Music

The Dresden Dolls

1. The Dresden Dolls - The Dresden Dolls
2. With Teeth - Nine Inch Nails
3. Extraordinary Machine - Fiona Apple
4. You Are Free - Cat Power
5. Rosenrot - Rammstein

To think that I saw 3 of the artists in the above list in 2005. Two of them twice. Yes indeedy 2005 was the year of the gig… or at least the bands that I wanted to see who happened to be touring these isles. After years and years of not seeing anyone, musical groups that is, I finally wrenched my bony white arse off my sofa and went out to concerts again. Previously the last concert that I attended was Faith No More at the Manchester Apollo on, I think, the second leg of The Real Thing tour many many years ago. There I was again in 2005 bouncing up and down like a lunatic and singing my little heart out.

Books

The Zen of CSS Design

1. The Zen of CSS Design - Dave Shea & Molly E. Holzschlag
2. Unless I’m Very Much Mistaken - Murray Walker
3. Designing With Web Standards - Jeffrey Zeldman
4. Love All The People - Letters, Lyrics, Routines - Bill Hicks
5. Eric Meyer on CSS - Eric Meyer

A year of enjoying more technical books then anything else. In my distant youth I used to only read Stephen King and James Herbert. I found it quite depressing that I had read only about 18, or so, books over the year, with at least another 10 still on the shelves, with the earliest book, purchased in August 2003, still unread. That is part of the trouble, I love buying books, and for the most part I like reading them, but I just can’t read them quick enough for my liking.

DVDs

Have I Got News
For You

1. Have I Got News For You
2. Dave Gorman’s Googlewhack Adventure
3. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
4. Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter And Spring
5. Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story

This section obviously doesn’t cover movies of 2005 as I had only seen Batman Begins at the cinema. It covers the DVDs that I’ve rented and enjoyed over the year. Not a good year for films as there just didn’t seem to be any films that I’ve enjoyed watching as much as Mulholland Drive or Memento. Now there were two films that I immediately liked and just didn’t want to end.

Rich Hall

Sods law quite clearly states that if you have to be somewhere at a certain time the road sign that will direct you to your destination will have a mini-bus passing in front of it obscuring your field of vision.

I was only at The Lowry at the beginning of the year to see Henry Rollins so I thought that I knew how to get there… I didn’t. I think I need one of those satellite navigation systems bolted to the dashboard of my car, which would no doubt double my cars value in the process. Or I could have just checked a map beforehand. I managed to get into the car park, park the car and dash towards the exit. Remembering the trouble we had at the Trafford Centre I looked back over my shoulder to check the name of the parking zone. Luckily I was still half an hour early.

David O’Doherty was the warm up act. The Guardian apparently described him as “also on the bill”. Yes that is the David O’Doherty, the owner of http://www.davidodoherty.com/ not to be confused with any other David O’Doherty’s who also have web-sites. He was quite funny (I’ll let him use that quote for free on any advertising media). The only joke that I remember him telling is :- Q: Who are the nicest people in the hospital? A: The ultra-sound people. That and the fact that he managed to wrench a myriad of orchestral sounds from his Casio keyboard makes me think that he’ll make it big in Dublin someday.

I’d seen Rich Hall on Have I Got News For You and also on QI and enjoyed his appearances so much that I bought, and read, his book Things Snowball. I honestly didn’t know that he did stand-up comedy until I found the tour dates and booked a ticket for tonight’s show. His delivery is just pure southern USA. Growly-voiced, laconic, non-smiling with the odd industrial strength expletive thrown in for good measure. He comes from the state of Montana (population 9) and so is in a perfect position to make mock of his countries president. I, for one, didn’t know that it only costs each American about 83 cents to keep George Bush in the Whitehouse every year. He also made fun of jolly old England :- our £512 space program, the fact that we’re optimists driving cars that have sun visors and that the Royal Mail is now in profit thanks to people selling each other their junk on eBay. I think that he was just a little bitter that he was only in the Quays theatre and not in the, more prestigious, Lyric theatre next door. That, and the fact that, he had to share his dressing room with 4 shetland ponies, possibly didn’t help his mood. Rich did improvise a few songs based on the people in the front row. Lesley and Noel had one song dedicated to them, but the fact that Noel worked in IT support and that Lesley couldn’t remember how they met didn’t really get the creative juices flowing.

