As I've mentioned earlier, I'm experimenting with two DSCM providers: Mercurial and Bazaar. I'm currently using Bazaar, but will be switching to Mercurial soon to try it out. Joe Fiorini, the Faithful Geek, and I were hanging out on Saturday, talking about it, and he had the idea of recording a conversation on my DSCM experience for his "Conversations in Technology" podcast. He plugged his microphone in, and we had a nice conversation. As conversations do, we meandered a bit, got on some tangents, but it was fairly focused. I haven't listened to it, yet, but I'll post any comments if I notice anything crazy.

Currently, I put a validation step in the coupon savings new user registration that forces a user to wait until I can verify their email before giving them an account. This is annoying, as a captcha should work okay (I hope).

Dead Programmer's Society had an article on implementing captcha in rails backed by  Recaptcha. Recaptcha is cool, as it uses words from digitized books that couldn't be understood by an OCR. So, as people use Recaptcha on my site, they will be helping digitize books. Look at it; it is pretty cool.

Let's see how long it takes me to get it integrated.

[Update: Well, it appears that following the instructions in the blog post worked, and I have captcha up in the new user registration. I haven't uploaded it to Heroku, yet, as I want to test a bit more on my local and make sure it really does work.]

Gary Bernhardt says that Bazaar is different Mercurial, because it stores more metadata about the tree rather than just the state of the tree. This keeps you locked in a certain version of the repository, keeping them from being able to add metadata. Mercurial just stores the state of the tree, so you get a better chance of keeping up with the versions.

Interesting! I'll have to keep this in mind if Mercurial is as easy to use as Bazaar.

[Update: Gary has put a comment on this entry that gives more detail about what he means. Well worth reading it.]

Well, as I am writing stuff on my home computer, I need to step into the modern world and get into a DSCM. I put out an email to the rspec group to get people's opinions on what I should use. David Chelimsky likes mercurial and git, then bazaar came up. Git doesn't run on windows, so it is out. Mercurial and Bazaar are written in Python, so they'll run on my system. After reading this comparison of Mercurial and Bazaar (yeah, I know, it was written by the Bazaar people), I decided to give Bazaar a chance first.

If I find anything interesting, I'll post. I'm going to give Bazaar two weeks of use, then Mercurial two weeks of use.

We are having the first coding dojo for the Cleveland Ruby User Group

Mary sent me this editorial from the new york times. UGH! Here's the first paragraph:

At a New York or Los Angeles cocktail party, few would dare make a pejorative comment about Barack Obama’s race or Hillary Clinton’s sex. Yet it would be easy to get away with deriding Mike Huckabee’s religious faith.

So, the first part of his argument is that Obama's race (what is it, really?) and Hillary Clinton's sex (can I say the same thing?) is exactly the same as Mike Huckabee's choice of invisible friend. Yeah, that makes sense. That's like saying that mocking goth kids is the exact same as making fun of children with down syndrome (note: I'm not condoning the active mocking of this girl more like mocking this girl).

He then quickly switches to the standard argument of "look, everyone, we aren't burning people at the stake anymore. Evangelicals do some good." Here's a good quote:

Scorning people for their faith is intrinsically repugnant, and in this case it also betrays a profound misunderstanding of how far evangelicals have moved over the last decade. Today, conservative Christian churches do superb work on poverty, AIDS, sex trafficking, climate change, prison abuses, malaria and genocide in Darfur.

He starts off, of course, with making a statement as though it is a fact: "Scorning people for their faith is intrinsically repugnant..." Really? Why is this such a self-obvious fact? Explain to me why scorning people because they have a leftover from the invisible friends of childhood is "intrinsically repugnant."

I love the line "...how far evangelicals have moved over the last decade." Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize they had much such strides in their humanitarianism OVER THE LAST DECADE!

He goes on to explain how evangelicals have FINALLY started putting fighting poverty over abortion as their issue of choice. WOW! Thanks, christies! As he says, they used to be mean (Falwell describing AIDS as "God's judgement against promiscuity"), but now, oh man, they are so nice and interested in helping people now!

He then goes on to talk about Rick Warren and how fantastic it is that he and his megachurch are finally getting around to helping people. I wonder what percentage of their profits are used in pure humanitarian aid and what percentage are used to further their own aims of poisoning the minds of our youth.

Well, the rest of the column is just the same old attempts to give examples of how the christies are doing good and we should be thankful for it. We've heard these arguments before, and they follow the same pattern: give examples of how there are some nice christee organizations, not bothering to mention all the of the negative that is done, all the while ignoring the secular organization doing exactly the same task without the negative overhead of an invisible friend telling you that you have the truth over the person you are trying to help.

