Xavier Defrang

I'm not likely to update this site in the near future.

You may follow my sporadic updates on twitter or check out my open source code on github.

I have finally released that plugin I have been hapilly using for almost a couple of years now.

Say hello to acts_as_tree_with_dotted_ids!

I'm usually all for readable instead of "clever" code but I can't help to find this Ruby* one-liner pretty sexy:

This cute piece parses the given text and extract all "Key: Value" pairs into an associative array.

This is the kind of simple joy that Ruby brings. Right in the middle of the implementation of some larger feature, you figure out you need to parse some text, you just write a single line of code and it just works.
This is worth mentioning because It does not happen that often, to say the least. :)

* this code requires Rails for the &:symbol shorthand to work.

Because directly invoking methods on objects is so 2000...

“La La La” by The Bird and the Bee

Tomorrow: block all incoming traffic on the firewall, lock access to versioning system and go to Brussels crying like a baby to beg this "government" of ours to let me pollute at a reasonable price.

Enough with the sarcasms. The thing that sickens me the most is that nobody dares to teach those moaners a basic lesson in world economy.
If they want to get a grip over oil prices, they should either start drilling for rotten dinosaurs in their backyard, or enlist in the USMC to wage war on more oil producing countries...

Awesome collection of 300+ old school house and rave tracks.

Bonus: a whole bunch of video of UK raves from the early 90ies.

If you like the ligne claire, you only have one week left to visit the Ever Meulen exhibition in Leuven.

I'm so glad I spotted this a couple of days ago on the door of Plaizier.

Awesome 27 minutes long interview with the late James Stinson of Drexciya, recorded a few months before he passed away. This was his first and last radio interview and it's like he knew it.

Things have been very quiet down here and hectic everywhere else. As a proof that this is no lame excuse, my first Rails patch was just committed into the trunk.

For the record, it addresses an issue in ActiveResource which could not locate resources defined in nested modules.

I've been using ARes a lot in my current project in which I've built a rich client-side API packaged into a Rails plugin. To be honest, I'm into a love-hate relationship with ARes and things were not as smooth as initially advertised.

I've experienced some severe hiccups with nested resources, inflected collection names, attributes vs prefix hashes and some nasty XML (un)marshalling oddities. If I find some time, I will document here the problems I encountered during this wild ride...

Even though it has given me some serious headaches, I still think this REST approach is better than dealing with a huge black box supposedly implementing some funky flavor of SOAP.
ARes is not totally mature in its current state but the size of its code base still allows a mere mortal to dive into it and see what's happening.

If the popularity of REST services keep on rising, ARes will need some real refactoring and internal plumbing work to bring it to the same level as ActiveRecord in the ORM field.

The bottom line is: ARes is a neat library you may want to play with but you must be warned that things are not as simple as they seem and it may require some significant tweaking on both sides of the wire...