Mike Bowler

Kathy Sierra recommends this fabulous video of Sir Ken Robinson discussing creativity and our education system.

When OS/X 10.4 was released, it shipped with a broken version of ruby. Ruby on Rails doesn't play nicely with that broken version so everyone doing rails work has had to install a newer version on their machines.

Apparently, in 10.4.6, Apple upgraded the version of ruby from 1.8.2 to 1.8.4. I've heard that this new version does play nicely with rails.

I say "apparently" because my machine (running 10.4.7) does not have this newer ruby and I'd like to know why not. My machine still reports it's ruby version as 1.8.2.

I just received confirmation that a friend of mine is also seeing ruby 1.8.2 on his machine. He is also on OS/X 10.4.7.

I've searched for this via google and not found any answers. I can't references to any machines with OS/X 10.4.6 or 10.4.7 that have not been updated to the new ruby.

I can think of a couple of possibilities. It's possible that 10.4.6 fixed the problem and then 10.4.7 reverted back to the old version. It's possible that the fix in 10.4.6 might only have applied to PowerPC Macs and not to the new Intel Macs. It's possible that something else I installed (XCode for example) might have reverted ruby to an older version.

Prashant Gandhi has a fabulous analogy for corporate IT shops.

HtmlUnit has switched it's source repository from CVS to Subversion. If you had the source checked out previously then you'll need to check it out again.

Thanks to Brad Clarke for converting the repository.

You can check out the latest code with this command.

svn co https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/htmlunit htmlunit

Here's an interesting article on the psychological tricks used by stores to get us to spend more money.

If you like this then I'd recommend Influence: The Power of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini which covers the same kind of material but in much greater detail.

Fast Track to Cash Flow is holding an evening session on real estate investments next Thursday. This should be interesting so I've registered.

My son has been showing a real interest in the Cash Flow games so I think it's time to pick up a copy of Cash Flow for Kids. He's really intrigued by Cash Flow 101 but the rules and the math are far too complicated for him. The Fast Track events usually have the Cash Flow games for sale at their events so this is likely a good time to pick up the kids version.

If you're like me, then you might have a negative reaction when encountering Java™ code like this:

private int zero = 0;

You might think that naming a variable for it's value rather than it's purpose is a mistake. You might consider calling it initialCoffeeCount rather than zero.

You might also think that it should be made final so that you can't accidentally change the value. Obviously, something called zero must only contain the value 0, right?

What then, do you think when you find this farther down in the code?

zero = 1;

I just discovered this OS/X dashboard widget for seaching phone numbers (business or personal) through Canada 411. The interface is really polished and I'm quite impressed. I suspect I'll be using this a lot.

Setting up a build server for a new project can often chew up a lot of time. Some Thoughtworkers have come up with a live CD that allows you to get up to speed really quickly. The project is called Buildix and sounds really promising.

Chris Read introduces the project on his blog and Martin Fowler has some more details.

Elliotte Rusty Harold writes about the ten things he hates about Ruby. For the most part, these are just personal preference and I'm not going to debate them. I find his first 'hate' interesting so I'll talk about that one.


Giving the constructor the name of the class is such a horribly unintuitive approach to naming. The C family of languages have forced us to use this pattern for so long that it's started to feel natural even though it isn't. It would be much cleaner for all objects to do their initialization in a method of the same name. And given that we're going to have one of those, calling it initialize() actually seems like a decent idea to me.

I remember first learning about constructors in C++ eons ago and thinking that it was a horrible convention to use the class name to represent the method that performs initialization. I'd forgotten about that initial reaction to C++ until reading this blog entry.

As for calling the constructor 'new', that's clearly not right. 'new()' is the class method that creates the object, not a method on the new object that will perform initialization.

This weekend, we have had more (and better) Great Blue Heron sightings than we've probably had all combined up till now. Every time we turned around, there was another one flying by.

We were staying at a cottage in the Kawartha Lakes region (near Peterborough) for the long weekend. The herons were clearly the high point although we saw quite a variety of other birds along with some muskrats and a group of white tailed deer.