Sometimes it's excellent fun to work with somebody to produce a website in a day. With no requirement for ongoing support, just get it up and running, instant gratification. In a way, it says, "Look what we can do when we set our minds to it!"

winchesterwebscene.co.uk

Yesterday, @sydlawrence phoned me to ask if i'd like to help make a new site for the Winchester Web Scene. Without a second thought, i said, "DEFINITELY!" We got together at 3pm today at the Bridge Patisserie. We drank lots of coffee, went on to the Bishop on the Bridge, then went back to Syd's house and ate pizza. We got the whole site designed, coded, integrating with Twitter, Flickr, Google Maps, Gravatar and Campaign Monitor for email subscriptions, with a blog plus comments, events list and RSS feeds … in about 5 hours.

It was nice that two Winchester web companies, Marmalade on Toast and Eden Development were able to combine talent to work on a fun social project together. The two of us had a great time making it!

The site gives a far greater prominence to the Winchester Web Scene than the old Ning site did. Still in its first few hours of existence, the site has already had 71 unique visitors. The future of the Winchester Web Scene is looking very bright!

The next event is a barbeque at the Hyde Tavern on the 6th July from 7pm. If you live near Winchester and are interested in anything to do with the web, you're very welcome to come along! :)

Having just installed Rails on Ubuntu tonight, and reminded myself how utterly horrible the Rails scaffold looks (it's supposed to!) i thought i might have a look at Hobo.

Hobo builds upon Rails, brings in a few plugins, makes it even faster to do things, and looks pretty good right from the start.

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I recently installed Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope and hadn't yet got around to putting Rails on to it.

Installing Ruby and Gems and Rails and getting them all to work nicely together can be a pain, so i'm happy to say i managed to go from nothing to Rails installed and working in 14 minutes this time! Thanks very much to Installing Ruby on Rails on Debian/Ubuntu for most of the tips. Here's how it panned out for me:

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I wrote the following on Saturday 30th May and somehow failed to publish it …

It's a beautiful day. I feel the need to get out, do something different. I've got that feeling like "Something's coming" from West Side Story.

This morning i watched the Google Wave presentation. I thought it was pretty good but not that ground-breaking. It's just a mashup of all sorts of different ideas: email, instant messaging, wiki, document editing. The live collaboration is cool but really just shows the power of XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol).

It triggered off a feeling in my head that i need to do something awesome. I've had this feeling twice before in my life. First time i learnt PHP and i came up with my own CMS. Second time i learnt Rails and wrote MyChores. I've got that same feeling that i had both of those times, like there's an idea in my head. Something cool that i can't quite figure out what it is, but there is something creative bubbling in my head. I need to learn something, and i need to channel this potential energy into something wonderful.

I think it might have to do with Google Web Toolkit and mobile technology. I'll look into it and see what i can learn from it.

However, i feel that today is not the day for sitting at a computer. I've had an insanely busy week at work, and i feel i need to get out and enjoy the sunshine. It's a glorious day. I plan to take a trip down to Portsmouth, get some fresh air, look at the sea, maybe do some shopping, do a lot of thinking. I'll take the boat over to Gosport and be at today's geohash location for 4pm. I don't know whether anyone else will turn up, but i'll take a camera and maybe knock on the door of the house where the geohash happened to fall today!

Things like this sadden me: Mike Gunderloy resigns as a Rails activist, no longer wishing to be a public spokesperson for Rails. This is a great loss for the community.

Things like this disappoint me: the attitudes of a few people cause a tainting on the entire community. Even if David Naughton has misunderstood the issue, it is clear that the whole debate has had a negative effect on the Rails community.

Unexpected pornography at a professional conference surprises me, shocks me a little. I wonder whether Matt Aimonetti, at any point during the preparation of that presentation, thought "This is likely to offend some people", and if so, whether Matt decided not to care.

The refusal of some Rails representatives to even acknowledge that there is a problem angers me. Yes it was edgy. Yes it was creative. It can be those things and still be offensive. "Creative" is not a synonym for "acceptable". Offending people is a big deal. The unpology "I'm sorry that you happened to be offended" is a world away from apologising for having been the cause of offence.

It is not a person's fault for being offended. Without wishing to be a Bible-basher, there is a lot to be said for this little nugget of advice:

"If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone."

You can't please everybody all the time, but there are basic precautions that you can take, and when you have made a mistake, you can take responsibility for it and apologise for it.

I think that is the end of my rant, and i hope i will have nothing more to say about it.

I would like to say publicly, again, that i appreciate my job so very much. I am extremely lucky to work in a family-friendly, vibrant, fun, laid-back yet totally professional environment, doing a job that i enjoy with my whole heart. I don't expect expect to be discriminated against, nor do i expect any special treatment. I receive precisely the appropriate amount of respect and admiration that i deserve based on my skill as a programmer. I am extremely grateful for it.

Here's a picture of me loving my job today, along with some of my colleagues, sat on the picnic bench in the sunshine: yfrog.com/4o8a2j :)

Sort of related to the rant, i have been wondering tonight where my opinions come from. Different people have different opinions, and i can read and intellectually understand varying stances, so what is it that sways me so strongly in one particular direction? I have an opinion on almost any given topic, but i don't always know what it is that makes me feel that way.

