David Murphy aka DrJolt chose to leave this planet a few days ago at the age of 29. I only knew him through a common friend and hung out on the same IRC channel, never spoke with him much, which I now regret in some way, but I got to know him as a man of high integrity, sharp skills and in general just being a very nice guy. People like him are few and very far apart it seems. Happy trails, David.

I’ve just released parabola version 0.1. Go get it and test it will ya?

I suppose I should mention that on the 23rd of December I’ve been a member of this planet for thirty years. No, I do not feel different.

One of my pet projects is parabola. It’s a web based news aggregation service. Obviously it was written in Rails and has served as a learning project for me.

Currently parabola can digest RSS, !okay/news, CDF and Atom using the FeedTools module.

It’s not rich on features (yet) but quite a few nifty things are planned. First release which will be version 0.1 (codename “Primordial Soup”) is likely to appear in January.

Keeping in the spirit of submitting a bunch of themes for the Typo Theme Contest I created another one which I’ve called “Fundamental”.

I’m quite happy with it. It goes very well with blogs which have lots of content in the sidebar such as Flickr photos and tags suitable for horizontal spreading.

It’s also very light on graphics so it loads fast.

Download here

C’était un rendez-vous is a high speed car drive through Paris. It’s absolutely insane.

Typo Garden is holding a theme contest for the Rails blog software Typo and Zunlite is my effort. A 15" PowerBook and other nifty prices are at stake so I thought I’d better put on a suit, comb my hair (no funny jokes please) and submit something.

There are already many nice themes and the next couple of days I’m expecting a flood of great themes submitted. The contest ends on the 28th of November.

Lots of Jimi Hendrix, John Butler Trio and Kate Bush were played during the creation of this theme.

This site’s now on rails. It took just less than a week to convert it to just about the exact same functionality.

Previously the site was done using Perl CGI scripts with a few Perl modules. The LOC for the CGI scripts and modules amounts to 1450 and 2643 respectively. The template HTML and code amounted to 1573 lines.

Hold on to your hat. Here are the Railsified numbers:

The model code is at 112 lines. The controllers amount to 305 lines and the views to 1197 lines.

Perl: 5666 LOC.

Ruby on Rails: 1614 LOC.

Tidal waves don't beg forgiveness
Crashed and on their way
Father he enjoyed collisions
Others walked away
A snowflake falls in May
And the doors are open now
As the bells are ringing out
Cause the man of the hour is taking his final bow
Goodbye for now

Nature has its own religion
Gospel from the land
Father ruled by long division
Young men they pretend
Old men comprehend

And the sky breaks at dawn
Shedding light upon this town
They'll all come 'round
Cause the man of the hour is taking his final bow
G'bye for now

And the road
The old man paved
The broken seams along the way
The rusted signs, left just for me
He was guiding me, love, his own way
Now the man of the hour is taking his final bow
As the curtain comes down
I feel that this is just g'bye for now.

We’ll see you soon.

I discovered the Perl module Class::DBI and got the brilliant idea of simplifying my rather old codebase for AllOrNone.org by using that module instead of messing around with endless SQL-fu.

Having now spent most of the weekend banging my head against various little details and intricacies of both Perl’s syntax and its object oriented implementation approximation hack along with Class::DBI’s poor and disparate documentation I have finally had it! All along I thought to myself:

Man, what kind of broken syntax is this?
Man, why doesn’t this work as seemlessly as ActiveRecord?
Man, what kind of fucked up syntax is this?
Man, this Class::DBI scherade really is a turd in disguise.
Man, why the fuck doesn’t this work like ActiveRecord?
Man, why do I have to jump through hoops to do the simplest things?
Man, this is too much effort. I’ll be rewriting it in Ruby on Rails later on anyway.
Man, why isn’t this crap module properly documented?
Right. This is it. I’m rewriting this in Ruby on Rails.