Yet, some parts of our country appear to lag behind.  The New York Times ran an excellent article today, titled “For South, a Waning Hold on National Politics” and written by Adam Nossiter.  The article points out that since Nixon was elected in 1968, the south has dominated presidential politics. This election cycle, however, represents a turning point. For the first time in 40 years a president-elect has achieved victory without strong southern support. Notably, the deep south is the only region that overwhelmingly voted more Republican in 2008 than it did in 2004.

Of course, these points alone do not indicate that race influenced the southern vote this year. Perhaps southerners preferred Senator McCain’s social policies, or maybe they were drawn to Governor Palin’s status as a Washington outsider. Reading some of the quotations cited in the article, however, the truth becomes crystal clear:

One white woman said she feared that blacks would now become more “aggressive,” while another volunteered that she was bothered by the idea of a black man “over me” in the White House.

…

“I think any time you have someone elected president of the United States with a Muslim name, whether they are white or black, there are some very unsettling things,” George W. Newman, a director at a local bank and the former owner of a trucking business, said over lunch at Yellow Creek Fish and Steak.

…

“I am concerned,” Gail McDaniel, who owns a cosmetics business, said in the parking lot of the Shop and Save. “The abortion thing bothers me. Same-sex marriage.”

“I think there are going to be outbreaks from blacks,” she added. “From where I’m from, this is going to give them the right to be more aggressive.”

These statements seriously freak me out, but luckily I can take solace in the article’s main point: that this year, the south has put itself solidly outside the political mainstream in this country. Democrats need not to pander to the region any longer, and Republicans must reach far beyond it if they hope to regain any of the power they have lost.

I’m not 100% sure why this community seems so much more enthusiastic about sharing than other language or framework oriented communities, but I do have some ideas.  Maybe I’ll explore that later.

The author fails to note that Obama has legislated for six consecutive years. Meanwhile, he spends three paragraphs describing Patrick’s political naivete, suggesting that inexperience led directly to the governor’s difficulties on Beacon Hill.

If Obama does not share the main cause of Patrick’s problems, why would the author tout Patrick’s story as “a useful prism to view the current presidential race”? In terms of relative importance, especially in the context of this article, the mutual selection of Axelrod pales in comparison to the difference in experience.

I hope other readers are not so credulous as to miss this point.

Well, today I ran into my first migration problem in some time. On Friday, I started implementing a major new feature of the project I’m working on. Like a good little programmer, I created a branch in my versioning tool of choice (git).

Today, I came back from a long weekend and hadn’t finished that feature. I needed to wait to talk to Adrian a bit before going ahead, so I decided to work on a couple of small problems instead. I switched back to my main branch, implemented the small stuff, and pushed it live (we’re still in alpha here, so I push pretty often).

A couple of hours ago I finally got that conversation with Adrian in, finished off Friday’s feature, and merged it back into the main branch. I thought the merge would be smooth but I got a conflict. No big deal, I thought, until I saw where the conflict was: in schema.rb. The conflicting line was the schema version.

Oh, no big deal (I thought again) it’s just because I haven’t migrated up my main branch. So I fixed the conflict, ran my migrations, and (like a good little programmer) kicked off my unit tests.

FAIL

Uh-oh. WTF!? Confusion and frustration, all at the same time. It appeared one of my tables from Friday’s big-feature-branch didn’t exist in my database. Then it dawned on me. I had inadvertently applied migrations out of order. You see, my minor changes this morning had minor migrations associated with them. So that table I added on Friday got lost. And I didn’t even notice, because I was working in isolated branches!

There are a few ways you can fix something like this - I opted for using rake to roll the database schema back to the last known good version, then migrate up from there. This worked on development and in production, because (as I said) we are in alpha mode here, so a little downtime is OK (it took literally 30 seconds). But if we were in beta or production mode, I would have been in trouble.

Moral is, watch out for those migrations - especially when branches are involved! They are pretty easy to screw up.

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  def self.find(*args)
    options = args.extract_options!
    options[:order] ||= "last_name ASC, first_name ASC"
    super(*args.push(options))
  end
end

This snippet will cause User#find calls to by default sort the results first by last_name, then by first_name. If, however, you specify the :order option when calling #find, this method will respect your choice.

Caveat: I’m not sure when Array#extract_options! showed up in Rails’ ActiveSupport library, but it’s at least there as of 2.1.0.

