Noel Rappin Writes Here

It seems like I’m forever mentioning that I’m not posting here as much as I’d like. I said a while back that between here and the Pathfinder blog I’d be posting two to three times a week. Turns out that’s actually been more or less true, just that all of it has been on the Pathfinder side. I do miss it here, and there are a few big genre/geek things in the last couple weeks that I really wanted to write about here, where nobody can interrupt me.

If you see RiffTrax at a party, say “Hi” from us. That’s what Joel Hodgson said about the relationship between the two different groups of Mystery Science Theater 3000 alumni roving around the country skewering bad and pretentious movies. Hodgson’s group, is Cinematic Titanic, while Mike Nelson’s group is called RiffTrax. The two groups have a different approach to making fun of movies, although the personnel differences seem to be more a matter of geography then any long-simmering feud.

Just a quick mention that part 1 of my article series on using Rails to write iPhone apps is online at IBM Developerworks. Parts 2 and 3 will be published sometime in the rather near future. In other notes, Pathfinder has updated the company blog URL to http://www.pathf.com/blogs. Individual authors now have unique pages, I’m http://www.pathf.com/blogs/noel rappin. Recent pieces there include a quick welcome to RailsConf, and a two-part article on HTML and code markup in Rails, available here and here.

A couple of recent life, the universe, and everything notes: I realize I’ve been away from here for most of the last couple of weeks – a side project has been eating up a lot of time. I should be done with in next week, and back to posting here more regularly. I know, I always say that. I’ll be at RailsConf 08 later this month, and I’ll probably have some number of copies of Professional Ruby on Rails to do something promotional with, but I haven’t exactly decided what.

I’ve been doing some web development for iPhone and Mobile Safari lately, not least because of a series of articles that will be showing up in IBM DeveloperWorks soon. I was using the iUI toolkit, which contains a number of CSS styles and JavaScript event handlers to make iPhone Web apps look and feel somewhat like native iPhone applications. As I was working with iUI, I realized I was building up a library, so I converted everything to a Rails plugin: rails_iui.

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.