johng Blog

I never want to deal with letting agents again. Their websites suck, they don’t answer the phones and they never call back. My theory is they are making so much money hand over fist that it’s actually a waste of their time to pursuing clients as one walks through the door every few minutes with a wad of cash in hand. Unfortunately it’s getting harder and harder to deal directly with landlords now that the agencies have polluted all the decent listing sites. Gap in the market? I’ll look into it.

Long story short I found somewhere half decent and fingers crossed I can move in this week (or at least whenever the broadband gets hooked up). The old BT monopoly reared its head once again and wanted to charge a ¬£125 connection fee for the phone line! But thanks to Andy’s Bulldog suggestion I will be paying a grand total of ¬£1! Lets just hope they show up for the installation. One of my considerations in picking a flat this time aside from location and price has been large white walls. You know the kind a projector would look good on? More on that when I have it set up.

It’s looking pretty hectic this week and I will be travelling about quite a bit so I look forward to my next post coming from the new place (if everything goes according to plan)!

So I tried to finish up my WPF app and I have done it up to a level where I can use it regularly. I just don’t feel like I need to put it out there right now and get inundated with bugs I have yet to find. Also got distracted by the awesome Ruby on Rails. Yes I am working with ANOTHER programming language. I personally blame Aston University for insisting we use so many languages making it hard to focus on just one. I walked out of that place with Ada95, Java, PHP, LISP, C++, SQL and some other crap I’m forgetting - it’s all on my CV anyway. So I know something good when I see it and Rails is definitely it.

Trying Rails was born of my frustration with Struts at work more than anything. Trying to find entries in colossal XML files and maintaining them is quite a chore. Add to that the database specific SQL that needs to be written at certain levels and sometimes I wonder if Struts is actually doing anything useful for me.

Rails is great because it uses conventions for filenames and actions rather than massive XML files - we stick to a naming convention, why shouldn’t the framework know what to do with the code you write? There’s also no database specifc SQL, you just write your Ruby code and it hooks into whatever database you have be it Oracle, MySQL or even Derby.

Don’t get me started on the way code can be hugely minimalised and the wonderful selection of pre-written standard procedures that can be plugged in anywhere. Rails is fantastic, it’s just such a shame that in the UK it’s only being used by a relatively (to Java) small number of developers in London only.