If you look down the page a bit you will notice that I was having a go at the beast forum for allowing spam to remain on the site for a while (its still there). I looked at my own blog today only to realise that I’d got spammy comments and not realised. I’ve now tightened the filtering and made it so that comments have to be moderated before posting, which is fine because I’m not exactly overflowing with comments. Anyway, I got the metaphysical slap on the hand for being uppity.

I guess I should be at least somewhat flattered that my blog has been found by someone, even if that someone just wants to write meaningless garbage in my comments.

I’m participating in Rails Rumble 2008 I got in a bit late because I only came across it the other day. I’m a bit of hermit when it comes to development so its a great idea participating in an event and getting to know some people. The project is currently top secret but once its finished I’ll open source it.

The other thing I’m going to try and do is record really closely the steps that I take during development. So I can post the videos as podcasts (ala railscasts), but also so I can go back and evaluate my own processes. I haven’t done anything like this in the past but if it goes well then maybe I’ll make it a regular thing.

beast.caboo.se is just loaded with spam.

Which is a shame because it shows the flaws of an otherwise great little application. For those that don’t know beast is a small forum implementation done in ruby on rails, some really nice features in ~500 lines of code. Sadly it doesn’t deal adequately with the realities of the internet. My problem isn’t so much that spam got posted, its that no-one has bothered to clean it off. If you’re going to run a forum you have a responsibility to ensure that it is maintained. If you can’t do it all yourself find some additional volunteers to help moderate the content, or develop a plugin to filter spam.

UPDATE: I notified both of them via email, while I recieved a reply from Josh, over 2 months later and still nothing has been done about the spam. Whatever respect I had for Josh Grobel and Rick Olsen aka Technoweenie is now gone. Josh argued that the forum isn’t used anymore. My response to that would be to delete the spam and lock the forums so you don’t have to deal with it anymore.

This word can mean a lot of things. The reason its currently in my headspace is ongoing discussions/actions to do with the amount of resources that are devoted to the project that I’m currently working on. My background is one of just getting things done, I do things as quickly as possible and then move onto the next item on the list. This occasionally gets me into trouble as I overtax MY resources. Not only this but pushing to hard also causes my collegues issues.

At the end of the day you can only get so much done, feeling stressed all the time because you’re pushing to hard doesn’t necessarily help you get things done faster it just burns you out. So yeah, make sure that there are sufficient resources allocated to a project if you have to meet a given deadline, and if there isn’t then its important to talk to the client and make sure more resources are allocated.

While my internet has been off (its now finally working) I’ve been using a local Network Cafe. They get a bit filled up with junk because they’re not locked down very well, I think limewire is on most if not all of the computers. Now I’m not a big fan of limewire (it has something to do with it always asking you to upgrade to the pro version). Out of curiosity I usually check what other people have been downloading. People download some weird things, my favorite find was a bunch of christian music. If it was you and by some one in a million chance you’re reading this; do me a favor and think about it long and hard. iTunes has PLENTY of christian music you can buy.