I had sug­gested that my com­pany use Google Cal­en­dar to pub­lish events. It’s easy, it can be made pub­lic and share­able, and it beats fig­ur­ing out how to pub­lish an Outlook/Exchange cal­en­dar on the web. (From what I’ve read about Google Cal­en­dar, you can pub­lish mul­ti­ple cal­en­dars indi­vid­u­ally con­trol­ling the level of pri­vacy and publicity—ooo, maybe we can migrate away from Exchange…) Yet, the coolest part about Google Cal­en­dar is that you can embed it in your web page using an iframe which Google pro­vides a handy-dandy con­fig­u­ra­tor to gen­er­ate the HTML. The worst part about Google Cal­en­dar is that you embed it in your web page using an iframe.

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Ruby’s beauty is often attrib­uted to its terse­ness. How­ever, there are times when you need to be really explicit in order to coax it to do your bid­ding. For exam­ple, a Rails form helper needs a bunch of paran­the­ses and curly braces in order to be a named ele­ment. Which makes sense, as :id can rep­re­sent a Rails (ActiveRe­cord) object ID or a DOM ele­ment ID. The Ruby punc­tu­a­tion removes such ambiguity.

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For the past year or so, I’ve been look­ing at finally get­ting an LCD mon­i­tor. 16ms response times or bet­ter with 16.7 mil­lion col­ors are becom­ing very com­mon. I’ve had the plea­sure of using a Dell Ultra­sharp and would not be unhappy with that acqui­si­tion. Unfor­tu­nately buy­ing a house on my income, though a worth­while invest­ment, has cer­tainly cut into my recre­ational funds. Yet there’s always a gap between what tech­nol­ogy I can afford ver­sus what tech­nol­ogy I would love to own.

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A typ­i­cal rails design pat­tern is to store object ids in ses­sion vari­ables rather than the objects them­selves. Objects can be unwieldy depend­ing on size, com­plex­ity, and asso­ci­a­tions. Ids on the the other hand are small, sleek, and more agile.

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