Uploading audio file and playing it on a web page using attachment_fu Ruby on Rails plugin

Basically used the information from "File Upload Fu" and "Demonstration of Different Ways to Play a Sound from a Web Page".

Uploaded audio file and stored it in file system just like image file using attachment_fu. Then in show.rhtml,
instead of:

<b>Audio:</b>
<%= link_to @vocabulary.public_filename %>

used:

<b>Audio:</b>
<embed src="<%=@vocabulary.public_filename %>" autostart="false" loop="false" height="20" width="200"></embed>

Of course, if there is a better way, I would like to know.

Ordering a service through a customer support by phone

I ordered satellite TV service by calling customer support by phone because I didn't have Internet access temporarily.
To make the story short, after all the communications, they put a wrong service and now I have to pay for the extra service I never requested for the next 30 days.

I am even more convinced that it's a better approach for a customer to order and select what he/she wants through web site.

Also I am even more a proponent of easy subscribe-unsubscribe model without long-term contract. There shouldn't be any 1-year contract or 2-year contract. The customer should be able to sign up anytime and cancel anytime without any penalty.

It is very unfair that the majority of my money has been lost throughout my life because I was charged for what I didn't ask for and what I was not supposed to be charged for.

I have lived both in a country with excellent customer support services and in countries/regions with customer support personnels doing whatever they feel like based on their emotion. I hope that the more web based approach would make this cultural difference irrelevant.

OOPSLA 2007 - Thursday

The keynote speech was very good.

In the speech, there was a comment by John Vlissides saying that Patterns were used unexpected way. At that moment, I thought that maybe the reason why he had said to me at one OOPSLA that learning Refactoring to Patterns was better than learning Patterns straight.

One attendee said that "A developer" wanted to work with "A developer" or even a better developer so that he/she could learn from him/her. But "B developer" wanted to hire "C developer" because he/she wanted to work with a developer who was worse than him/her. A, B, C, and D means that A is the best and D is the worst. I agree with him.
And I want to work with a developer better than me and I love to develop a quality software, which means I have to improve my skills even more so that I can have a chance to work with "A developer".

OOPSLA 2007 - Tuesday - 2

50-50 was hilarious. Even just attending this session only would make me feel that it was worth attending this year's OOPSLA.

OOPSLA 2007 - Wednesday

Many big names from the past made keynote speeches. It was amazing.

Domain Driven Design Movie BOF (Birds of a Feather) was good. It was very clear about how Domain Driven Desisn progresses with developer-customer interaction. I wish they post the movie online.

OOPSLA 2007 - Tuesday

The opening Keynote Speech by Peter Turchi was very good. "Get lost" - and experience what you have never experienced before. I agree that's the key of OOPSLA. That's why I come to OOPSLA. And I have lived almost entire life with this joy of getting lost (encountering an unfamiliar thing).

The panel of "Celebrating 40 Years of Language Evolution: Simula 67 to the Present and Beyond" was educational to me. The languages are increasingly getting functional. And multiprocessor hardware is making concurrency the main issue of the coming future.

OOPSLA 2007 - Dynamic Languages Symposium

Quickly, just my impression.

Last year, I got an impression that Dynamic Language camp and Static Language camp would never get along with each other. This year, found that there are some activities to take advantage of the good from both.

As usual, it's good to know and hear about something I have never known before. After all, that's why I come to OOPSLA.

I saw the actual OLPC XO during Dynamic Languages Symposium and Squeak Birds of Feathers session. Also link - XO Giving. It's exciting. I felt like getting one of those and play around with Squeak development environment in Etoy.

There is a Squeak book to download, announced at Squeak Birds of Feathers session.

OOPSLA 2007 remaining Podcasts

I have finished listening to the remaining OOPSLA 2007 Podcasts.

Unexpectedly, the Podcasts I wasn't expecting to learn from much for my purpose were very educational for me. "FindBugs" was interesting and I agree that it should be a part of continuous checking in - whenever a developer checks the code into the source control system, he/she runs FindBugs.

There seem to be lots to learn from ooPSLA this year.

I hope that it would be like what Linda Rising said in her Podcast about MiniPLoP - Don't criticize the author of the pattern by using the words such as "Your work is bad," instead, suggest what can be improved.
And I certainly don't expect a person in an important position to make a claim that some attendee is an idiot without even knowing the person or even talking to him/her even once. The comment should be scientific - based on the fact and evidence, not on personal emotion or cultural bias.
ooPSLA is a conference that we can demand such an integrity as a common sense.

OOPSLA 2007 Podcast

I have listened to some of OOPSLA 2007 Podcasts.
I enjoyed them very much.

Particularly, I enjoyed, "The Scala Experience", "Ruby", and "Unit Testing Patterns". I wish I would have a time to listen to "Domain-Specific Modeling" and "Aggressive Learning", too, which sound interesting.

