I’m talking to Franny. I like talking to people like Franny.

It’s dark, so I suppose I should get off the computer and do something useful.

I haven’t checked my voicemail today. I haven’t done any real work. I did kinda poke at some fun stuff, but I really didn’t accomplish anything.

Of course, it is Sunday. I really should let myself have a break now and again.

I think I’ll make a big cup of decaf and go play the cello.

I shaved my legs this morning, and my chest. I feel more like a girl than I have in a while. It’s a small relief. I looked in the mirror and my posture changed a bit. I feel phyiscally better than I have in some weeks. It’s small stuff, but it makes a difference.

I don’t talk about this much. It’s partly my parents — they make comments about squeekingknute and they’re not that positive. They don’t knock summerkid much, thankfully. That would make me even more upset.

I peeked at Venus Envy this afternoon. I nearly cried right there. It wasn’t any one cartoon, either. It pokes at my psyche in funny ways that aren’t always comfy.

Carrie called, wigging out and wanting to come home early. She gets homesick so easily. I started dumping, too and it wasn’t so hot. We ended up hanging up for a while, she thought for a bit, I slept. My late nights this past week caught up to me. We talked again. My cell battery died. That was a blessing, because the ‘net phone had better quality at that point. We hashed and talked for a long time. I haven’t had that long a conversation in ages. We get wrapped up in our lives, and don’t talk much. I internalize everything and tend to hide anyway. It’s not good. I feel all clogged up.

I feel more sane now. It’s getting on toward 11:30, and I think I’ll go take a walk and get my cell charger. It’s hot in here and I’m drinking tea.

I’ve been working with a fellow from Portland on getting his Swiki setup, where you can get a business card page for $25/year into some sanity. That means co-existing with everything else on the server, not taking over port 80, having sane URLs that you’d be proud to put on a business card, and being easy to administer. In addition, hiding the “list of Swikis” is important.

It turns out to be fairly easy. Start up the Swiki on port 8000 or what have you, get it running. Then set up Apache, which runs on port 80, thus:` <VirtualHost *:80>

DocumentRoot /somewhere

ServerName yoursitename

RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule ^/(admin|schemes)(.*)$ http://localhost:8000/$1$2 [P]

RewriteRule ^/$ http://localhost:8000/MainSwikiPage [P]

RewriteRule ^/(.+)$ http://localhost:8000/$1 [P]

</VirtualHost> `

We slept outside last night, like we have several times this week. It’s getting warm enough to do that on a regular basis, though it’s by no means hot at night. I think it’s in the mid forties lately. I haven’t checked.

Going to sleep, I saw three or four shooting stars.

Waking up in the middle of the night, the milky way was this almost blindingly bright stripe painted down the middle of the sky. I love that it’s that dark here, so that it can be the brightest thing in the sky.

I sleep really well during the darker phases of the moon. I feel rested and energized, though a little groggy still just like when I’m camping. A little warm liquid should help, though.

---

I am so glad to have heard from Kathleen. I’ve been missing hearing anything.

---

Marina, sorry for skipping out on you last night. I’m spending time with Carrie, though, before she leaves for Quo Vadis on Tuesday. I really will be around to help at some point, though.

I just talked to Dawn for the first time in over a year. It’s so bizarre to be reading about accounting for one’s business, and then instantly got back in time four years in your head, thinking of old conversations and how things were.

Strange.

A copy of The Last Unicorn, the 1984 printing, softback and in perfect condition? Free? Sure!

Here’s a small prop to LG for making a dandy small, cheap cell phone. I got a TM510. I’m happy. I paid $50 on ebay, and it’s like new. It’s text-message beep is a little quiet for me, but I’ll live.

I’ve added David Heinemeier Hansson’s comments on the ActiveRecord annoyances to the original post.

Jessica just called from New York, with Liz in the background, and asks me (out of the blue, but I can guess why) to put “leni riefenstal” into Google. 599 results. She wants to know if she has the spelling right, a sort of bet from Liz that has to be settled right now. She didn’t. 599 for “leni riefenstal”, 78,000 for “leni reifenstahl”. Jessica now owes Liz a kiss, instead of vice versa.

