Halogen Labs

It starts out simple enough. You’re building a webapp, and you want people with a certain role (read: Administrator) to have access to a separate “back-end” part of the system. They have to do different stuff, so it makes sense to make a separate administrator interface. A classic example of this is something like WordPress, where you have a totally different area of the website to sign into, and you have a myriad of different tasks you can perform.

At first, it seems to make sense — administrators have various goals they want to accomplish, like mass-approving comments or creating a draft of an article. The part of a blog that faces the reader is usually geared towards reading content, not making changes to it.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about something that I remember hearing a while back from Edward Tufte. The phrase is “administrative debris,” and Ryan Tomayko wrote about it a year ago.

Anyway, I’ve had the itch to finally write my own blogging app for personal use, and I’m following some of the ideas that Ryan writes about — things like using in-place editing, and making content look identical between reading/editing.

The nice thing about having your content be your interface is that it’s a lot quicker to make changes. Because it’s less painful, I’ll be more likely to write.

• I don’t have to remember the secret admin URL.
• When I’m logged in, I don’t have to parse a cluttered admin interface.

I’ll post more thoughts about design of the project when I get closer to actually having it live.

I recently installed the wonderful test_benchmark plugin for Rails, and ran it against our code. I was surprised to find that we had a couple unit tests that were taking 4 seconds to complete.

Digging in, I found code that was doing the following on a time range:


range = # .. a time range 24 hours "wide"
start_time = range.min
end_time = range.max


I looked up the API for Range, and there are no .min and .max methods defined, but they live in enumerable. So what’s going on here?

A little more digging:


>> count = 0; r.max { |a,b| count +=1; a <=> b }
=> Fri Apr 03 20:07:29 UTC 2009
>> count
=> 88200


Oops. 88,200 comparisons for a time range. Switching the code in the test and the class under test to use .first() and .last() instead of .min() and .max(), and I shaved off a cool 8 seconds from rake test

Is our beloved Mac text editor, TextMate, dead? The TM Blog hasn’t updated since the middle of August, 2008.

The latest cutting-edge version is 1.5.8, r1498, and it’s been a while since that’s updated, too.

Has TextMate died, or has it just reached a maturity level where it doesn’t need updates and new features as often? Whatever happened to the fabled TextMate 2.0? Last I read about 2.0 was back in 2006 when Alan mentioned 2.0 would require Leopard. Not even a peep about 2.0.

What’s going on?

Edit: I found a TextMate 2.0 FAQ, which indicates that TM2 was actively being developed, at least towards the end of November 2008. Hopefully we’ll see something in 2009.