LiveJournal are bringing back basic accounts! SUP have just done the improbable and actually *listened* to their userbase!

They want to plaster them with ads, of course, and there are four complicated proposals that i can’t get my head around. Not that i really care much, so long as they don’t put any ads on the RSS feeds.

The full, amazing, story about SUP bringing back LJ basic accounts

I finally feel ready to explain the grief that i was feeling when all i could manage was a full stop to get my feelings out into the big wide internet.

My kid brother is badly ill. Since there are 11 years difference in age between us, i played a big part in bringing up my brother, and we have an incredibly strong bond of love between us. It was breaking my heart to know that my precious little baby bro was going through so much suffering.

I have just come back from a couple of days away with my family, and i feel a whole lot better for it. My boss was very supportive and told me without hesitation to go and be with my family. I was very lucky that my darling Felix was also able to come and visit at the same time. We are very close as a family, and the three of us had a wonderful time last night. Tears were shed, we had many cuddles, our bonds of love and trust were renewed. I very much hope that i’ll be able to go back to visit again soon.

If anyone wants to reply but doesn’t know what to say, i very much appreciate replies containing just a full stop. To me that says, “I read your post and i am offering my support”.

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MyChores seems to be growing quite rapidly at the moment. I think it is receiving a bit of quiet promotion all around the internet. I was delighted when i saw it casually mentioned on familieswithpurpose.com:

… or try using an online chore organizer like MyChores to help get you organized.

Just like it’s one of those sites that people should be aware of. :)

We got to 1000 members 3 weeks ago, and have added another 100 since then. This is starting to look a bit like exponential growth, and i wonder how i will be able to handle it. Already i am getting a lot more contact messages, questions and suggestions coming from the site, plus an offer to translate the site into Portuguese! It’s very exciting but i feel i haven’t enough time to work on MyChores to do everything that i want to do, and that other people want me to do.

At the same time, i am painfully aware that the code is really badly written … for goodness sake, i had no idea what i was doing when i wrote it. I had no formal Rails training; i just picked things up as i went along. If it worked, it was good enough for me! Now i’m learning Rails properly, from people who really know it, i’m picking up all sorts of tips: “Controllers should be dumb!” … “Tell, don’t ask!” … “Encapsulation!” … “Avoid train wreck!” … “Story, spec, code!” … “Red, green, refactor!” … and i realise all the mistakes i have made with coding MyChores.

Oh well, Shea Bliss is looking like it’s nearly finished, and then i should be able to dedicate some time to making MyChores really robust and optimized. I am looking forward to it but i am sort of dreading it too, because ideally i need to write an entire test suite before i start refactoring anything, which will take a lot of time and effort, whilst the lovely people who use MyChores are still waiting for the changes they have asked for which would make it just perfect for them …!

I’m scared i could get out of my depth pretty soon.

No, the title isn’t in reference to the current freaky weather we are having (though there have been many surprise storms this week!) but it is the title of a picture that has been drawn … for me! :)

I do like the twoseekers community on LiveJournal, dedicated to Harry and Cedric, my one true HP pairing! :) On Tuesday last week rotary phones posted, saying,

As a big thank you to everyone who made last month the Month of Harry and Cedric (TM), I’m making an offer: free art! That’s right. Make a request, and I’ll do my best to set my artistic talents to the task.

I was the lucky first to get my request in:

Oooohh! That is a wonderful offer, and i have just the perfect scene that i’ve always wanted a picture of.

You know in book 3, chapter 9, the Gryffindor/Hufflepuff match … thunderstorm, everyone drenched to the skin … and the Dementors … Harry fell 50 feet and Cedric caught the snitch. Well, i know that’s what happened in the book, but i’ve read a lot of fan fiction where Cedric actually caught Harry, and in my mind that’s almost become canon now, heheh!

I’d really like a picture of Cedric swooping in at the last moment and catching Harry. If you would like to oblige i would be most exceedingly thankful! :)

And here it is, a truly beautiful picture; the bold colour style reminds me of the covers of the French Harry Potter books …

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Wow, i have been sooooooo busy lately, haven’t had time to write here even though i wanted to.

