Contemplating the brave new present
Posted in Coding on Mar 19th, 2008
While writing a proof-of-concept Ruby on Rails application (Ruby 1.8.6, Rails 2.0.2) I was stumped by an intermittent problem where long-lived processes would fail with the error message:
<ArgumentError: A copy of TransactionController has been removed from the module tree but is still active!>
Admittedly, I do some potentially dodgy things in this application. I initiate [...]
Posted in Tips on Mar 13th, 2008
Gmail has a nasty bug (or quirk) that I have only just discovered. It explains why I sometimes have trouble searching for specific emails in my archive. To use Gmail effectively you will need to know about this bug, and how to avoid it.
Background
In Gmail, messages are automatically grouped together into a conversation based on [...]
Posted in Other on Mar 5th, 2008
In my time at University I was fortunate enough to be able to study Philosophy. And I mean properly study it; I finished a major, completed and enjoyed an honours year, and considered doing a PhD. Ultimately I decided against a career in academia (or whatever it is one does with a philosophy doctorate) and [...]
Posted in AWS on Mar 4th, 2008
Here is a video interview with Jeff Barr from Amazon.com talking about the AWS infrastructure services – Amazon’s Challenge to Business: Turn Off Your Datacenter. The video gives an introduction to the services, followed by some in-depth technical discussion.
If you are new to the Amazon Web Services, this is a great starting-point.