Rich finished the show by singing a heart-warming little song about one time boxer and full time grill maker George Foreman. The last stand-up piece was totally spontaneous and completely un-prompted.

Tom Cruise plays a cocktail maker… a pretty good cocktail maker too, until he has a crisis of confidence and can’t make cocktails anymore. Then he finds a good woman who restores his faith in cocktail making. Tom Cruise plays a race-car driver…

This describes the 4′ 8″ scientology dwarf’s entire movie career to a tee.

After the show I made my way back to the car park and managed to find my car. On a concrete post there was a sign with a black pedestrian silhouette on it with the words “Beware of Moving Vehicles” underneath. Isn’t that a little obvious in a car park? I ended up having to go back to the entrance where the only pay machine resides. £4 for an evenings parking seemed quite reasonable… until, on the way out, I noticed that all the barriers were up.

Ruby on Rails

I’ve been busy learning, or at least trying to learn, Ruby on Rails. For people who don’t know this is a new programming language/application which allows programmers, like myself, to create web applications really fast.

At work we have one of our applications written in ASP.NET and since the beginning of last year I have been the unfortunate soul who has to debug and maintain this piece of software. At first I did think that it was pretty good. Towards the end of last year I had an idea to write some web pages linking to a database so that we could store client information, contacts, which clients have what software, what platform they are using etc. Just, more or less, everything that we need to know, all in one place. I felt that this was a good idea so I started writing it. I set-up the database and the tables in SQL Server and started to code the pages having copied chunks of code from our web application. Of course it has never been finished.

Let me warn you that if you work for a software company and one of the managers, who we’ll call Scouse Boy No. 1, buys a Rolodex to store contact information then leave immediately. Just run as far and as fast as you can and don’t look back.

This year I’ve had to convert our ASP.NET application so that it works with the new version of our main software. Even after having ASP training last year it was a slow and tortuous task. The fact that one of the pages doesn’t render correctly in Firefox, that it’s all tied into Microshites® web server and probably doesn’t validate to any W3 standard makes me think that it’s not going to be a possible career path. Maybe if we had spent £500 on Visual Studio things may have been less painful.

So, Ruby on Rails, is just the kind of thing that I’ve been looking for. A development environment written by programmers to make life easier so that more time can be spent writing clean, well structured, code. I ordered the Agile Web Development with Rails book, downloaded the necessary software for Tiger and started to work through a great little Ruby tutorial by Chris Pine. When that was done I started on the book proper, reading through the first section before promptly coming to a grinding halt on page 57. This is when I had a MySQL database and tables created and was about to see the power of Rails for the first time. I must have spent at least 2 days, on and off, trying to figure out why the views of the table weren’t being created. I even un-installed the latest version of Xcode and and re-installed the old version from the Tiger DVD, all to no avail. It just wasn’t seeing the database for some reason. Last Saturday afternoon I found the solution. In the config/database.yml file specify the username, in the book ‘dave’, that you granted database access for. Then re-run the ruby script/generate scaffold Product admin and you should see app/views/admin pages being created. Since then I’ve been working through the Book Store application. Everything is so easy, well not exactly easy, but just a joy to use. The scaffold that is generated by Rails knows what the database table looks like so you don’t have to key in lines of HTML with the different types of input code embedded in it. You don’t have to give each field a name, as this is already done for you from the field names. Links for edit/list/show/delete are already created and all the pages behind them. With one Rails command I generated a set of table maintenance pages. This is something that would have taken me at least a few hours using ASP.NET. And all without writing SQL statements.

I think to get the most out of the book you do need to have your own application to work on yourself. It would be really easy to just blindly get the demonstration application working without understanding how the principles can be put into practice. It hasn’t all been plain sailing. Just last night none of the controllers for my application would display in Safari. I found that emptying the cache and deleting any localhost cookies did the trick.