The OpenID 2.0 spec has been finalized. On the surface, it does
not seem to be very different from the 1.1 spec but it does include
at least one sweet new feature. It provides protocol support for directed
identity.
Directed identity is the concept of having a
single identity that appears to be a different identity for every
relying […]
A couple of months ago we hired a contractor to write a reporting
interface for our high volume monitoring system. Our system exposes
all of it’s data in RESTful web services, and his job has been to take
that data and allow users to create reports based on it.
This morning a couple of my teammates and I […]
Marty Alchin recently posted about the “evils” of returning None (or nil or null depending on your language of choice). I think
he has it basically right. Sure
there are situations where returning nil1 is
appropriate, but they are pretty rare. For example, if a method
actually does what the client asked and there is […]
Ara Howard has discovered that the ActiveRecord validation mechanism
does not ensure data
integrity.1 Validations feel
a bit like database constraints but it turns out they are really only
useful for producing human friendly error messages.
This is because the assertions they define are tested by reading from the
database before the changes are written to the database. As you […]
Authentication has been bane of my existence lately. By which I mean,
it is complicated and interesting and I am loving every minute of it
(but, as you can see, I am not going to let that stop me from complaining about it). However
tonight I have run into an authentication problem that I am not […]
I find myself ingesting more and more information in the form of audio
and video. This is rather unfortunate since neither well suited for
this purpose. The primary purpose of audio recordings are to fill the
long silences that otherwise occur while moving from one point to
another in a vehicle. The primary purpose of video […]
My team ran into this problem yesterday where the a particular, very
important, request was failing in one of our Rails apps. The failure
did did not make much sense and even more confusingly, the same code
worked perfectly in the console. As part of debugging the problem we
restarted the mongrel cluster, and suddenly everything worked […]
Defining new behavior for core Rails classes in mixins is a common
pattern in Rails plugins. This allows for a separation of concerns
that improves maintainability and digestability. However, it raises a
bit of question about where the mixin inclusion step should take
place. Should it happen in the plugin’s init.rb or in the same file
as […]
We recently settled on using JSON as the preferred format for the
REST-based distributed application on which I am working. We don’t
need the expressiveness of XML and JSON is a lot cheaper to generate
and parse, particularly in Ruby. Now we are busy defining
dialects to encode the data we have, which is happy work. […]
Mr Whitney recently posted an article in which he described mock objects as “bug aggregators”.
I once held a similar point of view.
Back then my belief was that test doubles (mock, stub, etc)
should only be used when real
objects would not work, either because they were too hard to setup or
because they were too slow. Recently, […]
