Monthly Archives: April 2007

followup on conditional page caching

April 27, 2007 – 7:35 am

A reader of my blog entry conditional use of page cache in Rails pointed out some problems with the caching behaviour. Thanks Dan! The problem could occur because the “page cached” version of a page is served by the web server directly, and not by Rails, so it may have HTTP cache headers as defined […]

By Edward | Posted in , , | Comments (0)

rails page caching dynamic images

April 17, 2007 – 3:19 am

My exchange rate graph application dynamically generates graph images, but the data only change once per day, and it always shows the same default image when you open the page. So there is clearly some gain to be made from caching the images. I got quite confused and spent a while fiddling with various Rails […]

By Edward | Posted in , | Comments (0)

currency graphing

April 17, 2007 – 2:31 am

Over the weekend I did some long-awaited work on my exchange rate graph application. The most obvious change is that you can now choose a range of dates rather than always getting all the data. I decided to have just a fixed set of ranges to choose from, since it does what most people should […]

By Edward | Posted in , , , , | Comments (1)

soft coding

April 12, 2007 – 3:52 am

I enjoy Worse Than Failure for the quick laughs some days. But you can’t have a site that shows bad practices in IT, without thinking about what the good alternatives are. Yesterday they had a thought provoking discursive article on Soft Coding, which looks at the tension between hard coding values in a program versus […]

By Edward | Posted in | Comments Off

fonts for programmers

April 3, 2007 – 9:28 am

I believe a good choice of font can help programmers. Certain characteristics make for easier editing of code. Firstly, it has to be monospaced. This may make it look ‘primitive’ compared to nicely laid out text, but code isn’t text. It is much easier to understand the structure of code when indentations and characters line […]

By Edward | Posted in , | Comments (0)