I know that almost every post i do write seems to be about my job, and this is no different. I am still loving it. I have realised that it is possible to write a successful web application with Ruby on Rails, not really understanding much Ruby at all! It’s quite odd to find out how much i didn’t know … i used to go to all sorts of extreme measures to make things work when i didn’t know you could do it with a single ennumerable block statement. I knew nothing about Prototype and Script.aculo.us although i used them without understanding what they were actually doing. I am being forced to raise my game significantly, and it is giving me a huge buzz!

In my spare time i am still working hard on Shea Bliss. It is coming on really nicely, and we have some great plans to extend it beyond what we were given from FreeWebshop. At the moment i am focussing on HTML optimisations and ensuring valid XHTML compliance. It’s quite a fun task because i enjoy running it through the validator, zapping the errors and watching the error count come down! :)

Yesterday we had a nice trip out to Chichester to do some shopping. It was a pretty place, and lovely weather so we had a very good time. Unfortunately i missed the Winchester Hat Fair, and by the looks of today’s weather, i’m not going to be going today either!

Oh my gosh, Doctor Who last night … what can i say that adequately expresses my awe at the quality of that episode?! Russell T Davies is incredible. After last week’s episode, i wondered how it could possibly get any better … but oh my, the finale totally eclipsed it. It was deep, profound, hilarious, exuberant and tragic, all in one mind-blowing episode. I cried floods of tears and was sniffling all evening! I have downloaded a Donna Noble wallpaper from the BBC website in commemoration.

I just got some flowers from a friend!

These are a thank you gift for helping to make Shea Bliss - Natural Shea Butter Body Care - the webshop is now open and ready for business! :) I personally use the products, and they do wonders for my skin … really good quality, and they make excellent gifts too!

My job continues to go very well indeed. Most of this week i have been working on Nudo Italia - a site for olive groves in Italy. You can adopt an olive tree and receive all its produce for a year. So all week i have been looking at stunning views of Italy! :) I ordered a pot of their olive oil … it came last night and tasted absolutely delicious in a salad dressing!

Today we are going to Portsmouth … a bit of shopping and a treasure hunt and barbecue this evening. I hope this lovely weather holds out! :)

So i hear now is a good time to upgrade Ruby!

Unfortunately i downloaded 1.8.6 patch 230 and it gives an error trying to start up the web server. Does anyone know what this is about?

*** glibc detected *** double free or corruption (out): 0x0000000000daabc0 ***
Aborted

Looks like a C warning about memory deallocations or corruptions. I’m not the only one having problems. Oh dear, looks as if today is not going to be a happy day for Ruby.

Resumo: Mi trovas min tre okupata, sed ankoraŭ tre feliĉa. Mi estas multa lernanta kun mia laboro.

It would be accurate to say that i have been pretty busy! My job has been totally excellent. I’ve been learning a whole bunch, but it’s difficult to grasp and i have been slightly frustrated with myself at times for not picking it up as fast as i’d like to. I recommend peepcode.com for some really great video tutorials about Ruby, Rails, REST, Git, Rspec, Ajax, Prototype. It makes me realise that i was never a Rails programmer before. I was a Rails dabbler! Now i can see myself getting becoming super proficient at Rails, but it’s going to take a while!

In my spare time i have also been busy with a PHP project for a friend: a web shop sheabliss.co.uk. My friend sells some top quality products made with shea butter. I use them every day, and thoroughly recommend them. It has been fun to work on the site, which is FreeWebshop with some heavy modifications. It’s an opensource community project so i have shared my mods on the forum and some of them are being included with the next release version! :)

For the experience, and to help me get used to it, i have installed Git at home and i’m using it for revision control on the web shop. It’s really amazing how you can switch branches and it instantly modifies the necessary files in your filesystem. It means i can work on separate things simultaneously without worrying about them interfering with each other. When the time comes and the changes have gone live and been verified, i can merge the changes back into the master branch.

This is a trivial example showing how i branched this evening to do the reCAPTCHA separately from icon changes and then merged them together later. At work we get far more elaborate branching, quickly resembling a map of the London Underground! It’s fun! :D

Speaking of London, we are going there tomorrow! :) We’ll be meeting a friend for lunch and then going to a midsummer party. Should be excellent, i imagine! :)