FatGeekUK

Bruce Perens released an addon for Ruby on Rails.

This addressed the requirement of limiting access to columns of the database depending on the specified user.

Now, there was lots of interest, but when you actually dug into the code it was not (at the time I looked at it) of an acceptable robustness. More an experiment of proof of concept than something to lean on with any confidence.

From my point of view, it also answered the wrong question, scratched an itch I just didn’t have.

I needed ROW security not column.

I needed to say….
‘This user can’t see records entered by users outside his organisation’

Not, ‘This class of user can’t see the balance recorded against all transactions’

Here is a link to an interesting article ragarding the current interest in Agile ‘methods’

As it says, there ain’t no magic bullet.

Good Agile, Bad Agile

I sat in Cathay Pacific ( a chinese restaurant in the Trafford Centre ).

In agony…

I sat in Cathay Pacific ( a chinese restaurant in the Trafford Centre ).

In agony…

We are definitely living in interesting times.

As a coder I have lived through several eras.

Text based applications – I coded in a mixture of 8088 assember, Basic (Compiled) and some “4GLs” like Sculptor and dBase

Text and Graphic Applications
Again Basic, with (if you can believe this) Graphics by ANSI strings. Writing ANSI code strings to terminals to control graphic overlay. I kid you not!

WIMP applications
For me this meant visual basic, and then more recently VBA (in excel, word, access etc) (I know, pity me!)

In between I have spent time on any number of assembler based projects for realtime stuff, but that does not count.

Web Apps. It used to be that web apps meant PERL, then it meant Java or PHP or Python/Zope…

Now, everything is changing again. The web is re-inventing itself as Web2.0! Ooohhh…

Ajax is the thing, but its too complex to use at the basic level. So there are several libraries of code that sit on top of the basic XMLHTTPrequest. My favourite is Script.aculo.us.

As the song says “Things, they are a changin!” Adapt or get out of the way!

Hop on over to http://script.aculo.us or download the video from the fluxium project.

Well, I have finished the coding for the radio capture system.

I can now click on a radio .RAM link of the BBC website, and a request will be queued for download. A cron job will pick up the request and download the raw radio as a WAV. Another cron will take this wav, and encode it as an MP3 with the appropriate ID3 tags. Finally, another task will pick up the MP3, and use the tags to move it over to my MP3 archive directory and insert records into the MusicBox database so that it can be picked up by the Shoutcast server.

The only bit left is to increase the power of the requester script to allow scheduling of periodic tasks so that I will never miss an episode of “The Archers” again!

Well,

When I started working with Ajax, I felt that it was a major problem that you could only update a single entity on your HTML page with an AJAX call.

Problem solved.

RJS Templates.

You gotta love it. :-)

I love BBC radio.

Especially Radio4.

I HATE real-audio.

I REALLY hate streaming.

So, I sat down last night and coded up something.

A small script associated with the *.ram mime type. This records the rtsp stream info into a file in a queue directory.

A cron job to periodically scan this directory and download to raw PCM the stream.

Another cron job to periodically check for the PCM files and re-encode as MP3 including asserting id3tags against the file reflecting the information of the program.

The next steps are :-

• Copy the resultant mp3 into the directory structure used by my shoutcast server
• Write a script to index the new MP3 files into my homegrown rails based “music box” software
• Add an RSS feed of incoming content to the “music box” site.
• Work out some form of scheduling support so that I can record the Archers omnibus every week without intervention.

Oh, dear, did I just admit to listening to “The Archers”!?

At the risk of getting myself branded even more of a geek, cheers Craig.

Heres a link to a nice little dictionary of Algorithms and Hieruistics

Only for the geeky among us. :-)

I have been informed by my current client that the project I have been working on has been shelved indefinitely.

Scrapped.

This is the first time in my career in IT that a project I have worked on has not succeeded in its objectives.

Previously I have always taken pride in the fact that when I finish on a project, my product as part of that project will continue (probably) long after I have left.

To not have that feeling, to have the exact opposite.

To know that all the creative work put in, was deemed to not be satisfactory for purpose. To know that as I leave the project, nothing of my effort will go forward.

Its a profoundly depressing experience.