Disqus - Latest Comments for Pistos

Re: Every Friday, rain or shine (Scripting News)

dave — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 14:24:18 -0000

Me too. Of course we're typing these comments into just such a thread. :-(

Re: Every Friday, rain or shine (Scripting News)

Pistos — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 14:15:14 -0000

Indeed, I perhaps shouldn't have employed the wording "either that or". Nevertheless, I still think that both full blogging and comment threads are solutions, even if perhaps to different problems. I'll continue to employ both. :)

Re: Every Friday, rain or shine (Scripting News)

dave — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 14:05:20 -0000

That was basically the point of this piece, to amplify what Marshall said in
his "perfect storm" piece.

http://tr.im/weyM

Dave

Re: Every Friday, rain or shine (Scripting News)

Pistos — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 13:56:49 -0000

I hope nothing bad happens to FriendFeed, I really like it. :( But certainly, I'm of the opinion that we should posting more than just to microblogs.

Re: Every Friday, rain or shine (Scripting News)

dave — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 13:53:12 -0000

Yes and all that good stuff will go bye-bye when FF goes bye-bye.

That's the part about helping strengthen the web when you do a blog post.

Re: Every Friday, rain or shine (Scripting News)

Pistos — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 13:46:28 -0000

Either that, or you use a microblogging service that has comment threads, wherein you can place extended thoughts and discussion about your short message. Like FriendFeed. http://friendfeed.com/

Re: Awesomeful

hgimenez — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 07:13:51 -0000

@Pistos,

you definitely have a good point regarding ActiveRecord: it will abstract out and move most functionality to the ORM layer as opposed to living at the database layer, which is A Good Thing (TM). In most Rails app this will suffice, especially on the small to medium sized ones.

I have however used some of Postgres' features in a Rails project. For instance, I've used views and rules in a Rails project, and ActiveRecord happily thought it was just a table. Some may argue that triggers are a safer way to do things like database auditing, especially when the Rails app is not the only system that is inserting/updating the database. As an aside, we implemented a very data heavy system that required ETL'ing data from numerous sources and that's where something like Pl/Ruby or Pl/PGSql came in handy.

In any case, this is aside from my main point: it's all about PostgreSQL's license and community. The slew of features and awesomeness of the DBMS are just there to back up my argument.

Re: Awesomeful

Christoph Olszowka — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 05:18:07 -0000

You can actually use views with ActiveRecord, they'll act just like regular tables. Table inheritance, triggers, rules and functions are things that work on the database level and (i.e.) can help you to preserve referential integrity - things like uniqe indices and friends can be added via your migrations and enforce your data's correctness (as opposed to validates_uniqueness).

Check out Enterprise Rails (2008, O'Reilly) by Dan Chak to learn more about leveraging "advanced" database features. Dan is obviously very opinionated, and while it's arguable everything he writes should be accepted without further questioning (i.e. he refuses to use Rails migrations, which imho are a great tool), it's still an intriguing read, making you ask yourself if everything Rails does is really the best approach to handle things.

Re: Awesomeful

Pistos — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 22:54:13 -0000

I'm certainly a PostgreSQL user (and MySQL avoider), but I find it curious that you mention Rails at all in this post. I thought ActiveRecord does most (everything?) on its own, and uses only the bare bones of the database simply to persist. Meaning to say, many of the advantages you cite, some of which are absent in MySQL, won't even be used by ActiveRecord. For example, views, triggers, rules, and plpgsql functions. As such, a Rails user switching DBs from MySQL to PostgreSQL won't see much difference.

A _Ruby_ user on the other hand...

Re: Rails Alternatives: Merb, Sinatra & Ramaze

Pistos — Thu, 28 May 2009 09:02:24 -0000

Nice, brief overview of the three. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on them, and thanks for the positive mention of Ramaze, as well as the linkage. :)

Re: Ruby Best Practices - Blog

sandal — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 13:52:08 -0000

I guess rklemme's example of transactions is a good one. You don't want to rescue a failed commit. Though that can also be solved by not making rescue catch all exceptions :)

Re: Ruby Best Practices - Blog

Pistos — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 13:23:52 -0000

Robert: Ah, of course! Well that's certainly one situation you'd want to use it. However, I'm not sure how often I'd find myself in that situation. :)

Re: Ruby Best Practices - Blog

Robert Dober — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 06:43:42 -0000

I am quite confused about the topic. IOW I did not understand a lot about the comments. I did not see an else block after the rescue, it was after the if block_given?

However I still believe that the rescue,else construct is a concise way to write the following code

begin
do_something
rescue
oops
else
do_something_of_which_you_do_not_want_a_potential_exception_rescued
end

Re: Ruby Best Practices - Blog

Pistos — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 09:01:27 -0000

You can't take what is in the ensure block and put it after the end of begin-end. This code example should elucidate:


begin
  puts 1
  raise "Oh no!"
rescue Exception => e
  puts 2
  raise e
ensure
  puts 3
end
puts 4

Output:


1
2
3
-:3: Oh no! (RuntimeError)

Re: Comment formatting?

