studioblīp

Update: I’ve been using named_scope for a bit longer now and totally don’t agree with my former self about naming conventions when creating named_scopes.  I now do what comes natural.  Love, me.

I’ve been using the new-ish Rails feature named_scope for a couple days now, and I love it.  The expressiveness was something I really missed jumping from OpenACS, a “framework” where you’re encouraged to write powerful queries in raw SQL.  So you get the best of both worlds: modular business logic and (relatively) powerful queries.  I wish Rails had more features to enable INNER JOINs using finders in a way that still allows the pre-fetching of associated objects, but that’s another matter entirely.  Some observations, though:

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At work, we use Oracle’s calendaring software. Oracle is nice because it can be synced via SyncML. This worked great with my Treo thanks to Synthesis’ PalmOS client software. But sadly, my iPhone is hopelessly tethered to Apple iCal. Ironically an iPhone on PC would have no problems since you can sync an iPhone with Outlook, and sync Outlook with Oracle Calendar via SyncML. But being attached to iCal is a decided problem. It’s just not used by enough corporate types that it gets that kind of attention. The only sync tool I found, Spanning Sync, hooked iCal up to Google Calendar which is a big win for me, since I do my personal calendar stuff in Google Calendar. So we’re 50% of the way to having my calendaring life mobile.

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I’m not gonna lie. I began fantasizing about the iPhone back in January when it was announced at MacWorld. But I really had no practical need for the thing, given that I already had a Treo 650 that could do all the usual SmartPhone bits, and that my existing iPod nano had hung out in my car pretty much since I got it and served exclusively as a CD-changer replacement (with an increasingly stale copy of my iTunes library).

So I held out when the big launch came. I probably read more of the iPhone hype on Wired.com than the people who actually bought them. Being a UNIX geek, the greed welled up within me when I learned that people had been successful at installing an SSH server and standard set of command line utilities on the phone. And this wasn’t like reflashing your iPod to run Linux, thereby throwing out all of the excellent software that it came with, making the device less useful. Nope, the iPhone ran a full multitasking protected-memory Darwin kernel. Jobs hadn’t been overstating the fact that the phone ran OS X (which I half snorted at when I heard it last year).

Then came the price drop. I still held firm for another two weeks, but ultimately my resolve crumbled. I had to have it. Continue Reading »