A data corruption bug in fact!

The last two days have seen a few emails roll in regarding mysterious bugs where table rows and columns would jump about randomly. The problem was that Rails allows an object to have destroy called on it twice. And it would then execute any callbacks… twice. This meant that a bunch of headers would end up with the same position value (since that was updated as a callback). This was most unfortunate, and once fixed should keep the problem from cropping up again!

A bit of the edge of one of my SD cards broke off my camera and got stuck in the SD card slot of my D80. The camera flashed “CHA” in the info window and I couldn’t push my SD card all the way. This was quite sad.

Solution involved a flashlight, needles (at first, but they weren’t long enough) and finally bent paperclips. Thankfully things are fixed and life is good once again!

I’ve been using resource_fu to make routes in Rails not stupid. I noticed the author tried to get a patch into core but it appears to have died out. I also noticed that someone else wrote a plugin called inferred_routes that does the same thing, so I’m going to link to all three in the hopes of adding some Google juice to them.

That being said, I think the renaming of resource route helpers and just miscellaneous weirdness due to the need to accommodate nested and polymorphic resources is a serious Rails wart.

I took a look through the code for both so I could make a meaningful comparison, and I would say that resource_fu is the way to go. It uses method aliasing instead of overriding which I think is a bit more future-safe (though the changes are invasive enough that a change to Rails core will break both), and the two do the same things to infer parents… I think. That being said, resource_fu also has a number of undocumented features, so its something to keep in mind should you be worried about code bloat.

So there have been various people asking around about how to remove the default folders (Like Pictures and Videos) from Windows Photo Gallery. I noticed that deleting the folders (right click on the folder, and then delete) removes them from the listing, and moves the folder into the recycle bin. When you restore the folders from the recycle bin they aren’t readded!

So its a passable work around. If one of the folders are too big to fit in your Recycle Bin, move the contents of the folder somewhere else, and do the above, then after restoring move the contents back. Yay Photo Gallery!

(The ironic thing here is that as far as I can tell, they made the default Pictures and Videos folder special cases that you can’t remove, which is a decision I really can’t understand at all. Bleh, Vista why do you tease me so?)

So, I engaged in conspicuous consumption and got a sweet X61 tablet. I’ve been meaning to put together a list of thoughts.

Thoughts:

• Mouse gestures are super helpful.
• The “adjust screen orientation based on physical tilt of laptop”/AutoRotate is too finicky.
• You NEED to install the wacom drivers if you want stuff to work in Photoshop. Boo.

Stuff I Installed:

• Windows Vista - XP has pretty lackluster tablet support. And Ubuntu, well… at least my wireless works there.
• Geckotip - basically gets the Windows tablet input panel-thingee to recognize Firefox (so password fields are recognized as password fields, and the URL bar gets some nifty URL buttons like .com and so on)
• Wacom Driver - Like I said above, required to get pressure sensitivity in Photoshop. I wish someone had told me about that much earlier
• Microsoft Experience Pack for TabletPC - some cool utilities that ended up being nifty. There appear to be two: Experience Pack for Vista and Experience Pack for XP.
  • Ink Desktop for Vista - The XP one has something cool, an Ink Desktop, that does not appear in the Experience Pack but is available separately. (This seems ridiculously finicky. I put up with it, but it likes to leave weird artifacts on your desktop)
    PS: seems you could use Ave’s Desktop Effects to do something similar. Haven’t tried it due to the time-limitedness, but hopefully it sucks less than the Microsoft one.
  • There’s also the Microsoft Origami Experience Pack with Sudoku. You know, in case the new games in Vista weren’t enough!
  • Tablet PC PowerToys - There’s a whole mess of interesting apps.
• Wallpaper Gyro - There are two ways to deal with the fact that wallpapers don’t rotate with you when you change screen orientation: find a new wallpaper, or find new software. Wallpaper Gyro rotates or swaps wallpapers when you rotate your screen.