Paul Lynch's Pages

The last time I was here in the States, two years ago, I found free wireless networking everywhere – all the hotels and coffee shops had it, or maybe just all the ones that I went near to, which may be some sort of demographic indicator. This time, the hotel access is both flakey (poor signal strength or down) and chargeable. Only the cafe I’m at right now (Stell’s, Redlands environs) has free access, and it has the faux hippy ethos to go right along with that. Back in Vegas, one cafe and a hairdresser both had it – there’s some logic there, I think.

We’ve had some problems sending email via our home mail server, for a stupid reason (the local ISPs here put all of their IP adresses on the anti-spam filters on spamhaus, which we use to reject connections). I know that I can tidy that up by messing with our security settings for mail server access, but this is a new mail client/machine, and I may need server access to sort it out properly.

So free fi seems to have been lost in the wash; it was great while it lasted, and may it come back soon.

Once upon a time, many years ago, I wrote a column for PC Pro (UK PC magazine) on “Mobile Computing”. The editor wanted me to write about Windows CE PDAs, which were then and are now extreme crap – and I submitted columns on what worked – which, back then, meant mainly Palm, and I expored mobile phones and laptops, which meant the early Mac OS X machines from Apple. Good stuff, and I was happy to see recently that Stephen Fry validated all my opinions in his blog. I was booted, and replaced by a guy who owned a PDA business, and wanted to write about what made him money – which, incidentally, was exactly contrary to the concept behind the Realworld Computing section in PC Pro (but then my column didn’t fit either, as it wasn’t my primary business, or even a secondary one for me).

Time for an update…

I have stayed away from hand-helds. Frankly, the market niche sucks. Palm sold out to Windows CE, and couldn’t recreate their (bought in) OS; they may (or may not) have held on to their original purity of UI, but didn’t have a platform to sell. Apple laptops, as everyone knows, hold their market – high price, good feature set, great UI, and good overall value. But I’m typing this on an ASUS eee PC (running Linux).

This trip has been an interesting one. I’ve been using an Apple iPod touch for some time, and my wife an iPhone, but this is the first long trip with one. For various reasons we decided not to take a laptop (staying with hand luggage only in both directions was a big part), and took the iPods to give them a good test.

At home, walking to a local cafe with an iPod/iPhone in the pocket is a trivial decision. They work very well for casual email and web browsing, although the iPod Touch shows up the problems of finding WiFi access in the UK; with the iPhone, the 3G data access makes that a non-issue.

The obvious weaknesses are the the small screen size; pinching to zoom every single page gets old, very quickly. Outdated sites that refuse you access because you aren’t running IE are a well-known problem, but less obvious. Lack of copy and paste is a big issue for us, as is the inability to do anything meaningful with Notes documents – I’d at least like to be able to edit them on the machine synched to.

The inconveniences turn out to be big when on a real trip. I wasn’t writing long enough emails back home, which I usually do to act as a form of trip diary for me. In the past, I have done the same with an Apple Powerbook and iWeb, very successfully – but there’s nothing close enough on the iPhone/iPod. Twitter really doesn’t match the requirement, having always a transient feel.

I concidered buying a 13.5″ Powerbook – that would cost approximately $1,000. It would fit the bill very closely, although battery life could become an issue. I have often thought about buying one for travel in the past, but the relatively large overlap with the 17″ Powerbook that I use for training classes and semi-portable development has been off putting. However, the new Linux netbooks are attractive – all the required ports and interfaces, good battery life and inexpensive. A white ASUS eee PC 1000HE (I think the suffix is correct, although it doesn’t mention it anywhere on the box) lasts me for a day mostly sitting in coffee shops, connects effectively to free WiFi (if I can find any), and handles mail/web/chat well – much better than the small screens and quirky software of the iPhones. With data roaming turned off (due to cost) on the iPhone, that kills the one advantage it has. Netbook price? < $300; no addons or upgrades are required. What you are buying is substandard from both the hardware and software point of views, when compared to the Apple offering, but at what saving? By substandard I mean the entire inconsistent Linux UI (that’s right, I wouldn’t consider Windows), and minor details like how hard you have to hit the trackpad button to make a click, and the balance when the screen is tilted back, and a myriad other tiny details that just don’t arise on Apple hardware and software.

If you bake bread, then you will be in sympathy with what Andrew Whitley has to say. The author rants extensively about the state of the industry, and the depredations to our palate caused by the Chorleywood process with no signs of abatement. He informs this with an eye to the biochemistry of baking that is missing from most ‘hard-core’ bread books.

About three quarters of the book is devoted to the process of baking; we are taken through simple yeast risen recipes, and led directly into creating a no nonsense rye sourdough starter. The recipes here are centred around Russian style ryes, with additional recipes for different grains: wheat and rye of course, but also spelt and gram. Later chapters include the modern trend for flavoured doughs (tomato and onion, mushroom and garlic, etc), and cover the range from ciabatta and calzone to stollen and lardy cake, with an extensive chapter on gluten-free baking.

It should be clear to the experienced from the above description that Andrew Whitley favours working with very wet doughs, using natural leavens and a wide variety of grains. For a novice some of the descriptions could be more detailed, and the number of permutations for using leavens tends towards the confusing. On balance, I think that a novice breadmaker would be able to learn to make bread from the progressive instructions given in the three chapters devoted to this.

I baked my way through the central section of the book; I had to substitute dried yeast for his fresh yeast in the initial recipes with some stumbling on my part – the instructions for conversion are located in a different section of the book. My rye starter worked exactly as he predicted, and is currently producing a series of fantastic wholemeal rye loaves and French country style wheat and rye (which he calls Cromarty Cob). The doughs all come out somewhat wetter and more fluid than the author describes, but bake successfully (which is what really matters). He also suggests baking at 220-240 C for an initial period, which my last two domestic ovens refuse to reach (they all lie about their temperature, too, which is a very common problem).

Bread Matters is joining my bookshelf alongside Ed Espe Brown, Elizabeth David, Laurel’s Kitchen and Nancy Silverton. I can’t say any better than that.

O’Reilly seems to be suffering from more typos and code errors than they used to (in the distant past, before perfect bindings). This book suffers from a few that jarred on me.

If pressed, I’d describe this book as a reasonable taster for Rails. The authors assume that you are already familiar with the basic concepts (HTML, AJAX, and so on), and forgoes any serious coverage of Ruby. There is a basic, half page, description of MVC, and an awareness of object oriented programming is also assumed.

Other criticisms: unit testing is only covered in the last chapter. Come on! It’s a fundamental principle of Rails that you should develop your tests as you write, and leaving it all to last makes a mockery of that.

I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the programming style; it relies on use of primary keys, when I would be happier with passing the ActiveRecord model object that owns that key to methods that accept it; it also often uses quoted strings where symbols are now preferred.

The writing style was also cookbook style – do this, do that, and it will work; but with very little explanation of underlying principles. In an introductory book like this, coverage of principles is far more important than in thicker reference books.

My biggest objection, and why the title “Up and Running” is inappropriate, is that deployment isn’t covered at all. At least a cookbook version of deploying the example photos application using Capistrano and Mongrel should have been included to make the book meet its title.

This book is 167 pages long, including appendices and index. But 28 of those pages are in Appendix B, which is the (good) InVisible Ruby On Rails Reference (freely downloadable elsewhere). It’s a short book.

I have to sum up by saying that, despite its flaws, this gives a good, quick, preview of Rails development, and I can’t think of a better one on the market at the moment; it is also better, I believe, than any of the web site based introductions, but stops far short of the comprehensive reference that is ‘Agile Web Development with Ruby on Rails’ (Dave Thomas and DHH).