I know, the stuttering RSS feed is incredibly annoying. It annoys me too. But my todo list is a mile long...excuses, excuses...

  • PHP Semantics in Rails:Use Blank? - Just a reminder that Rails defines the handy ?blank on everything. Bad enough that I don't have many of the Ruby core methods memorized yet, there's all the Rails extensions to remember too. Oh well, this is why I'm continually reading books and documentation and source. At some point bits and pieces sink in (and next year I'll be embarrassed to read the code I'm writing this year, too).

  • OpenProj - Cross-platform, open-source, free replacement for Microsoft Project. I had a little play with this, since I do occasionally like to track things with Gantt charts (yes, I know they're not ideally suited for everything, but I've got an industrial engineering degree, OK?). On the plus side, it does seem to work fine, and opens Microsoft Project files without a problem. On the minus side, it's a Java app, which means that the UI is equally nonstandard and annoying on all platforms.

  • Bug in @flash deprecation? - I've been getting annoying warnings about using @flash in one of my Rails projects even though it's nowhere in sight. It looks like the simple answer for now is "don't use a partial named _flash". Fixed in Edge