Pistos — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 08:54:34 -0000

Code doesn't really work. REAL code has at least one level of indentation, which <code> doesn't preserve:


if condition
  do_something  # supposed to be indented
else
  do_something_else   # supposed to be indented
end

Re: Ruby Best Practices - Blog

Pistos — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 08:50:37 -0000

ehsanul: I think you misunderstood my question. :) Perhaps a code example will help. I was wondering why we need this:


    begin  
      do_work
      something_at_end_of_begin_block
    rescue Exception => e  
    else  
      something_in_else_block
    end

When we can do this instead:


    begin  
      do_work
      something_at_end_of_begin_block
      something_in_else_block
    rescue Exception => e  
    end

(Gah, can't format code blocks. Disqus: fail)

Re: Ruby Best Practices - Blog

ehsanul — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 01:36:34 -0000

"Why not just put the contents of the else at the end of the begin block?"

Well, putting the contents of the else after the begin block's end has a different behavior compared to having it in the "else" section. Code put after the begin block will run whether or not there was an exception (just like an ensure?), whereas in the "else" section, the code runs only if there is no exception. A valid use-case of code inside the "else" would be giving a user positive feedback for some successful action.

@Robert Klemme

However, I have a similar question concerning "ensure". Code that runs under the ensure would also run whether or not there was an exception if put just outside the begin block, provided there's a rescue. The code could have just as easily read:

if block_given?
begin
yield tee
rescue
end
tee.close
else
tee
end

So how does using "ensure" help, besides (possibly) readability? I think in most cases where you have a begin block, you want to catch exceptions, so a rescue is going to almost always be there, right? In which case, I don't see how "ensure" would help. Maybe I'm missing something.

Re: Ruby Best Practices - Blog

sandal — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 14:32:56 -0000

Whoops, thought I had a good reason but I was wrong. It's a valid point. I'd like to see a good example of using else in this way in the wild.

Re: Ruby Best Practices - Blog

Pistos — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 14:30:13 -0000

I'm having trouble seeing the utility of an else block after a rescue block. Why not just put the contents of the else at the end of the begin block?

Re: Does Ruby Dream A Shell?

Pistos — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 16:07:17 -0000

I've skimmed the README. This looks like it has the most promise of all Ruby shells I've seen, but I have to say that I am too used to classic shells (currently zsh is my choice). If I have to use : instead of - for switches, and put filenames in quotes, that is too much of a change for my comfort zone. I think a successful Ruby shell would never punish me for using classic shell syntax, but would have some sugar on top to let me manipulate things with Ruby once in a while.

Re: Comments Are Now Enabled - { |one, step, back| }

Pistos — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 23:52:58 -0000

I tried Disqus for a [very] short while on my blog, but I found two problems that made me switch back [to plain Wordpress comments]:

(1) There is no comment preview. (Related: It wasn't immediately obvious if they supported a markup syntax of some kind)

(2) It took away the Markdown support that I already had installed on my blog comments.

I do admit that it has its pluses, and I also observed a non-negligible boost in referred visits. But lack of a preview in a text box that supports markup, and the deactivation of my Markdown support are showstoppers. Oh, not to mention that Wordpress will be officially adopting a direct competitor to Disqus, namely Intense Debate.

Re: The problem of the ensoulment of identical twins

Pistos — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 13:34:51 -0000

This article was quoted in a forum thread in August 2008. Reknowned Catholic apologist Patrick Madrid argues that the Catholic Church's teaching is that humans are ensouled at conception. (I personally remain unconvinced that there is a clear teaching from the Church on ensoulment. In my opinion, Patrick's argumentation did not definitively prove otherwise.)

Re: Free classical sheet music

Pistos — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 01:19:50 -0000

The IMSLP reopened on June 30, 2008. Yay! :)

Re: My programming language is my dance partner

Pistos — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 02:31:26 -0000

Kareem: Just keep having fun with Ruby. Over time, you improve. It helps to find successful programmers and look at the source code of their work, to see how they solve problems. You could begin browsing at github.

Start small: Rather than trying to accomplish something big all on your own, instead, find a program or library that you like, and then adjust or tweak it slightly.

Re: Catholic Reference Extension

Pistos — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 00:14:18 -0000

Lee: Thank you for your kind comments. Could you describe your situation in greater detail? What version of WP or WP-MU do you have? What version of the CRE? Can you give me a screenshot of the Upload Media icon(s)? Because I see the Add Media icons in my installations regardless of whether the CRE is activated or not.