I find the various out-of-control tram hurtling down a track thought experiments quite interesting in terms of moral dilemmas to which people often have a strong opinion, yet cannot quite explain why. Ethics and morals are curious subjects.

I have just launched a contest for a new logo for MyChores.

If you're a creative type (unlike me - i do code, not graphics!) then please have a go. The logos submitted will be judged by MyChores members and the favourite one will be used on the site. It doesn't matter whether you use MyChores or not.

Please help spread the word so that lots of people get to hear about it!

Alexander Lang has written a great article about why CouchDB is not compatible with ActiveRecord, and why you should not try to coerce CouchDB into mimicking a relational database. It really is a very different thing altogether: The case of ActiveRecord vs. CouchDB

In my experience of CouchDB i first tried out ActiveCouch because of my familiarity with ActiveRecord. I soon came across problems because it was trying to make CouchDB something that it is not. As i exclaimed at the time, "LOL. ActiveRecord this is not!"

I had far more success with couchrest which is a much closer CouchDB wrapper, enabling CouchDB to be used as it's intended: as a RESTful interface with map/reduce views.

Recently i have been reading Domain-Driven Design by Eric Evans. Through reading it my understanding of Rails - and web programming - has completely turned around. My thinking used to be entirely database-centric. I saw Rails as little more than an easy access into the database. For ages i didn't even realise that you could have models that weren't connected to a database table!

Now my thinking has changed and i consider the primary focus to be the domain model. I think about the classes and the design patterns that apply to them. I consider how they fit together, how they communicate with each other, and the boundaries between the core domain and subdomains. In my mind, the database has gone from being the most important thing to being just a method of persistence for the data in the domain model.

When you think of things this way round you are less likely to get hung up on the differences between ActiveRecord and CouchDB. You work out your domain, design the classes and then think about the most appropriate database platform to support your model.

Update: I've just come across a useful article that provides three methods to achieve a has_many relational structure in CouchDB. CouchDB "Joins" by Christopher Lenz.

With all this talk of Google wanting to buy Twitter, it got me thinking about the exciting potential for real-time searching. I've seen some greasemonkey scripts for adding Twitter search results into Google, but i wanted something a little bit different. I wanted to search multiple places and bring them together in columns. Something a bit like this:

So i spent the whole afternoon figuring out how to do it (and in the process, learning how to do object-oriented PHP!) and you can try it out here: rightnow.aimee.mychores.co.uk

I need help on making it more interactive. It should be fairly easy to define new search locations like plugins. I want people to be able to choose which they wish to search on. I would like AJAX updating with auto refreshing. And of course i need a lot of help with the design!

If you fancy having a play, fork it on Github! github.com/sermoa/right_now_search :)

I'm back! I have been away from the Internet for a week - a self-enforced leave of absence to try to avoid getting RSI. Happily to say, it seems to have worked - just typing as much as i need to at work, and having a rest in the evenings. I love programming and i love my job, so i really don't want to injure myself.

I have been trying out another keyboard layout: Colemak. It has similar aims to Dvorak but, unlike Dvorak, they actually used a computer to help generate the layout! Also, unlike Dvorak, Colemak layout is fairly similar to Qwerty, possibly making it easier for Qwerty users to switch. It keeps Z, X, C and V in the same place, useful for the obvious keyboard shortcuts.

colemak.com - the website for the layout.
Colemak on a TypeMatrix EZ-Reach keyboard - made for my own reference, but i imagine others may come looking for it too. If you want it as a PDF, let me know.

Work has been fun lately - we've been trying out pair programming and i'm really enjoying it. I took a while to believe that it really is beneficial for two people to program together, but i'm coming round to the idea now. Especially when trouble-shooting - there is almost no break in the flow because the combination of two brains focussed on a problem means that we come up with the solution pretty quickly. Plus it's also really good fun! :D I think the key is to have a separate pairing station set up with two keyboards and two mice plugged in. That gives a feeling of equality. With a little perseverance it soon starts to feel very natural to program together.

Social life has been fun too. The Spring weather is making me very happy. Church has been great, really enjoying it. In my week-of-no-internet i became totally hooked on Life On Mars - can't wait to see the second series!

I leave you with something that i saw in a bookshop in Southampton yesterday - made me LOL ;-)

For once, a meme that's actually worth doing! My thanks go to Kapitano for this one. It takes a little while to do, but it's fun!

1. Go to a random page on Wikipedia. The heading is your band name.
2. Select the last in a list of random quotations, or the last few words of it. That's your album title.
3. Take the third of a random selection of Flickr images. That's your album art.
4. Now get creative.

My random Wikipedia page is Trip distribution, part of a mathematical transportation forecasting model.

My random quote:

The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.

- Alfred North Whitehead
English mathematician & philosopher (1861 - 1947)

For my Flickr image i couldn't take the third one because it was 'All rights reserved' so i kept going until i found one with a Creative Commons share and derive image. Which turned out to be this lovely picture: Hello flickr, (explored) by OUCHcharley.