Do you like self promotional blog posts? I sure do. In fact, that’s all I use this blog for. It’s all about me and my projects here.

So, along these lines, check out this site I developed with Zach Slow and Bryan Denman. It’s called Rename the Swine Flu, and it’s about changing the stupid name for this overhyped disease. Even the Indiana Pork Producers Association is down. Go have a look.

Hey, you know those sweet Emoji icons that people have unlocked lately for their iPhones? You can SMS some pretty sweet stuff, like this poo with eyes , or this beer: . Turns out you can also post them to Twitter. So I did some poking and prodding in the Twitter system and pulled out a bunch of interesting data. Check it out here: mytwitterweighsaton.com/emojicons.

I was wondering why Rappers on Twitter was getting flooded with submissions this morning. Turns out the talented Jean Grae tweeted about it:

It’s been about a month since my last Stupid Twitter Trick. Here’s a quick one: twitter.com/probablyTrue

probablyTrue posts randomly select bite-sized facts to Twitter from Wikipedia twice a day.

For my next Stupid Twitter Trick (prev) I would like to present My Twitter Weighs a Ton. It shows you what kind of words you tweet about most. It’s mostly pointless, but it’s not 100% pointless. It’s more like 95% pointless, 5% “Hmm”.

Here are the stats for MC Hammer. That guy loves and thanks a lot. And here are the top 10 words.

If you’re writing Rails apps on the regular a good amount of your time is going to be spent writing ActiveRecord validations. You’re probably also defining many of the core restrictions in the underlying SQL table structure. Perhaps, like me, you have grown to loath having to define your tables in your migrations, complete with :limit and :null => false options, only to have to repeat yourself in the models’ validations with a bunch of validates_length_of and validates_presence_of declarations.

The larger the table definition the worse it gets. Some strings can be null, some can’t. That’ll mean careful placement of :allow_blank => true in the models, attached to the necessary validates_length_of, :maximum => expressions. That kind of thing takes forever, but it’s necessary unless you want flies in your soup.

So here’s a Rake task to do this for you. It’s like an intern. It’s not perfect and you’ll probably want to tailor its deliverables before you call it a day, but it does a decent job.

Hey Rails developers,
Rails 2.2.2 totally broke the Exception Notifier. They took out the send!() method from ActiveSupport, which causes Exception Notifier to fail and put a lot of nutty /!\ FAILSAFE /!\ in your logs.

Get your patch here.

I’m not really that big into Twitter, but I am into the fact that MC Hammer posts a ton.

I also think that every stupid observation (“Huh, some rappers have Twitter accounts.”) deserves a website.