Green Recruiting

Many people seem to want to work for a company that is environmentally responsible. I'm glad to know that.
"What’s Your Green Recruiting Strategy?"
"Green is the Color of Successful Recruiting"

In the past, I was discriminated because I was trying to recycle materials. I hope that it will become a thing of the past.

By the way, sometimes in the past, I was socially discriminated by religious workers, even though it is a basic human rights violation. But they don't care or maybe they don't understand the concept of human rights. I hope the society becomes the one where nobody is discriminated when he/she acts based on the fact.

Improved Ruby Gems

Ruby Gems: new release and plans for inclusion in Ruby 1.9

RubyGems Beta 0.9.4.5

I have update to Ruby Gems 0.9.4.5 right after I've read the InfoQ article above.
$ sudo gem update --system --source http://segment7.net/
(sudo is for Mac OS X)

I'm getting back the mode to live on the Edge as I used to with Eclipse. I used to download every milestone as soon as it was released - this was influenced by my former colleague.

Seats in buses and trains in South America are more comfortable

Seats in buses in South America are very comfortable. Especially, "Cama". Even "Semi-cama", which is not as good as "Cama", is very comfortable. Even the buses in less developed countries like Peru have comfortable seats. And the seat in a train in Chile was comfortable as well.

After I came back to North America, I found that the seats in buses and trains were very poor and uncomfortable. I can't believe that I had thought that they were comfortable before going to South America.

By the way, unrelated but I saw people making a call from cell phone in a running subway in Chile and I think Argentina, too. But in North America, there is no signal in subway.

Ruby on Rails - ActiveScaffold

It's good to generate repeatedly used codes.

But ActiveScaffold is using configuration to set particular parameters or conditions. That reminded me of Java + XML, where XML configures the auto generated Java code. It seems to be "configuration over convention" instead of "convention over configuration". Going back to the bad approach. Only the good thing about ActiveScaffold's way is that it's done in Ruby language itself not external stuff like XML.

Isn't there a way to generate codes for controller and views in "Convention over Configuration"? I wonder.

--------------------

P.S.
I have wanted to mention this. So decided to add now.
ActiveScaffold is tying View and Controller together by generating them dynamically. Then, what's the point of Model-View-Controller separating View and Controller? The purpose of Model-View-Controller separating View from Controller is that View can be created/changed independently from Controller.

Rails: How to test

I came across Jay Fields' blog entry, "Rails: How we test".

I'm glad that I happened to find this article because it contains the ways to use mock object and to make rails unit test not to access database. I like the way of writing unit tests without accessing database by mocking database access. But I didn't know how to do that with Rails. And I wanted to follow the Rails convention because that's one of the strength of Rails. But now I can do whole a lot of better way of writing tests.

AgileEvents Calendar

InfoQ article listed AgileEvents.

Also InfoQ Agile homepage lists them.

Buy a Laptop for a Child, Get Another Laptop Free

Through ACM TechNews, I found this article. The full story is here.
And the name of the project is "One Laptop Per Child".

I wonder if Millennium Village project the non profit project I was contributing to is for will be utilizing this. If not, they may be able to get one to access the web site.

Language-oriented programming

Interesting article.

Walk the walk - it's different

Deborah Hartmann is using Ron Jeffries' quote at the foot of her e-mail.

"My advice is to do it by the book,
get good at the practices,
then do as you will.
Many people want to skip to step three.
How do they know? " -- Ron Jeffries

I like it.
I don't like people who make a judgment of something they never practiced only by reading about it or even just by hearing about it. For example, I don't like people who criticize Agile software development practices simply because those practices sound unfamiliar to them.

Back from South America

I've just posted a new blog.
It's good to have Internet access at hand with wide-range wifi, etc. That's a good thing about being back in North America.

South America was good.
I may write a summary of what was good there later on.
But I just write a few of them.

People in South America were very nice while some of the English speaking people from other parts of the world are just so full of themselves.

I found that people in Brazil, especially around Sao Paulo, were more open to different kind of people. - Before the trip, I thought that North America was the most diversified place in the world (in fact, that's why I decided to live in Canada). But it was not true. It was good to know that. Especially, religious people in English speaking countries are very closed minded to different kind of people.

Homer's Odyssey as an Agile Consultant

I've just watched the video of Jean Tabaka's presentation at Agile 2006 ("Homer's Odyssey or My Life as an Agile Consultant").

In one of the companies I worked for, I encountered many of the monsters she described. For example, Laestrygonian (Technical Lead Saboteur), The Siren (person who tells what Agile is and teaches wrong practices), and the control guy who says that it's not Agile unless everybody follows what he says.

My emotional feeling was that I felt relieved that somebody identified those problems. What this presentation means to me in practice is that I learned what to watch out and how to deal with them.