Author: Matthew

  • Who is Ron Paul?

    As a Christian who is socially conservative, fiscally libertarian, and non-interventionist, I’m having a very difficult time imagining myself actually voting for any of the current Republican Presidential candidates. I’m just hearing the same old thing from all of them. All except one, who happens to be the only guy up there actually willing to tick off a few people while articulating his principals. That guy is Ron Paul.

    I agree with the premise of this article, namely, that Ron Paul is the only Republican candidate who has a chance of beating Hillary in 2008.

    What’s really cool is how Ron Paul is taking advantage of the Internet to promote his message. As of today, he has over 44,000 Meetup members. There are literally dozens of Ron Paul-related video clips on YouTube. And why shouldn’t there be? The mainstream media is only giving coverage to the perceived frontrunners of both parties, who spout the same drivel day after day.

    The Internet levels the playing field and de-monopolizes the television networks and newspapers. Even Google has hosted a one-hour Q&A session with Ron Paul. The Internet makes free speech free again. That’s why the efforts of many in our government to regulate the Internet should be aggresively opposed.

    Whether you’re liberal or conservative, you have to admit that Ron Paul speaks his mind and has a solid track record of constitutionlist voting. He’s a statesman in a political environment that harbors far too few.

  • Come tipp some links with us

    Rails RumbleThe Rails Rumble took place this past weekend, and together with fellow raleigh.rb‘ers Mark Bennett and Nathaniel Talbott we formed a team. 48 hours, one go-cart race, and several Wii games later we finished our creation and dubbed it Link Tipping.

    Link Tipping is very similar to digg, except instead of voting on links you “tipp” them with real money. We integrated with Amazon’s new Flexible Payment Service to support micropayments: you can tipp in $0.25 increments. Once a link has received a tipp, the individual who created the resource at that link can log in, “claim” the tipps, and have the money transferred to his Amazon account.

    (No, I’m not misspelling “tip.” We intentionally spelled it “tipp” in the app.)

    The wonderful thing about Link Tipping is that, since real money is being used, the links that move to the top of the list are much more likely to be useful and remarkable.

    There were 90+ apps entered in the Rails Rumble and voting started yesterday. Check out the full list. Could these many apps have been built in this short an amount of time using a Java or .NET stack? I have my doubts. Rails isn’t a silver bullet, but it sure is fun to rumble with.

  • Water restrictions

    Raleigh, the city that I live in, recently implemented stage one water restrictions. This means I can water with a sprinkler once a week, and by hand with a hose twice a week.

    This simplifies my life. Whereas I once had to be concerned about watering every other day, now I only need to be concerned about watering once a week.

    Better yet, once my plants and grass die from lack of water, I won’t have to water at all. Thank you, City of Raleigh, for helping me simplify my schedule this way.

    sar-casm [sahr-kaz-uh-m] –noun “harsh or bitter derision or irony”

  • Slides from Chaotic Agility talk at Agile RTP

    These are the slides from the presentation I gave at the Agile RTP user group on August 7th. It was a great experience and I appreciate everyone showing up. The talk generated some good discussion.

    I was hoping to post these sooner. Sorry for the delay. I look forward to seeing you all again at the Agile RTP meetup in September.

  • Testing with Selenium at the raleigh.rb meetup tonight

    Here’s your friendly reminder that the next raleigh.rb meetup is TONIGHT! Brenton Leanhardt will be introducing us to the wonders of testing our Ruby apps with Selenium. Get yourself a full description of the talk and directions to Red Hat on the Meetup page.

    I think it’s safe to say that if you’re a Ruby programmer in the Triangle area and aren’t a regular attendee of raleigh.rb, you are greatly missing out. Join us tonight at the most happenin’ Ruby bash in Raleigh and redeem yourself!

  • Agile RTP meetup tonight

    Remember, this month’s Agile RTP meetup is tonight at 6 PM. I’ll be presenting my Chaotic Agility talk at Misys in North Raleigh. This is a new meeting location (we’re not meeting at Frankie’s anymore) so take note! Here are the directions from the mailing list:

    The address of the building is 8537 Six Fork Rd. Raleigh NC. The name of the building is Forum V. The conference room is #1500.

    This is the building directly beside the main Misys office building and it is located to the north of the water tower. The building is brand new, so it doesn’t show up on most mapping or satellite sites.

    There is plenty of parking in the parking garages surrounding the building.

  • Explore chaotic agility at next month’s Agile RTP meetup

    I’ll be speaking about chaotic agility at the Agile RTP meetup in August.

    Chaotic agility is a phrase describing why I believe agility works: the science behind it models an amazingly accurate picture of a typical development project. Most of us will agree that agile teams produce better software on time and for less money. But few of us question why agility works. By better understanding the science behind agility, we will stop trying to manufacture and control software and instead allow it to emerge on its own.

    Note that August’s meetup won’t be at Frankie’s. We’re trying out a new location at Misys Healthcare on Six Forks Road. Visit the meetup site for directions and a more detailed overview of the talk. See you there!

  • Registration for BarCampRDU 2007 is open

    Registration for this year’s BarCampRDU is now open. This is an event I unfortunately had to miss last year due to a prior commitment. I’m really looking forward to attending this year. It’s shaping up to be a fantastic experience.

  • No need to check response when testing redirects

    Early on in my exploration of Rails, I got into the habit of testing that the response code of an action indicated a redirect. It turns out that this check is entirely unnecessary since assert_redirected_to makes an identical check:

    def assert_redirected_to(options = {}, message=nil)
  clean_backtrace do
    assert_response(:redirect, message)
    ...
  end
end

    This is how one of my functional tests might have looked early on:

    def test_index
  get :index
  assert_response :redirect
  assert_redirected_to :action => "list"
end

    This is how the test should be written now:

    def test_index
  get :index
  assert_redirected_to :action => "list"
end

    I recall reading several examples that specifically checked for a :redirect response code before calling assert_redirected_to so it must have been necessary at some point. It’s certainly not necessary anymore. Keep this in mind and save yourself a line or two of code.

  • Deploying PHP apps with Capistrano

    Capistrano is a wonderful tool. I have this really old PHP-based web site, TolkienMovies.com, that I needed to make a change to earlier today. (The spam bots had finally found my news submission form.) I decided this was as good a time as any to automate deployment of the app. This article was very helpful. Staring at a task like this can be daunting, but once I actually got in there and started hacking it wasn’t half as bad as I thought it would be. And now I have a warm, fuzzy feeling knowing that deployment of this stinkin’ PHP app is only one “cap deploy” command away. Hallelujah.