Oh, you found the ‘appearance’ tab in the admin backend? Ah, that’s my cue to notice that your website is broken, and instantly replace it with a nice picture of some trees. You like trees, don’t you? They’re very pretty, and I think sometimes you’ve got to put that above more practical concerns like not suddenly breaking everyone’s website.

What, you want your old theme back? Aww. OK, here it is in our themes repository. Oh, sure, I could just tell you where you can download it, but I have a better idea. Let me install it automatically for you instead! Just give me your FTP password, and everything will be juuuuust fine.

No, I don’t think there’s a plugin that will let you punch programmers in the face. Why do you ask?

Spokesman for Leeds Metropolitan University on the radio: “Macdonalds paid us to perform an independent study…”

Bollocks they did.

If you were paid for it, it’s not independent. Getting money for something is the exact definition of “dependent”. Call it impartial, unbiased or neutral if you like. It might even be true. But “independent” actually means something real and verifiable that backs up your claim to be impartial. It doesn’t mean “we’re unbiased because we say so, honest”, and when you start using the word as a free pass to avoid scrutiny, you go from being possibly biased to actually lying about the fact. Which is not good for your credibility as a research group. Stop polluting our language, you tossers.

You see, in my book a framework is something that’s meant to make programmers work more effectively – not to lecture them about what they’re doing wrong. Lecturing can be a good thing, as long as it ultimately results in better code – I’ll happily admit that following the Rails learning curve has taught me an awful lot about good programming practices. More and more though, I’m finding it being used to justify just plain broken features: If it doesn’t work, it’s your fault for not doing it the right way. Take this bit of profoundly broken behaviour:

let’s say we have a Company model, which belongs_to :city

>> torchbox = Company.find_by_name('Torchbox')
=> #<Company id: 1, name: "Torchbox", city_id: 1>
>> torchbox.city
=> #<City id: 1, name: "London">

Aha, we’ve got the city wrong. Let’s reassign a bundle of attributes then, like we would if we were doing this through a web form:

>> torchbox.attributes = {:name => 'Torchbox', :city_id => 2}
=> {:name => 'Torchbox', :city_id => 2}

Right, so now we should retrieve the correct one.

>> torchbox.city
=> #<City id: 1, name: "London">

Er, oops.

But no – according to the response on that ticket, Rails isn’t at fault, because there’s a convoluted way I can rewrite my code to make that not happen. Out in the real world we would refer to that as “a workaround for the bug”. But Rails doesn’t have bugs… it just has opinions. My code sucks, as indicated by the fact that it doesn’t work, and if I just learn to write it in a way that doesn’t suck then I’ll become a better programmer. In that way, the Rails developers have, intentionally or not, painted themselves into a position where they’re immune to criticism: Rails works perfectly logically to them, because they wrote it. There’s no counter-intuitive behaviour to them, because they know the codebase back to front and understand exactly what it’s doing and not doing. Anyone who believes it is counter-intuitive just has a different opinion to them, and should be forced to either accept their opinions or get out of the Rails party.

Well, quite frankly that’s bollocks isn’t it? Even if their method is genuinely better according to some metric I don’t understand (and I don’t believe it is: my original approach works perfectly well the other 98% of the time and is in fact such a well-established way of doing things that even the Lighthouse website where I reported the bug does it that way) – my approach is better according to the rather more important measure of being the one I thought of first. The big promise of agile development was that we’d all spend more time implementing what we want to implement, and less time fighting against the mundane details of our platform. Any time the platform forces me to get out of the flow of building my application and figure out how to bend Rails to do what I want it to do, that’s a FAIL for agile programming and for Rails.

And if the code I write is something that logically should work, that I so passionately believe must work that I’m willing to spend my own time tracking down the reason why it doesn’t work, fixing it, testing the fix, writing it up and handing my results to you on a plate, then if you don’t agree then you’d damn well better have a better reason than “meh, I don’t really like doing it that way”.

But wait, there’s still hope! If I act as cheerleader on the Rails core mailing list, then I might be able to drum up enough support to get my patch pushed through! Well, nuts to that. I’ve put enough effort into fixing their broken software already, and now I have no desire to spend even more effort campaigning for a result that doesn’t even personally affect me any more, because now I’ve got a plugin that fixes it, and nobody but me will ever know about it until they get bitten by that bug themselves, spend several hours tearing their hair out over it, and eventually stumble upon this blog post. Hello there. I suppose you’d like to know how to fix it then? Here, have a plugin.

