The book follows the standard format of starting out with a tutorial and then diving into a deeper analysis of the technology. The tutorial in Agile Web Development with Rails is more in-depth but still left me a bit cold. Where the book really started to shine is when it went deep on the underlying technologies. I've not finished the book yet, but the section on Active Record, the object relational mapping service used in Rails, alone was worth the price of the book.

With the help of the book I'm building a new blogging system I call Dog Blog. Why Dog Blog? Because I like dogs and it sounds funny. I know the world doesn't need another blogging system but it's fun to write and Rails makes if easy. My master plan is to move off of Blogger to Dog Blog at some point in the future, but I still have more Rails to learn and bunch more code to write before that will happen.

I'm sure this is a truism of life but I've reached a point now where I need to reset some priorities. As much as I enjoy reading articles like The 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2005 (on Redit), Company bets on woman to die quickly. Woman lives, company sues (on Metafilter) and the wealth of other interesting but frivolous tidbits that cross my path thanks to the likes of Digg, Slashdot, Kuro5hin and Memepool, I feel the need to make a late new year resolution. I'm going to unsubscribe all those feeds and try and forget all the URLs and live without those sources of trivia. I don't know if I'll use the extra time wisely, but It's worth a shot.

Don't let it bring you down
It's only castles burning,
Just find someone who's turning
And you will come around.

This wasn't a loose overlap either. As my eyes parsed the sentence, Neil sang the exact words. Very, very cool.

via Ben Poole

When I was a child, I can recall a time when people had responsibility for the safety of their children and their own personal conduct. Back in the late 60s and early 70s, my family took a lot of weekend skiing and hiking trips. On almost every trip my father kept a couple of beers in the car for the ride home. Even now, 40 years later, I can still see the beer can sitting on the dashboard, with my father smoking his pipe, as we ride down Rt. 16 through Pinkham Notch in New Hampshire. If this wasn't bad enough in a modern context, the entire time, because I'm the youngest, I'm stuffed in the back of the station wagon with no seat belt or safety restraint.

A parent doing something like that today would be in a lot of trouble. They would not be allowed to decide how to safely transport their family, they wouldn't be able to decide to have a beer while driving, even if their blood alcohol levels was well within the legal limit. I'm not arguing that the laws that have been passed are somehow wrong from the sense of being unreasonable, they certainly make some level of sense. But that said, some restriction of freedom of speech or privacy makes sense too, especially if we're measuring personal freedoms against public welfare. From my layman's point of view, it looks like we've got ourselves onto a very slippery slope.

Of course, it didn't take long for the nanny patrol to come down pretty hard on him for this. It seems people would rather he pretend he's not a partier. It's OK that he hurtles himself down mountain sides in reckless abandon, that's all fine and dandy, but admit to enjoying a deserved celebration and you're a horrible role model. Personally, I like someone who says what they mean and lives life on their own terms. In fact, I think that's a perfect role model.

On a related topic, have any of you living or working in Massachusetts noticed this odd numeric coincidence? Route 62 intersects both Rt. 495 and Rt. 3 at an exit numbered 26. What's the chances of that happening?

This post came about because I was reading Bob Congdon's post on the integration of SOA into the world of enterprise Java and the image of that bloated beast sprouting a new set of limbs came to mind. I might have lived with that metaphor in my head if I then hadn't then seen this poetic piece of technical writing that casts things in a different light. Its image of a giant turd really does seem to nail it beautifully.