As an addendum, there’s also the fact that if you misspell it “leni reifenstahl”, you get 1,830. It wasn’t even the popular misspelling.

I’ve been using ActiveRecord for a while now. I’m writing a financial application with it — which I suppose is the canonical example of a database application that SQL was designed for. Specifically:

• It has many 1:N relations.
• It makes extensive use of grouping and aggregation for everyday data
• It routinely works with many thousands of records, even in a small system.

All of which makes ActiveRecord break into a cold sweat.

ActiveRecord, at the moment, handles 1:N relationships with N+1 queries — one for the main record, and one for each sub-record, indexed by ID. That gets really slow when you have a thousand records to display.

ActiveRecord, since it reads the column names from the database system itself, can’t automatically infer the presence of a virtual column such as an account balance, which is calculated as the sum of a field from a joined table. In fact, there’s no way to do that at all without dropping back to SQL, and there’s no place to place a join in the standard methods. Meaning you have to jump under the hood, into the greasy parts of the engine.

The temptation to say def balance transactions.inject(0.0) { |acc,e| acc += e.amount } end is really tempting, but it’s too slow.

My other problem is how it doesn’t integrate with Ruby that well. It doesn’t feel like the standard library.

ActiveRecord takes over inheritance: ActiveRecord classes must inherit from ActiveRecord::Base, and worse than that, it treats indirect subclasses differently: if I have an inheritance of Payment < Transaction < ActiveRecord::Base, then it assumes there’s a column type, which will contain a value NULL or the string Payment, referring to whether to instantiate the parent or child type — instead of using a table payments by default, and letting me change that. This integrates really poorly with PostgreSQL’s way of doing object orientation, and in this case, a Payment is a kind of Transaction, but the difference is semantic, not coded into the database. I’d like to be able to inherit the behaviors from the parent — not have them change on me because I’m inheriting.

ActiveRecord is also very hard to debug without intimately knowing its structure due the the massive amount of eval magic involving strings calculated elswhere in the code.

ActiveRecord does a decent job of type guessing, but only for basic types and classes-as-tables, not for anything resembling a derivative of a basic type.

So, what I’d do to ActiveRecord, and may do when I get this app a bit further along:

• Make ActiveRecord::Base a module designed for mixin. We have Enumerable which adds pretty massive functionality to a class — why not an ActiveRecord mixin to make your class automagically database-enabled?
• Eliminate the inheritance magic.
• Use define_method whenever possible.

Take this with a grain of salt. I’m working with a pre-existing application here, porting to ActiveRecord. I’m working with data with One True Way, according to six hundred years of accounting theory, to be represented. I also have a habit and a fondness for taking systems and bending them past the point where they’re still flexible. It’s why I use Ruby.

<a name='20040527'></a>

A response from David Heinemeier Hansson

Ahh, great to get a set of concerns like that. Allow me to elaborate my position on each of the charges.

> 1:N relationships with N+1 queries

This is exactly why Active Record allows for an intimate relationship with SQL. And why it uses SQL for conditions snippets and more. Active Record really doesn’t want you to forget about SQL because SQL is exactly the right answer to a lot of questions. This is one of them. Active Record takes the drudgery out of doing manual SQL for a ton of queries (in Basecamp it’s around 85-95% of the queries that are automated).

So when you encounter a case such as this, you just drop down to SQL. If AR gives the intention that SQL is fooling around with the engine that’s were the mistake is being made. It’s more like choosing manual gears on a car that runs on automatic rather that popping the hood. So I think this is mostly a case of managing expectations. Active Record shouldn’t give the expectation that you’ll never have to touch SQL again. That’s an illusion and many ORMs have been build and crumbled on that illusion.

Taking Active Record to a manual gear on this entails using all the wonderful flexibility put into the ORM through the power that is Ruby. The solution is called “data piggybacks” and works like this:

    `
class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
   def self.find_all_with_authors
     find_by_sql(
       “SELECT posts.*, people.name as author_name ” +
       “FROM posts, person ” +
       “WHERE posts.author_id = people.id”
     )
   end
end
    `

    Now you can do:

    `
  for post in Post.find_all_with_authors
     puts “#{post.title} was written by #{post.author_name}”
  end
    `

This bends the regular restriction that post objects will only have attributes equal to those in the table definition for that class. Hence the piggyback term.

