Morning links.....

A review of The Rails Way can't wait for my copy to arrive.

iPhone 1.1.3 firmware rumours makes sense, getting ready for the SDK by letting people manage their home screen.

Aw Kitties!

Spooks....

Well, thats another series of Spooks wrapped up. If you haven't watched the last episode, look away now...




















Ok?

Right....

I enjoy Spooks, but there it has now just established itself as utterly misogynistic.

This series ends with the death of Jo, who despite being a solid staunch strong character goes from 0 to wreck in less than two jump cuts and a fade in. And so yet again a Spooks series ends with a female character dead because they were weak. This just keeps happening. The men are strong and get a million second chances (cf Adam, who should have been retired after the last series as he was a wreck, but oh no, he can manage it). The women are 'apparently strong', but always break. The next series, as soon as a new female character walks on, you will find yourself wondering how she's going to end up dead or disgraced. Take Ros this series, she was a strong, possibly too hard, character, and bish bosh, she's broken by torture, she's off helping Yalta (the chaps who torture her) and it's all down hill from there for her and off she's shuffled to a life of hiding... organised by the chaps.

It's not just this series, this has been happening from the start, from the deep fat fryer in episode one, series one. And it just keeps happening.

It's all so bloody infuriating, as the big arc story in Spooks this series worked really well, but when it comes to the character management, there's a big "Spying's a blokes game, watch us break the little ladies" theme running through.

Read XKCD?

Then you may want to watch this.

BBC's iPlayer works* on Mac and Linux

Hussah! (and w00t!)

And the volume control goes to 11.

Class work.

* Streaming only. Now about those downloads........

Pope notes* - Rails - restful_authentication --stateful

* Pope notes - things that I've just worked on, and got halfway, but need to press on with. Like little papal snapshots, mainly for my reference so I can come back to it later.

I like state machines; they make life cycles much easier to manage and acts_as_state_machine is a nice way of expressing state machines. The problem I just hit though was that restful_authentication plugin just added --stateful, which generates up an authentication setup that includes the Stateful authentication setup. It went well enough getting it to work, but there seems to be a mismatch in statefulness and the use of an observer to generate mail. The observer watches save and creates, and then uses the state of the user to decide what should be done. But, it does this for all saves, and because there's no indication of a state change having just occurred, then having the after_save observer mail when the users state is active triggers off multiple "you have signed in mails" and the variant, checking for a pending state, triggers an activation mail. What struck me was it should be better to move the mail generation into the user model, using the same hooks that the state machine uses for when a state is entered. I had a quick hack, and it seems to work, but does generate two activation mails.... this is probably fixable if I understood the acts_as_state_machine plugin better, so I'm going back to another part of the code which does use that.

Oh, and I'm in day two of my "coding rails without an IDE"... it's all TextMate and Terminal here for the next fortnight. No better way to know what an IDE is doing right or wrong than getting back to basics.