Interested in Coupon Tracker, but not sure if you really want to use it? Watch this screencast of entering a coupon into Coupon Tracker to see just how easy it is.

Here's the previous entries for this topic

part I, part II, part III

Well, as I mentioned in part I and part II, I'm building an application track my coupon savings, specifically Entertainment Book coupons, called Coupon Tracker. I've got a couple people signed up, but there is still lots of room for people to try it out. Just go on and go sign up.

Today, I got a day to work on it, so I spent the day finishing up my specs for remove, as well as adding some specs for better user feedback if a coupon can't be saved for some reason. I also discovered the form.date_select helper, which creates a nice set of drop-down selections for choosing a date. Before this, the date field was a text box, which makes it way to easy to put in a date wrong. I also added a What's New page, along with some other stuff. I also got to play a bit with some unnecessary AJAX with script.aculo.us to make a title pulsate a bit. Here's the list from the what's new page of what I did today:

2008-02-02

• What's New (this page) added
• Added the ability to delete a coupon. Just click the x next to the coupon in the list
• Put some validation feedback on the coupon to give feedback on why the coupon wasn't saved
• Changed "Date Used" input to an easier input format (drop-down selections)
• Sorted coupons from newest to oldest
• Added header to show how many coupons for how many users we track

I'm learning a lot of rails as I go along, so I'm definitely making this well worth my while.

I also recorded a screencast of using Coupon Tracker to see how easy it is right now.

Every year, Mary and I get an entertainment book for christmas. A few years ago, I decided to track how much I saved. Being a programmer, I decided to over complicate it, so, instead of using Excel, I wrote a javascript-based solution for a blogger-based blog. Basically, each blog entry was call to a javascript function that saved the data. The blog template had a little snippet of javascript that would sum up the savings for each blog entry's javascript call. It worked great. I think I saved around $150.

[Update: I just loaded up the old one on blogger, and it says that I saved $125.40, not quite $150. Also, if you are interested, you can look at the javascript in the page to see how I did it: nothing too impressive, though, especially with how mature the javascript implementations are these days.]

One thing I also noticed was that I was driven to use the entertainment book more. The next year, I didn't track the savings, and we hardly used it at all. I think that seeing a running total made me strive to take the total higher.

As I mentioned in part I, I am creating an application for this as a learning experience in Rails. Well, after working off and on for the last couple weeks, I have a working version of Coupon Tracker, a multi-user coupon tracking website that allows you to enter coupons with a description and tags. You have your own personal savings list, along with a tag cloud for them. The tags can be used to categorize them however you want. For example, why not have a tags Restaurants, Shopping, Entertainment, etc. Maybe you also want a set of tags that describe how likely you would go back. The sky is the limit.

If you would like to use it, please go to Coupon Tracker and register as a new user. Send me an email (when you register, the page has my email address) with your user name, and I will validate you as a new user. After that, just come back, login and start entering your savings. I would appreciate any and all feedback, as well, considering possible features.

One thing that I would like to add is a pledging piece: users can pledge to donate a certain percentage of their savings to charity. The site would track how much the user has pledged and how much the user has contributed.

It is still in its infancy, feature-wise, but I am constantly adding new features to get the site completely usable. Currently, the feature set includes the following:

• Multi-user
• Enter new coupon
• Support for tags
• List entered coupons and total savings

The list of features currently being prioritized for addition:

• Delete a coupon
• Edit a coupon
• Filter list by tags
• Custom sorting of coupon list
• Export to CSV
• Integration with charitable donation sites / paypal to donate part of your savings

Pastie http://pastie.caboo.se/

Pledgie http://www.pledgie.com/

I got an account with Heroku to host the rails app that I'm working on (a coupon tracker), and it is awesome! I have been developing on my local, then uploading the files to their site when I have my specs passing and my brief manual tests pass.

There was on gotcha, though. I recently added user authentication, which meant I had a bunch of files in different directories that needed to be uploaded. I could have re-imported my whole application, but that flushes your database, as it treats it like the initial setting up of the application. This sucks, as I'm using the app to actually track my real savings with the Entertainment Book.

I contacted their support about this. My suggestion was to allow me to upload a tarball into a root somewhere and have it expand it with overwrite. I got a reply back from James Lindenbaum there pretty promptly. He agreed that importing the application wouldn't work exactly for me, but he suggested the following:

- in the rake window, run "db:data:dump", this will create a db/data.yml file with your data in it
- download db/data.yml
- import your new code
- upload data.yml to db/
- in the rake window, run "db:data:load"

Well, I just did it, and it worked great! This is also a great way to just do a simple refresh, in case I've missed some stuff.

So, all-in-all, I'm very happy with Heroku, especially with their support.