Adventures with Ruby

I was about to do lots of work for the i18n-community, improving the website, managing the fork requests of Globalize 2, improving the official Rails guide and more. But instead, I just slowed down developing in my spare time, letting the community down in the process.

Now it’s not that they need me, but I felt like I was making a contribution. I felt obligated to do as much open source as possible and my already busy schedule kept getting busier. Then suddenly I couldn’t get myself to do it anymore.

Lately, what I do when I come home after work is read up on my RSS feeds, check the i18n mailing list to see if I can be of any assistance, and more than once just read a book at night. Finding a bit of a balance between work and relaxation. And this is a more pleasant schedule for me and one I can keep up with.

I also had a streak of bad luck these last few weeks. My washing machine died (it was 23 years old, so it didn’t really come as a big surprise), my server died, my graphics card in my desktop died, my heating is still dead (a mechanic is coming on Monday), and I have caught an annoying cold.

So, I am sorry about my absence. Hopefully it’ll improve during the coming months. All the much respect to all those programmers that do continue working at night for days on end.

So, what have I been doing?

Well, I worked through the fork queue of my http_accept_language plugin, merging in some improvements and making it compatible with Rails 2.3.

Furthermore, I’m busy making some changes to Ryan Bates’ Nifty generators so that they don’t use fixtures anymore, use Authlogic, and add some minor adjustments to what I found to be very useful when trying to do RAD. You shouldn’t use it just yet.

And finally, I’m trying to come up with a way of making forms that doesn’t hurt. ActionView::FormBuilder is nice, but if you need a lot of forms, it can become tedious. I’m trying to automate it more, while keeping as much flexibility as possible. It’s a difficult process to find out what actually is the handiest. I am making progress though.

And finally, I will be trying to blog a bit more. I’m ashamed that this is the first post of 2009.

I’ve changed iain.nl’s feeds to FeedBurner feeds. It promises me graphs, and I like graphs. So if you’re subscribed to my rss feeds, please update the url to http://feeds.feedburner.com/iain-nl.

Thank you!