So, having stuck the knife in, allow me to give it an extra twist by stating that indenting with spaces is shit. Tab characters make sense for the same reason that using <h1> rather than <font size=”36″> makes sense for HTML headings: it’s meaningful markup that indicates the purpose of that whitespace, and allows the reader to tune its appearance and behaviour, such as how much space it takes up and what happens when you move your cursor through it. And no, I don’t care about your vim profile that does automatic tab conversion. Some people actually like using other text editors, and if you use tab characters in your files then your choice isn’t limited to editors with esoteric make-your-text-behave-like-something-it-isn’t features, but is instead limited to editors which can insert the characters you tell it to without arsing everything up. (Unfortunately, it turns out that some editors aren’t capable of that, as we discovered: the Rails mode of Eclipse insists on chucking spaces in, even after we changed every conceivable preference setting.)

This is where my retabulate plugin comes in. It converts the customary two-space indent into tabs, both via an explicit rake task that does a sweep of your codebase, and by intercepting any new files created via script/generate. It can’t deal with YAML files though, because the YAML spec obnoxiously insists that only spaces are valid.

Enjoy these plugins… or ignore them entirely if you prefer. Hurrah for freedom of choice.

In 2007, adult DVD producer TVX Films found a picture by young British photographer Lara Jade Coton on the internet, took it without permission to use as the cover of one of their DVDs, made a lot of money out of it, and shrugged it off with a sarcastic comment when confronted about it. This was covered on BBC News yesterday, in a report that concluded with the reporter saying something to the effect of “The case is still ongoing, but for now this underlines the dangers of posting pictures on the internet.”

No. It. Damn. Well. Doesn’t.

Clearly, when putting a photograph or any other personal information online people need to consider the possibility of it falling into the wrong hands and being spread further than intended, but “what if some thieving scum come along and illegally repurpose it in a way that I don’t approve of” should not have to be part of those considerations. Ms Coton did nothing irresponsible in posting that photo. It wasn’t pornographic in any way – it was an elegant, professionally made shot. Good enough to be put on the cover of a DVD, in fact. Definitely not something she should regret putting her name to on the internet.

So what does that BBC reporter think she should have done? Just stuck to taking photos of bunnies and flowers? Or better, just stayed in and watched MTV? This is what copyright law is for, guys. You use someone’s work without permission, and you get your ass handed to you in court – as I sincerely hope will happen in both these cases. Don’t try to paint it as if the original artist did anything wrong by publishing that work for free on the internet… the suggestion that they should curb their artistic expression, just because there are a bunch of law breakers freeloading off it, is just offensive.

Certain activities you may take part in while away may be considered hazardous.

Click here to see a list of hazardous activities

(Tickybox) I confirm that none of the applicants will be taking part in any of the hazardous activities listed.

I think “Fruit or Vegetable Picking” was the first item to make me do a double-take.

Must be all that genetic engineering they’re doing these days. Those parsnips, they’ll all gang up against you the moment your back is turned. Oh well, that doesn’t bother me. Slightly more inconvenient, however, was the ban on both “Flying (as a Fare Paying Passenger in a Fully Licensed Passenger Carrying Aircraft)” and “Flying (Other Than As A Fare Paying Passenger In A Fully Licensed Passenger Carrying Aircraft)”. I also spent a moment pondering the implications of not being able to do any “Running (Non-Competitive and not Marathon)” – supposing I turned up at Bruxelles-Midi to find that my train was leaving in two minutes, I’d have to quickly find a willing volunteer to race against. Or continue running for another 25-and-a-bit miles after getting on the train, I suppose. And on observing that “Bungee Jumping (within Organiser’s Guidelines)” was right out whereas bungee jumping unsupervised with a slightly-too-long piece of string was presumably acceptable, I sensed that something was amiss.

Fortunately for me, a competitor’s website had managed to get the right idea and correctly arranged the list under the subheadings “you can do this”, “we’ll let you do this if you pay us enough” and “now you’re just being silly”. Unfortunately for Lloyds TSB, I couldn’t alert them to their mistake because their website didn’t provide an email address for the appropriate department. So I had to email an inappropriate one instead. Where it will probably be sat on for the next six months.

Well done Lloyds TSB, you just lost 50 quid of business through having a crap website.

This worries me slightly. If modern-day terrorists can pack any meaningful amount of explosive into a package that size and still have room for a working mobile phone, aren’t we all a bit screwed?

And if so, is there any chance we can have litter bins back at railway stations now? I know they took them away to stop people planting bombs in them, but if in fact it turns out that they can do the same damage with a bit of chewing gum under a chair, then it would seem to be a bit of a moot point.

Heard a good one on the train tonight. “Smoking is forbidden on all parts of this train; this includes the toilet areas.”

Toilet areas? That sounds awfully uncivilised – don’t they have actual toilets then? Toilet areas are the sort of thing a cat would have, surely.