Crimusic Portal Birthdays

4 April 2008 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ music

Crimusic

Today is a BIG DAY for the crimusic.info — our local Crimean Modern Music Portal. That would be two Birthday celebrations:

4 years of the portal itself
1 year of the Aestetics (”Estetika”) radio program

It’s pointless to mention that the show is going to be spectacular. Crowds of clubbers, creative folks and fellow composers — everyone is going to be there. Amazing! I’m in anticipation of long talks on hardware, MIDI, 8-bit madness and recent electronic world music trends. Hey, it’s going to be magical.

The place is almost 100 kms away from where we live, but nevertheless we are going to join our friends on the long 2-hour drive and have a great night.

Hope to see you all there!

DHTML Calendar and the has_finder Plug-in

4 April 2008 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ personal

This week I stumbled across many interesting things, but here are the two most valuable for your Friday enjoyment.

Pretty and functional DHTML calendar for web applications. This one is the best I’ve seen so far. It’s used in some of my favorite web apps and I’m using it in my own projects. Easy styling, nice integration, ability to show date / time in one field and store the computer-digestible version in another, very quick start through lots of examples, PDF documentation.

And now the amazing has_finder Rails plug-in to convert many standard single-line finder methods into a nice declarative beauty. I’m just beginning to use it, and the Rails edge has already adopted it. Kosher, with no side-effects.

I’m thinking of making this kind of posts more frequent. It’s a nice reminder to me and a great source to those who value my advice.

Upgraded to WP 2.5

2 April 2008 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ wordpress

Finally upgraded my blog to WP 2.5 today. Looks so sweet that I can’t help sharing it with you.

Rails: When an Uninitialized Constant Hits the Vent

29 January 2008 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ technology ruby

Last two weeks I was seeing the production server of one of my clients hit the same error over and over with no visible pattern. This second it works, the next it fails and leaves the Mongrel cluster in an undefined state somewhere between this world and hell.

The error I’m referring to is:

NameError (uninitialized constant MyModule::Utils::NetSession)
... backtrace follows ...

I need to repeat that it comes and goes under some non-obvious circumstances, and is hard to recreate. Fortunately, I found the solution and here’s what it was.

RSpec: Hierarchical Specifications

1 January 2008 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ technology rspec ruby

RSpec is full of great features, but some of them either not very well documented or hidden to a naked eye. No wonder if you never discovered hierarchical specifications.

Get a Life, be Free!

31 December 2007 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ personal

We all make new year resolutions, and what’s tricky about it is that adding an item to the list often means becoming unhappier. How is that?

Well, the moment you start building the list you start hand-cuffing yourself. Every moment later you will be checking with your list to see if whatever you do at this very moment helps your goals or is it an awful “waste of time”. Even if it is a better thing to do, you will be sorry as it doesn’t help your own plans. Sticking to the plan is good, being flexible is better.

Enjoy the moment, be yourself!

Here’s some great inspirational read for you, entering this new 2008 year — 12 Ways to be More Free in 2007 by Pamela Slim. Yes, it’s a guide for the leaving year, but I reviewed it just now and can feel how right she is.

So enjoy your read, make the coming year better, and make it suite you best!

RSpec: Three Things You May Not Know

31 December 2007 ⋅ 3 min read ⋅ ruby

RSpec is fantastic. It’s so phenomenal that I can’t imagine my development without it anymore. It’s extremely easy to use, fun to write specifications and see how they turn green as you progress. But… at some point, when you have several hundreds of specs, using almost all documented features and excited to max, you may start facing serious problems. They aren’t easy to debug and may lead to a disappointment, unless you are prepared and armed with knowledge.

BlogBridge: The Best Version We Ever Had...

24 December 2007 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ blogbridge

And now, fans, put your hands together! Louder! Louder! I can’t hear you! Last Friday we released the best version of BlogBridge we ever had – BlogBridge 6.0.2. No more no less. It’s the consequential result of polishing, testing, stressing and doing other awful things you don’t want to know.

If you are using a standalone version, odds are you already was invited to upgrade. If it’s a weekly version, it must have upgraded itself automatically. If you never used BlogBridge, well… you are losing your time.

Ruby / Rails: Zen Testing With Autotest and XOSD

29 November 2007 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ technology rails

Lately I watched the Rest series of excellent Peepcode screencasts and fell in love with that nice marriage of Autotest and Growl they have on Mac.

If you don’t know what Autotest is, imagine the RSpec tester spinning in the background and watching the files you change. Once it sees something new, it runs corresponding specs and displays all usual “X examples, Y failures, Z pending” in its output. Then it looks for more changes and makes another specs run. Pretty useful.

Consulting and Programing Services

18 November 2007 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ personal

Currently I’m in the receiving mode and looking for projects to apply my skills and knowledge. If you have a project for or need any consulting / programing services from an open-minded and communicative guy with more than 10 years of programing and software design experience, please contact me via e-mail or IM, and we’ll see if we could work out a mutually beneficial agreement.