Let’s take the example of loading this blog’s last four entries using the Google AJAX Feed API. Net::HTTP consistently takes less than a second to load the results, while HTTPClient consistently takes between 10 and 15 seconds! This can’t be right, I must be doing something wrong…

Here’s the script I’m using to test:

require 'httpclient'
require 'net/http'
require 'uri'
require 'cgi'

def time(label)
  t_start = Time.now.to_f
  yield if block_given?
  puts "#{label}: #{Time.now.to_f - t_start}s"
end

feed_url = "http://taylorbarstow.com/feed/"
url = "http://www.google.com/uds/Gfeeds?v=1.0&output=json&q=#{CGI.escape(feed_url)}"

time "Net::HTTP" do
  Net::HTTP.get(URI.parse(url))
end

time "HTTPClient" do
  HTTPClient.new.get_content(url)
end

Bowman’s sliding doors provided elasticity based on the size of a container’s content. But it’s also desirable to achieve elasticity based on a container’s external constraints. This paradigm is particularly applicable to data sets, where we want one column to expand or contract dynamically to fill the available space.

Gmail and Google Reader give us an example of this technique:

GMail’s Sliding Doors Interface—the subject column is elastic

Reader’s Sliding Doors Interface—the title column is elastic

Interestingly, while the end result is essentially the same in these two applications, the implementation is completely different: Gmail uses a table while Reader uses floated divs. Why the implementations are different doesn’t really matter (My guess? Maybe Gmail is on an older version of GWT), but it is an interesting distinction.

I will focus on Reader’s implementation for two reasons. First, it performs much better. Gmail’s interface is jumpy when resizing the browser window (on a recent MacBook—2.4GHz Dual Core with 2GB of RAM), whereas Reader is smooth as could be. Second, while a table may be an appropriate markup choice in terms of semantics, tables are inherently inflexible. Reader illustrates this point; when the user clicks on a row, the entire story expands inline. While this may be possible with a table, it would be more difficult to achieve, and the implementation would awkward at best.

The Markup

For this example, we’ll work with a list of email messages. Each message will appear in its own row, and each row will display the corresponding message’s sender, subject, and date. We’ll use a simple ordered list, where each list item represents one message. Each list item will contain a set of spans—one for each of the properties mentioned.

Here’s the basic markup for each list items:

<ol>
	<li>
		<span class="subject">Potluck tomorrow! 7pm</span>
		<span class="sender">Adrian Mott</span>
		<span class="date">3:08pm</span>
	</li>
</ol>

The Stylesheet

The theory behind this technique is to position all columns absolutely and with known widths, except for the elastic column. That column is positioned statically and its width is constrained using right and left margins. Since we have a statically positioned element, the containing list item is “propped open”, which means we don’t have to jump through hoops to get things to layout properly. Also, you can visually arrange the columns however your want—order in the markup doesn’t matter.

Here’s the barebones CSS:

ol {
	padding: 0;
	list-style: none;
}
li {
	position: relative;
	margin: 0;
	padding: 0.152em 0;
	height: 1em;
}
li span {
	display: block;
	overflow: hidden;
	height: 100%;
}
.sender {
	position: absolute;
	left: 0;
	top: 0.152em;
	width: 11.4em;
}
.date {
	position: absolute;
	right: 0;
	top: 0.152em;
	width: 6.84em;
}
.subject {
	width: auto;
	margin-left: 11.78em;
	margin-right: 7.22em;
}

Pretty simple—have a look at the result (enhanced with some additional CSS for looks). What’s cool about this is the flexibility. Want to show the entire subject, letting it wrap onto multiple lines? No problem (just change the height on each list item from 1em to auto).

Cool!

So I expected Michelle Obama to communicate her family’s values on her terms. But I was surprised and delighted to find something I didn’t expect: as a speaker, Michelle Obama rivals her husband! Her passion, her thoughtfulness, and her candor all shone brightly last night. She delivered the kind of speech rarely seen from most mainstream politicians these days—let alone from politicians’ partners. (Indeed, I would argue that we won’t see anything as inspirational from the Republicans during their convention.)

Let’s hope that, as Michelle put it (I’m paraphrasing here), we can come together as a country and listen to our hopes this time around, rather than our fears! If we can make this happen, then maybe, finally, we can get out from under the thumb of corporate America and set our own agenda for once. A big thank you to Michelle Obama—your speech thrilled and inspired me.

The ski magazines arrived the other day. I have been thinking about skiing almost every day for weeks now. You might be able to tell that I am super excited!

But before I can ski, I need to get my legs in shape. Which leads me to hiking! Fall is hiking season. The days are crisp and not too hot, the leaves are beautiful, and there aren’t many bugs. I didn’t get out that much last fall, though I did get to Katahdin, which was a blast.

So this fall, I’m committed to hiking four or five times. To help me follow through, I’m trying to start a little hiking “club” with some friends. I figure not everyone will be as into as me, but hopefully I will find a cohort or two for each hike. We’ll see how it goes!

Katahdin in 2007