Dr Nic

Dumping thoughts onto the InterTubes, aka blogging, is fun. And I’ve been doing it 1 year now.

Its also challenging.

Its like inviting people over for dinner - you have to clean up your house so they get a completely false impression of how you normally live your life.

Same with code - pasting it into blog articles or releasing projects makes you work harder to clean up code.

Same with the article - like rewriting paragraphs and sentences so they read better.

Why?

Remember the I Hired Jeff Clark site from a year ago?

I started this blog a year ago with the idea of it being an Online CV - I’d write clever things, people would comment, and employers would pick me instead of someone else.

Leaving Tele2

The whole time I’ve been overseas working for Tele2 - a Swedish telephone company, developing their billing systems. No Ruby code anywhere. Lots of perl, some Java, and lots of an internal proprietary language. It hurts to work on that environment.

And today is my last day, so now I can pursue Ruby/Rails with full-time reckless abandon.

Starting with Dr Nic Academy.

What’s left to blog about?

In the last 12 mths, I think I’ve covered a fair bit of (seemingly random) ground: composite keys, magic models, javascript, radrails fixups, newgem, and lately openid.

In the future, the following stuff intrigues me, and it’d be fun to explore:

1. Social OS - when I use flickr, I add contacts/friends/family and I add photos. When I visit your fancy new Web2.0 site, how can I import this profile information and automatically find all my friends or invite them to use your site? I envisage this built on OpenID, where every app is both an OpenID consumer (you login with OpenID) and possibly an OpenID provider (you can use your account page as a login to other apps).
2. Mongrel handlers - sexy integration of handlers into the Rails code base, so they are automatically picked up when the mongrel servers are started. I haven’t looked into this at all, so that sentence mightn’t make any sense.
3. Caching - nothing fancy, I just haven’t figured out how to use it yet. Anyone that used MyConfPlan during RailsConf might have guessed this.
4. Javascript widget generator - generators get me from “idea” to “ooh that’s pretty” much faster, and avoid the “oh I can’t be bothered setting up the code base” step. I want to write a bunch of widgets for the RoR Oceania blog, to pull data from the RoR Oceania facebook API, so hopefully I can extract some base code into a generator.

As always, I’m completely happy for someone else to tackle these things first. So get cracking

[1] The XML for this Maani graph is mashed from the raw feedburner API via this Ruby CGI script. If you want to use it, you need to turn on the Feedburner API first, and change the start date within the code (currently set to 1/8/2006)

That is, the data goes from feedburner XML to maani XML.

Does anyone know to whom I address and send this letter?

Dear Gmail,

Thank you for Gmail. I love it and would hug it if it were a teddy bear and no one was looking.

Recently, some Asian-origin spammers have included me in their lists. A while back, it was some Russian spammers, or thereabouts.

If the contents of my emails don’t fit into the basic English ASCII set of characters, plus some of those European characters with the cute accents on the tops, then the email probably isn’t one I can read, thus spam or not, I’m just not that interested.

I doubt I’m alone in my mono-linguistic capabilities either.

Either help me filter out foreign language spam, or let me translate it and then with confidence I can say “No I don’t want a chinese nor russian penis enlarger, but thanks for asking”.

Yours sincerely,
Dr Nic