Community developer blogs

Blog of Paul Ingles

Recent Posts

• Ruby Influenced C#

  Posted: 07 May 2008 at 21:07 by Paul

  Before joining my current project I spent about 4 months working with Ruby every day, the first time I’d done so for a few years. It was a glorious time: uncluttered syntax, closures, internal iterators, and with open classes, the ability to extend the ‘core’ at will.Today I’m working with C# and .N

• Prioritising Work

  Posted: 01 May 2008 at 20:37 by Paul

  I was involved in the inception work (and the resulting delivery) for a project late summer last year. We estimated the total work to be nearly 500 units- too much to complete in the time we had. So, working with the client we cut it down to a reasonable scope (this client rocked at that!) of around

• Poor Man's C# Singleton Checker

  Posted: 07 Apr 2008 at 20:05 by Paul

  Paul Hammant wrote a nice article about how to refactor the “nest-of-singletons design” towards using dependency injection using Google’s Guice IoC Container.Whilst waiting for one of my many builds to finish today, I figured I’d satisfy a curiosity - roughly how many single

• Declarative Programming with Ruby

  Posted: 11 Feb 2008 at 10:50 by Paul

  During the most recent ThoughtWorks away-day (a chance for the office to get together, catch-up, drink etc.), George and I presented on a number of Ruby and Rails lessons we learned from our (now previous) project. One of the most interesting sections (to us anyway) was on declarative programming, s

• Copying Classes

  Posted: 15 Nov 2007 at 20:02 by Paul

  From across the desk, George asks “can you copy classes in Ruby?”. We talk about it quickly and reason that since everything’s an Object (even classes), you probably can. Since the constant isn’t changed or duplicated (you’re essentially assigning a new one) then it oug

• Watch out for the Monkey Patch

  Posted: 08 Nov 2007 at 09:35 by Paul

  The project I’m currently working on uses both the Asset Packager and Distributed Assets to ensure we have only a few external assets, and that we can load assets across more than one host - all so that the pages for our site load nice and quick.Unfortunately, wiring in the Asset Packager plug

• Meta-programming with instance_exec

  Posted: 04 Nov 2007 at 11:57 by Paul

  Rails makes heavy use of a declarative style around it’s codebase- for example the has_one and belongs_to declarations inside ActiveRecord (amongst others). These are just class methods defined on modules, letting Rails wire up relationships, but they read like fully-fledged statements within

• DTrace in Leopard with Ruby probes

  Posted: 29 Oct 2007 at 21:20 by Paul

  I’d read a while back that Apple were going to include Sun’s DTrace tool in the now newly released Leopard - underpinning Instruments (formerly known as Xray).What I hadn’t noticed was that the build of Ruby 1.8.6 included in Leopard (patchlevel 36 with some extras) also includes R

• New Repository URL for Mephisto Flickr Plugin

  Posted: 02 Oct 2007 at 21:54 by Paul

  I’ve recently had a few people email me about problems with the Mephisto Flickr plugin I wrote, that Liquid (the templating engine used in Mephisto) had changed the interface for the initializer.I thought I’d fixed it a few times, and indeed I had. Just in the wrong repository! Sorry. I

• The Fantastically Honest RDoc

  Posted: 12 Sep 2007 at 20:59 by Paul

  Whilst working on a bit of code the other day we found this little nugget in the RDoc for Object#instance_variable_set:Sets the instance variable names by symbol to object, thereby frustrating the efforts of the class‘s author to attempt to provide proper encapsulation.Brilliant!

• Equality and the Domain

  Posted: 02 Oct 2006 at 23:58 by Paul

  My old team-mate George Malamadis published another brilliantly thought-provoking post the other day about testing for equality in Java and it’s impact on testing, and test code quality. I’ve often found myself thinking that the issue of equality has been misunderstood when overhearing p

• Washed out colour from RAW with Apple Aperture - Help!

  Posted: 14 Sep 2006 at 19:03 by Paul

  I’m back from holiday, having spent nearly a week in lovely Paris and am in the process of getting some shots up onto Flickr but am hitting a few problems. Chiefly, the colours in the exported JPEGs (from RAW) are appearing washed out when viewing in Camino, but not Safari. I spent a day or tw

• Another Day, Another Server

  Posted: 01 Sep 2006 at 17:15 by Paul

  Well I’m not so sure that Lighty, and FCGI running Rails and PHP isn’t such a great mix after all. After approximately a day all goes a little crazy and everything becomes largely unresponsive. So I’m taking drastic measures, and trying yet another web server. This time, I’m

• Sorting Related Articles by Relevance

  Posted: 29 Aug 2006 at 22:29 by Paul

  As alluded to in my last post, I’ve been looking at enhancing my Typo plugin by adding some kind of relevance to the results. Since I’m considering articles that share some tag to be considered related, I’m also going to consider articles that share more than one tag more relevant.

• Sorting Related Articles by Relevance

  Posted: 29 Aug 2006 at 22:29 by Paul

  As alluded to in my last post, I’ve been looking at enhancing my Typo plugin by adding some kind of relevance to the results. Since I’m considering articles that share some tag to be considered related, I’m also going to consider articles that share more than one tag more relevant.

• The Importance of Language

  Posted: 23 Aug 2006 at 20:01 by Paul

  Every now and then I get an urge to go back over some test code to figure out what I like and I don’t like, and try and find ways to make the tests more useful as a means of communication. I place a lot of importance, as a developer, on being able to think about writing code through tests - st

• The Importance of Language

  Posted: 23 Aug 2006 at 20:01 by Paul

  Every now and then I get an urge to go back over some test code to figure out what I like and I don’t like, and try and find ways to make the tests more useful as a means of communication. I place a lot of importance, as a developer, on being able to think about writing code through tests - st

• Stability Woes

  Posted: 22 Aug 2006 at 19:48 by Paul

  Apologies if you’ve been trying to access one of the posts here over the last few days and received any one of the various Internal Server Error, or Service Unavailable error messages. It seems that Lighty (mod_proxy - I also tried running the latest 1.5.x code from the Subversion trunk to use

• Stability Woes

  Posted: 22 Aug 2006 at 19:48 by Paul

  Apologies if you’ve been trying to access one of the posts here over the last few days and received any one of the various Internal Server Error, or Service Unavailable error messages. It seems that Lighty (mod_proxy - I also tried running the latest 1.5.x code from the Subversion trunk to use

• Related Articles Plugin for Typo

  Posted: 21 Aug 2006 at 14:08 by Paul

  I’m not so sure how relevant this post is now that Piers has started removing the component-ness of Typo’s sidebars (kudos for changing it all so quick). But, it was again an interesting exercise, and hopefully people will take something from it. Tonight I decided to follow on from my pr