Angus Thinks

Month: February 2010

  • Rails Migrations and Schemas

    • A schema.rb file is typically a ruby script containing a call to the ActiveRecord::Schema.define method.
    • A rails migration is a ruby class which inherits from ActiveRecord::Migration and contains a method called up

    The useful fact that I realized only after doing some ultimately unnecessary work today is that because the schema file contains a method call, it’s actually easier to extract the information from it than with a migration (which needs SQLEditor to figure out a class name and then call the up method)

    Hopefully this new work will appear soon in SQLEditor

  • Tea and Coffee and newspaper articles

    So another one of these articles, shock horror, some public body has spent thousands of pounds buying hot drinks for their staff.

    Clearly, the whole lot of them should be hanged  …

    except, if you look at the figures quoted, the outrage breaks down:

    From the article,

    440 staff and a total bill of 70,000 over 3 years.

    Assuming a 48 week working year for everyone for 3 years, this means that the amount spent per week per person is

    (70000/(48*3)) = 486 per week

    486/440 = 1.11 per person.

    Yes, just over 1 pound per person, per week!

    Outrage, I say, outrage!

    Ignoring for a moment, the fact that visitors apparently got hot drinks too for the money; given the large amounts of money and the vitally important decisions that a group like the GHA makes, making the right decisions is important. If spending a few pounds a week on hot drinks makes a key decision even slightly better, then it’s worth it.

    The same is true of biscuits, snacks and even meals. Anything that improves the performance of the organisation at such a low cost is worth doing.

    So as far as I’m concerned, this is money well spent.

  • Best Mobile Broadband?

    Happened to be in a major supermarket’s electronics section the other day and was told that the “3” network offers the best mobile broadband.

    Although oddly all of the O2 retail hardware boxes were sold out, plenty of “3” boxes to be found.

    Unfortunately no reasons were offered by the employee as to this blanket statement.

    EDIT:

    Except this mobile broadband Group Test at the Register proves him absolutely right:

    The clear winner is 3.