So this Tuesday I had the honour of presenting at Montreal on Rails 2, where I demoed the Acts As Authenticated and Role Requirement plugins.

I think Marc Andre Cournoyer’s review impressed me the most, mainly that “…[it] is an exploit to be able to code a live app in front of a crowd like this.“ It’s a testament to the power of Rails and I’m just glad the Roles portion didn’t bomb the way it had during my rehearsals at home.

I was especially impressed by Chris Scott’s demo of the Ext JS framework. Sorry Darin, but there are some pretty nice features in Ext that will make me want to take a closer look. Terje Tjervaag’s demo of Firebug was convincing enough to make me wonder why I hadn’t already installed it yet. Used it at work today to great effect. You can read more reviews of the night here and here, while photos have been posted on Flickr and videos might pop up on Youtube.

I’m happy to announce that I will be speaking about user authentication at the next Montreal on Rails meetup, scheduled for Tuesday the 4th of September at the McGill MAASS Chemistry building, room 328. The show starts at 18h45 and I think I’ll be the first to present, so come early.

Although user authentication may sound like an advanced topic, it will be aimed mostly at the novice Rails developer as a showcase of how easy it can be to implement advanced features such as user security and roles in a Rails application. I hope to touch on a few items including the excellent Acts As Authenticated, roles and salting. If there’s anything in particular you would like to see, drop me an email.

Last night’s Montreal on Rails meetup (their first ever) was a large step up from the Commodore 64 disk swaps of my youth, but probably a lot more significant as far as self improvement goes. A good 30-35 people showed up and the two presentations given were fantastic.

The first presentation topic was improving tests, it was given by Marc Cournoyer and included a hilarious introduction to a somewhat advanced topic. The next presentation was given by Carl Mercier, who introduced the extremely useful HAML, which appears to cut the code in your views by half by generating HTML using a simplified indentation scoped ruby based markup. Very simple and very powerful stuff and I’ll be trying it shortly.

Overall the people who attended the meetup were great and I look forward to the next one. It’s so good to see a vibrant developer scene in Montreal.

You can’t resize the Window except when you use the lower right corner.

That’s a terrible design issue, one that has annoyed me a bit in OSX but annoys me even more in Windows. I guess this is a strong sign that Window resizing won’t be changing in Leopard.

The RSS icon doesn’t respect what everyone else is using.

Sure the little orange RSS icon isn’t very clear on what it does, but at least once you know what it does you can easily recognize it. The RSS icon used in Safari strays from that, and yet fails to be any more useful to someone who doesn’t already know what RSS is.

Yet another browser for web developers to debug.

This is a lazy complaint to be sure, but proper testing does take time, and some clients are going to demand it. Plus there’s no guarantee that how things render in Windows will match how things render in OSX, so you can’t be sure until you’ve tested on both platforms. Finally, this could lead people who might have purchased an Apple computer to not bother since they can test Safari from a Windows PC.

“For about four months back in the 90s I kept what was once called a diary, and I enjoyed doing it but what happened was - and I think this is a very common response - is when you start living your life inside your diary you become quite mercenary, and it’s all about ‘will this make a good entry?’

Suddenly your life becomes that Warholian thing where every moment of your life should be something you can sell, you’re always taking pictures, taping everything, and then I think it’s just psychologically strange.”

Fortunately the schism between living a good entry and writing a good entry is wide enough that I’m spared Mr. Copland’s predicament. I am a big fan of Douglas Copland’s earlier books, but I can’t say I’ve ever assessed how much of an impact Microserfs has had on my life.

A bunch of links and a picture from our trip to the cabane à sucre.

Here’s Why: A sociologist offers an anatomy of explanations.

Health Problems and the Geek Lifestyle: Things to look out for.

Synthesizer Medley from the 1985 Grammy awards, featuring no less than Thomas Dolby, Herbie Hancock, Stevie Wonder and Howard Jones. All of the 80s synth music summed up in one cheesy medley and narated by Stephen Hawking.

Incredible Machine 1 and Incredible Machine 2: Tons of Japanese Rube Goldberg machines with a catchy theme.

Multiple meats? Check! Maple Syrup? Check! Breakfast beer? Check!

Ok, I’ll admit it, I’m not always good with numbers, and yet I have always been fascinated by them. In grade four I didn’t know how to do long division, and so copied from a friend sitting next to me as I slowly deciphered the process on my own. Yet paradoxicaly I was a member of the math club and I came in second place within my school board for the big math competition. The guy I copied long divisions from came in first.

The rest of my academic life my math marks varied from a record high 100% three semesters in a row to a record low 16% precalculus class in college, but even then I never hated math itself (let us blame the teacher and the newfound freedoms of college life). If you would like to test the waters to see if you share my interest for math I present to you the following articles, all of which I promise will contain hardly any equations at all. We’ll start with a popular teaser known as The Birthday Paradox. If you liked that one, then check out Benford’s Law (or looking out for Number One), which shows how popular the number one really is, and how easy it can be to find fake data. The longest, and also the most interesting article is Who Can Name the Biggest Number which is a fascinating look at the origin, use and limitations of really big numbers. Finally, for a bit of eye candy, check out The Secret Lives of Numbers and more importantly the visualisation on the left of that page, which in my opinion is one of the nicest Java Applets to have been implemented.