JuliaKM.com

Upgrading to DISH HDTV last week quickly descended into a comedy of errors. Eric and I have had DISH since we moved to Durham three years ago. Over that time, I have had numerous discussion with the always-helpful DISH technical line explaining minor issues such as: the DVR erased its entire hard drive; the DVR could no longer fast forward; and the DVR spontaneously decided to start and stop recording.

Although these experience have been frustrating, I have always been impressed with the DISH technical service department's ability to quickly sent out replacement DISH receivers.

With graduation rapidly approaching, I thought it might be time to create my own site separate from my one at SILS. For the next couple of weeks I plan to play around with the format of the site. Let me know if you find any crazy design quirks.

I worked my way through Task E: Checkout in the Agile Development Book today. I find myself increasingly confused by what is going on behind the scenes as my depot project gets more complicated. So far, everything is still working, but I do not understand the logic behind all of the changes I am making to the application.

Since I got a Mac Mini over the holiday break, I decided that I might as well start over using the new computer to learn Ruby. Of course, this meant installing the Ruby development environment on a Mac after finally getting it to work on my PC.

In my third day of Ruby, I finally learned how to add CSS to documents. I continue to be amazed by just how darned easy Ruby is. My only problem came when trying to fill out the syntax for formatting numbers.

I finally realized that to change the format of numbers, the following works:
= number_to_currency(product.price, {:unit => "£", :separator => ","})

Ruby is amazing for handling databases. I couldn't believe how easy it was to create an admin interface for my test demo application. The only problem I ran into today was adding a column to the database. I couldn't get the database table to updated after adding a price column. I finally realized that it was my fault for not reading page 2 of the book more carefully. Since Agile Web Development is written for Rails 1.2, I needed to install the Rails framework snapshot for the time being.

I am starting to work my way through the new Agile Development book. My first problem seems to be that I get:
Application error (Rails)

I went through the A3 and A4 without many problems. My only early problem was that I was on a plane and couldn't download the css and images needed for Iteration A4. When it came time for Playtime, I got a little stuck on the second question, "Change the error message associated with one of your validations." I was trying to change the error messages for multiple fields with one :message. I finally figured out that I needed to define unique messages for each field like this.

Now I'm testing blogging from TextMate.

validates_uniqueness_of :title, :message => "must be unique"