Dish pizza.
My favourite Ruby web application framework Ramaze has been updated, and in a major way. As of the 2009.05 gem release Ramaze is built on top of sub-project Innate – a lean mean core that in turn builds on top of Rack. Pistos explains the major changes well in his blog post. For me, although I'm yet to properly get to grips with the new code, the most promising things to look forward to are:
- A fresh start with a lot of accumulated cruft thrown out, resulting in cleaner, more straightforward code for Ramaze itself. I end up reading the Ramaze code a lot (it's very accessible and empowering) so this makes it even easier to delve into the internals and figure out what's what.
- Rack middleware is front and centre, making it easy to chain HTTP processing components into your request handling flow – like Java servlet filters. Not required very often, but a godsend when it is.
- A much tidier sessions implementation, with lazy initialisation.
- A rethought render helper that brings a bit more sanity to the many ways to bring in view fragments.
- Layout support is more of a core concern, with more facilities to deal with layouts sensibly.
- Built-in support for serving different content representations from the same controller.
- An interesting new codebase for me to poke my nose into 🙂
Now if only I can find time to get my Ramaze CRUD framework going in this new world order, then package it up to share with the rest of the world. One day!
My train rolled into St Albans station from the siding as per usual, though excruciatingly slowly, and I got on. Then the lights went off and all those whirring noises you didn't realise were there fell silent. Oh dear I thought. Then the lights came back on and the driver announced "I was having some power problems but I've switched the train off and on again and it seems to have cured it." Nice.
Mac OS X comes with a lot of fantastic stuff built-in, like Java, Ruby, Python etc. The downside to this is that users tend to stick with the stock installs of those items and never upgrade them, which can leave them a long way behind the curve. I just ran into that problem when trying to install the latest version of Ramaze (my favourite Ruby web application framework) from the official gems. The IRC channel #ramaze was useful as always and provided the solution. The problem is that rubygems on OSX 10.5 is old and tired, but you can tell it to install a very specific version of innate that sorts it out. So from scratch, assuming Mac OS X 10.5 with the stock Ruby 1.8.6 install:
> sudo gem install innate -v 2009.04
> sudo gem install ramaze
> sudo gem install ramaze
Obviously as new versions of innate and ramaze come out, the exact version of innate required will change. You can tell which verison you need by trying the ramaze install and looking at the error message.
Update: Actually now Ramaze and Innate 2009.05 have been released, it seems things work just fine without any special incantations. So you can just sudo gem install ramaze and you're away.
On the way back from a lovely wedding in Shropshire over the bank holiday weekend, we stopped off at Attingham Park – a National Trust property comprising a big house and a bigger estate. We got there fairly early in the day, and since the house isn't open to the massed hordes until 1pm we snuck on a free tour at 11. This turned out to be an unexpected delight, as the tour was specifically about the usually hidden process of keeping a big old NT house clean throughout the seasons. I didn't realise quite how much careful effort goes in every day just to keep dust at bay, not to mention light, insects and humidity.
To me the house isn't the star attraction here though (we went back and had a full look once it was properly open). The vast parkland grounds are what make it special, featuring grassland, woodland, deer, rivers and ponds. These are lightly littered with some interesting sculptures, which would be more impressive if they weren't accompanied by ridiculous texts explaining what they represent. I should have burned that leaflet! We almost missed the monopoly hotels on sticks poking out of the water of a pond.
As we strolled through the bracken there was a section that was literally swarming with large very black and rather lugubrious flies. I've since identified these as St Mark's Flies, which apparently emerge at this time of year – traditionally 25th April (hence the name).
Down by the river (I'm not sure if it was the Severn or the Tern) there were a couple of Grey Wagtails shooting out over the water for insects.
