I'm Dave Gorman

Well, I certainly feel that way with my Facebook quest. Funny story, I got my account disabled for spamming. I think I'll have to think of a more ingenius way getting others to do my evil work for me.

V Review - Sunday

Sunday had the better line up as well as the first good band coming on later (read lay in).

We started with Mark Ronson who rolled out some guest apparences, followed by a subduded Rilo Killey (mainly due to under filling the JJB/Puma tent). Lily Allen was next who was too funny. I caught some on video, so keep an eye out on video.google.co.uk for those. We caught an underwhelming performance from the Manics whom we walked away from in about 10 minutes to catch Kasabian instead who rocked! Killers finished up with a truely rock and roll performance. The whole of the main stage was packed, and it was rocking.

Awesome.

VFestival Review - Saturday

All the good stuff

Foo Fighters play secret gig - We got to V early, sorted ourselves out with a drink then sat and waited for Juliet and the Licks to perform and got treated to the unknown band 606. Turns out, it was actually an acoustic set by the Foo's. Awesome.

Paolo Nutini was a surprise for me, sure I'd heard some of his stuff on the radio but he put out a really good performance and I really enjoyed his stuff. Especially his covers of "I want to be like you" from the Jungle Book and Mobys' "Natural Blues".

Kayne West rocked, and I caught a video of him doing a sample of the Verve's Bittersweet Symphony

Snow Patrol were brilliant and even rolled out Martha Wainwright to do a duet of "Set the Fire to the 3rd Bar" and we watched the Kooks wrap up. They were pretty good, but it doesn't help when they play new stuff on the closing set of a festival.

All the bad stuff

I'm sick of the heavyweight commercialism of these events. With day tickets, like what we had, there was no re-admittance. Really? You think during a whole day I might not want to leave the venue to perhaps get a coat out of my car? Or in our situation, food so we wouldn't be forced to pay for overpriced crap, like burgers that'd been cooked this morning but now 'warming' on the side. As luck would have it, they had the Caribbean stall back and you know you're getting quality chicken rice and peas and goat curry there!

It seemed ridiculous, the queues for drinks. I was waiting in a 5 deep queue at the bar in the Cider House and the place seemed so disorganised, with most of the taps out of cider and the bar staff running around like headless chickens. After waiting half an hour, I gave up!

Photos

Check out Saturdays photos.

"Were you in that video?"

I've done two Channel9 videos in the last 10 months or so, one back in October at Tech Ed and other in January after the 2007 Innovation Accelerator. Now and again when I meet a new person I get "your from the videos". I'm not greatly surprised as these are people who are coming to work with us, they've probably Googled 'web21c' and found my videos.

However, last night at the Facebook Developer party someone came and asked me that question that they was not affiliated with the project at all and didn't work at BT. Now, that was a surprise!

Robbie on Rails Part 3 - The Conflict of Redirect vs Render

RFC2616, 10.2.2 says that a HTTP response code of 201 should be the response when creating a new resource but from a user experience view, I'd want to be redirected to the new resource. However, this returns a 302 redirected code which goes against the RFC.

Hmm, this is a bit of a problem. We can render the new resource using "render :action => 'action'", but it doesn't show the URI to the user who may want this.

It's pretty frustrating, and for now I can't find a way around it, so I'm defaulting to user experience.

My Facebook Quest

I randomly put my surname into Facebook earlier and was surprised to see so many others with the same name, so my quest is to get those people together in a group and say hello. Maybe even go for a drink with the local ones.

Gotta love the web!

Robbie on Rails part 3

What a difference a day makes. Eastmad and I were pairing and decided to leave the strange error behind us and move on. We collectively had one the most frustrating days in the office because of that problem on Wednesday. As we moved on, we started to build up momentum and really started to see results. We also had a little help from Kerry who managed to help us with our issue we had the previous day.

Turns out the validates_associates function doesn't really do what we had expected it to do, but by using the key function validates_on_create we were able to roll our own data restrictions.

I have to say, I really enjoyed coding in Rails yesterday, long may it continue =)

Robbie on Rails Part 2

What a difference a day makes. I've spent probably three or four hours pairing on a stupid problem. Earlier today I was bouncing around looking forward to start building our rails app, but we hit a problem almost immediately. We had added a foreign key validation to one of the models and although the unit and functional tests passed, the actually web pages would not insert the row into the table.

Very infuriating.

Robbie on Rails

The last few weeks I've been involved in a new project at work that invovles building a portal and we went and had a play with Ruby on Rails. So far, so good. I must confess that I like the way that your application is structured in Rails, it stops a lot of ambiguity and I'm a big fan of the MVC pattern which Rails uses everywhere. It's the first pattern learnt at university, so I suppose there's a fond place for me there kinda like how I shop at the supermarket I used to stack shelfs at when I was 17! lol.

I bought a few books on rails for the office and I'm a bit disapointed with one of the books which claimed to be "agile" and hasn't shown me how to write a test and I'm upto chapter 6.

On another note, I've been asked to do a rails brown bag at work, I may use what this book has taught me, but introduce tests.

hmmm