links for 2008-03-11

French fries.

Specifically, one of:

1. “home fries”

2. Del Taco fries

3. “chips” with vinegar in the British style

“The customer is always wrong” might have been a better title for my Pidgin development team hit-piece. It just seems like the core developers of a popular open source project have so lost track of what they were doing that they started taking cues from Microsoft. It’s . . . disgusting, even infuriating at times.

The Ruby/DBI overview is interesting, by the way, at first glance. I’ll be giving it more of a look. Until now (thanks to the generally abysmal state of module documentation in the Ruby world) I’ve been operating on the assumption that the best way to figure out how to work with a database from within Ruby is to use documentation for Perl/DBI, and troubleshoot when that causes problems. This might give me some better insight into how it works.

Now, if only someone provided something like this for the Ruby/Postgres module. . . .

Aside from some minor issues with performance of the implementation, poor documentation is my only real problem with Ruby. Within its niche, of course, Ruby’s performance is generally quite acceptable — but it is limited to that niche in large part by the fact of its performance limitations. Library documentation is a somewhat more significant problem, though.