May 2008

A model-free wizard

Posted by Michael on May 13, 2008 in Programming, Ruby Language

Maybe I’m taking the whole MVC thing too far, but I’ve been reading and learning both Ruby and Rails at a fairly fast clip and just when I thought I was getting the hang of what goes in models, views, and controllers respectively, along comes The Advanced Recipe for Rails book with a recipe for [...]

Handling Date Entries

Posted by Michael on May 10, 2008 in Programming, Ruby Language

Separate inputs for a single Date Entry? pop-up Calendars? Enforce one way (i.e. enter in “mm/dd/yyyy” format)? What happened to the end-user perspective?
User input parsing and validation is classic computer science and usability fodder, yet we seem to get ever more clever at making it more cumbersome to enter a date than [...]

Why Macs?

Posted by Michael on May 8, 2008 in Macs, Systems

For Years, I have used nothing but Microsoft Windows desktops and my development effort was 100% Windows based systems. Long story, short, lets just say I knew way more about the inner bowels of Windows and its various API’s than I will ever care to recall nowadays. Around 2001, I realized “The Web” [...]

Hello world!

Posted by Michael on May 3, 2008 in General

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging
…and with that, I almost did delete this post to begin start blogging. But alas, every programming example seems to start with “Hello, world!” so I figured this is an appropriate beginning to this blog about myself and programming. [...]