The facility of Ruby on Rails' test, development and production environments is one of those features that goes almost unremarked, but which makes using rails more pleasant. No doubt everyone has their own solution for this in other environments, and while I am sure Common Lisp is not lacking in examples, I have not seen an idiomatic implementation. In developing cl-blog-generator I came up with the following solution.
...Twitter now lets developers build applications that take actions on your behalf without you ever having to divulge your password. Instead of asking you for your password, these applications ask Twitter to ask you for permission, and you give permission to the application while logged in to Twitter. What's even better is that you can revoke the application's permissions, from within Twitter, at any time, without having to change your password. The OAuth protocol makes this possible, and does so in a very secure manner.
...I have now added a comment system to cl-blog-generator. My requirements were for a simple, low overhead, commenting system, preferable one that could possibly be fully automated.
...I am an Opera user, these days mainly because it gives me integrated mail, feed and news reading, so that everything that comes from the web appears in one place. The last significant innovation I remember was the introduction of tabs, and that was some time ago (long before it made its way into IE, for example). I am a heavy user of tabs - it is not unusual for me to have over fifty pages open, as I tend to just open pages and rarely close them again. This means that the tab icons are unreadable, and Alt+Tab (I'm on a mac) produces three or four columns to scroll through to select the tab I'm after. I dream of a better tab navigation model, and would love to be able to search across all the open tabs. Surely it wouldn't be that hard to implement.
...I recently uploaded some links to my cl-blog-generator project, and have been getting some feedback with comparisons to other blog site generators, or compilers, such as Steve Kemp's Chronicle, or Jekyll as used on GitHub Pages. Compared to these, cl-blog-generator is immature, but takes a different approach in several areas that Charles Stewart suggested might be worth exploring. I look forward to any comments you might have.
...The grackles have returned, the grass is showing in the garden, the piles of snow are rapidly diminishing, and the accumulated dirt of winter is poking through; it must be spring. The family walk has recommenced, and these pictures were all taken within a few minutes of the house.
...Yesterday was frustrating; I spent far too long trying to debug some problems in a Rails application I am writing. Rails, and frameworks in general, are supposed to give us improved productivity by hiding the complexity and mechanics of the task at hand. This is great as long as the framework behaves as expected, but invariably causes problems when things go wrong.
...While trying to validate the output of cl-blog-generator I needed a local DTD for XHTML. The textproc/xmlcatmgr package in Darwin Ports creates a catalog at /opt/local/etc/xml/catalog, but it does not include XHTML. A flattened XHTML DTD can be found in the w3 validator library and installed the DTD's under /opt/local/share/xml/, but I couldn't find a catalog file for it. It turns out it is pretty simple to write the catalog file; the Wikipedia XML Catalog entry has an example that contains what is needed. Save the example next to the XHTML DTD's as catalog.xml and adjust the paths, then add a "nextCatalog" entry in /opt/local/etc/xml/catalog pointing at the catalog.xml file.
Today's surprise was that "2009-01-01" and "2009-1-1" get parsed differently by the YAML parser in Rails. The former gets converted to a Date, while the latter becomes a String. It confused me for a while, as the problem only showed up when I wanted to send the dates to a Flot chart. Looking at the standard, it's conforming behaviour. Must be me that is non-conforming then...
Sometimes I find myself wanting to record my thoughts on a particular subject, and as much as a way for me to find them again, I thought I would publish them to this blog. I believe a blog is essentially static content, and I like to edit things in Emacs, which rules out the majority of blogging solutions I know of, so I wrote my own.
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