Noel Rappin Writes Here

Battlestar Galactica 403 (or 405) “Ties that Bind” That was dark even by the really, really high standards this show has set for being dark and unsettling. It was an unrelenting parade of deeply screwed up people in torment, and the relationships that torment them. Naturally, I loved it, but if it wasn’t so well written and acted, it’d be insufferably gloomy. Bullet points – if you haven’t seen it, and plan to, look away.

A couple of updates on book and article news… It looks like the screencast/video thing is going to happen, thanks to Jim Minatel. The main constraint is that they’d like the videos to be about five minutes long. I think the first one will be setting up a Rails project in Subversion (chapter 2 of the book, essentially), and I’d do a remix of that chapter using Git if there’s interest.

Two articles on the Pathfinder blog on adding show and hide toggles to a Rails application: http://blogs.pathf.com/agileajax/2008/04/hide-and-go-see.html http://blogs.pathf.com/agileajax/2008/04/hide-seek-and-s.html

In the last week, I’ve had two separate editors at two separate companies make a bulk change in something I was working on. Specifically, they changed “plugin” to “plug-in”. This is driving me a little bit crazy. Which is right? Should I care? Quick research, designed to shore up my point of view… Wikipdia has it as “plugin”, with “plug-in” as an alternate. Dictionary.com has it as “plug-in”, although that’s clearly an antiquated reference based on the definition (“capable of or designed for being connected to an electrical power source by plugging in or inserting”).

Battlestar Galactica 402ish “Six of One” Some quick bullet points before the next one comes down the pike. Very pleased with the first two episodes of the season – I think it’s encouraging that this episode, credited to a writer whose last couple were not that strong, was arguably better than the first. Katee Sackhoff had an amazing week – Starbuck was all over the place, on the very edge of hysteria of not past it, a lot of great scenes.

When you have a blog with as few comments as this one, you can give every comment the kind of personal attention it deserves. This one came through from an anonymous commenter: Noel, have you considred making a DVD video tutorial of your book? This will really help those who learn by watching videos. So what do you say? The short answer is not as any kind of official adjunct to the book.

Annnddd… This, of course, is what I get for posting anything about Wiley late at night without checking. Jim Minatel from Wiley added the following comment: Noel: I’m interested in getting Wrox authors to to videos related to their books…. I can tell you what’s involved and see what we can do. So, contacting in progress. Further bulletins as events warrant. Or as events don’t warrant, I think further bulletins are inevitable.

5 Things About: Doogie Howser, M.D. Why Doogie? Because the parody at the end of How I Met Your Mother a while back, plus a desire to wander through hulu.com. So I watched the Doogie pilot from 1989. And now I’m writing about it. I was really not expecting the show to hold up at all. It’s actually a pretty solid piece of late 80’s TV, despite the cheesy theme music and classic 80’s opening sequence.

Battlestar Galactica 4-1 “He That Believeth In Me” I’m relieved, frankly. Not surprised, exactly. I liked Season 3 more than a lot of people seemed to, and I’m optimistic that Ron Moore and his crew understand what the problems were and how to avoid them. Still, it’s good to see the show starting out it’s final season with a strong episode. This was basically the episode I was hoping for, with two extra plusses, and one kind-of minus.

(This one is also on the Pathfinder blog, but since it fits in here, I wanted the full text here…) Jay Fields, who has been posting a very nice sequence of nuts-and-bolts Ruby and Rails guidelines, pauses to talk about creating examples. It’s a topic I’ve wanted to write about here for a while, and this is as good a lead-in as any. Plus, I’m generally interested in how principles of software development apply or don’t apply in odd cases, and software being developed specifically for example purposes certainly qualifies as an odd case.

I’ve been meaning to do this sooner, but, wow time flies… Here are some brief comments about books I’ve read so far this year and would recommend. I think I’ll pass on doing negative reviews here at the moment, unless I can make a larger point somehow. Captain’s Fury, by Jim Butcher Book four in the Codex Alera series continues pretty much everything that’s enjoyable about the series. I particularly like the way Butcher continues to move the story along, as well as how he’s resisted the easy way to manage the hero and his lack of fury powers.