#Dev

There are a lot of things to really love about Rails apps. One of them is not deployment. Rails boffins, regardless of what they say, do look with longing envy over at those php kids with their simple copy of files up to a server and having it run on apache.

Admittedly, I’d rather deploy via capistrano anyway (cause even php boffins should be doing it that way) since it is fabulous and does deployment like it should be done, but there is something to be said for the wonderful mod_php under apache. Configuring proxying and mongrels under either apache or nginx is simply not fun. It feels like work.

Mike Cohn basically invented the idea of Agile User Stories which is what we’ve started using at Amnesty on specific projects for our Agile development. It’s definitely paid dividends though, like any new introduced technique, has had a few growing pains as we’ve learned new things.

We do have some of the issues he mentions in Prioritizing Your Product Backlog in our agile development, and I’d have to say we don’t spend enough time “grooming the product backlog.” We do spend a good week between iterations, thinking of the focus of the design goals of the next iteration and writing new user stories.

As people who tune in regularly to the blog may be aware, the main site for Amnesty International was completely redesigned last year and launched on Dec 10th human rights day.

Since then, and with the advantages the underlying Drupal, CiviCRM, and Alfresco core technologies have given us (though we’ve had quite a few problems with alfresco since launching), we’ve been able to do quite a bit more than we were ever capable of doing before with the old platform and made some fundamental gains with the site.

Just a shoutout to my favourite Rails ninjas here in London, the bambinos at New Bamboo *(disclaimer: they’re working on projects with both AI UK and with us at the Secretariat right now)*a, who just launched AI UK’s new Protect the Human site after partnering up with Made by Many .

{{ figure src="/images/farm4/3272/2792698081_71d634992a.png)" title=“AI UK’s Protect the Human” }}

Very nicely executed social networking site based on activism, sharing and discussion. Just wondering what they used to get the base done. They even managed to incorporate the new visual Global Identity and reconcile it with AI UK’s current visual scheme.

One of the consequences of the macbook dying was that I had to cast around for another laptop fast to work off of. Luckily, we happened to have a Lenovo X300 laptop in we were testing with the (pretty amazing actually) 64GB solid state drive it has.

Not being a windows fan, I installed Ubuntu 8.04 on it. Here’s my impressions.

First off, the laptop is light and fast and really well thought out. As a response to the macbook air, it’s an excellent one and at least from my perspective there is no gap between the functionality of the two. In fact, I’d have to say that the IBM actually goes one further having the DVD built into such a small frame and a full range of ports.

I’m not sure if anyone but a close bunch of friends noticed, but I took the blog down while I was moving some things around in the background here. Nothing big, but moved a few subdomains over to the excellent slicehost and off my old hoster TextDrive (now Joyent).

They’re still excellent, but they’re not about to upgrade their old BSD boxes and it was getting to be a bit difficult with working with new stuff like git and rails 2.0.

I just got through cleaning up and prepping my old 12" G4 Powerbook (quite seriously, the best computer I have ever used), to give to a friend whose 1st generation iBook is starting to wheeze with the things she needs it to do (and who is giving it to her Mom whose computing needs are relatively modest in comparison).

Now, as a preamble, I try to live quite greenly. I use low power appliances wherever I can, use public transport, take the train whenever practical instead of flying and in general, think of myself as a (compared to most people I know) as quite an easy-on-the-planet kind of guy. My problem is computers. I know they are horrendously toxic and everything about them from manufacturing to disposal is the anti-thesis of green but I make both my living off manipulating and making them more effective.

Past posts have probably nailed me by this point as a huge fan of Ruby on Rails and the Ruby language in particular.

While I think a huge mythology now surrounds how much more productive it makes you which causes difficulty in separating the hype from reality, my personal experience has made me a raver about it in terms of just getting things done. In one (ok, mostly sleepless) weekend, I managed to get up a canvassing and get out the vote application, web enabled across the internet that was used successfully and to great effect in a Canadian federal leadership campaign (and the person ran rings around the other candidate partly because of its contribution). The party in question had been unable in several years of trying to accomplish the same thing.

Some very cool open source news just to round up.

OpenOffice 2.0[http://openoffice.org] with full support for the OpenDocument format and (IMHO) a very worthy replacement for Microsoft Office for the vast majority of people who use Word, Excel and Powerpoint in anything under uber-expert mode.

It now includes a quite cool MS Access database replacement as well as a good drawing package. Sadly, a native OSX port still lags but the Linux and Windows versions should keep everyone happy. Also, it’s free, open source and virtually future proof format-wise.

Wow. I’m going to say this again, because it is so rare for me to use this word in relation to programming at all: Wow.

In fact, the last time I used it was in regard to my first view of XCode whose ability to remove the grunt work from creating interfaces and allow you to concentrate on coding instead is amazing (sadly though, I’m not a big fan of ObjectiveC and you really need to code in ObjC to get XCode’s full power… though apparently someone has come up with Ruby bindings for Cocoa which I am also going to check out since Ruby seems to save so much pain.