This is of course a simple example, which you can make more elaborate as your requirements dictate it. But it does show how you can turn n2 (or n3 or n*5) type queries back into n. This is mostly important for overview screens that needs to present this data together.

I could imagine some formal support in Active Record for the piggyback approach, but I’ve found that outside toy examples, like the one above, I really do like to drop to SQL for queries like this. The only reason you’re going to SQL is to tweak performance, so it’s often you more interested in control than convenience in these cases. But again, I’m certainly open to formal piggyback schemes.

> ActiveRecord takes over inheritance

It was an early decision that ActiveRecord objects wouldn’t be able to live in isolation from the ORM. This follows directly from the Active Record pattern and is one of the main differences between that and the Data Mapper approach. By tying your business objects to Active Record you loose flexibility in swapping in another ORM, but at the same time gain a incredible ease of use and convenience. Active Record objects accepts this dependency by using the association/aggregation macros (has_many, etc), overwriting callbacks (before_save, etc), and implementing validation.

So in my opinion there’s little to gain from a mix-in, when you’re writing code that formulates a specific dependency anyway. Once you’ve accepted that, there’s no way to “mix-out”.

What I’d rather mix-in would be the shared functionality between payment and transaction if you don’t want it to use an explicit inheritance hierarchy. That was actually exactly what I did with todo lists and todo items on Basecamp. Both needed functionality to control list movement (move this item/list higher or lower or insert a new item/list). This behavior was kept in a List module that was then mixed into both Active Record classes. Worked very well.

> ActiveRecord is also very hard to debug.

I recognize that especially the association/aggregation macros are pretty hard to debug. But you’ve yourself remedied that with the module_eval debugger where you get a perfect view into which methods are added by the different macros and what their internals look like.

The other parts of Active Record is more easily debugged by having a look at the logging that ships with the package. All SQL statements generated and executed by Active Record are logged and their run time is reported (poor man’s profiler).

The newer versions of Active Record also implements a considerably improved exception system with more saying and relevant exceptions raised.

> ActiveRecord does not [do a decent job of type guessing] for

anything resembling a derivative of a basic type.

This just changed with the inclusion of the aggregation module, which brings much needed value object support to Active Record (allowing for a “fine-grained” label). You can now use Active Record objects as aggregations of value objects such as Temperature, Money, Address, and others that doesn’t need an identity (such objects are often called entity objects, which is exactly what Active Record-based objects are).

Example (as it will be in the final version): def Account < ActiveRecord::Base composed_of :amount, :class_name => “Money” end

The amount attribute, which is just represented by an integer in the database, will now be presented as a Money object and can be assigned as such:

  `
account.amount = Money.new(20, “USD”)
account.amount.exchange_to(“DKK”) # returns Money.new(150, “DKK”)
  `

  > Take this with a grain of salt. I’m working with a

pre-existing application here

Active Record is certainly better suited for new applications than for wrapping around existing structures. The naming, id, and class schemes work much better when you’re following the form that Active Record is most comfortable with. So again, trade a bit of flexibility, get ease of use.

It would however not be unreasonable to suggest improvements to Active Record that would allow it to be more easily used for legacy applications. It’s just that I’ve certainly picked sides and tweaked ease of use towards new applications, so suggestions that this awkward probably won’t be acccepted.

Thank you, Ari, for bringing these concerns out. This allows me to better formulate what Active Record is and isn’t and why.

(I’ve posted this response to Loud Thinking as well)

David Heinemeier Hansson,

[http://www.instiki.org/](http://www.instiki.org/) — A No-Step-Three Wiki in Ruby

[http://www.basecamphq.com/](http://www.basecamphq.com/) — Web-based Project Management

[http://www.loudthinking.com/](http://www.loudthinking.com/) — Broadcasting Brain

[http://www.nextangle.com/](http://www.nextangle.com/) — Development & Consulting Services

A response

All very good points. When it comes down to it, it’s a difference in expectations, mostly, and in coding style.

Debugging is still something that keeps biting me — and since ActiveRecord isn’t a perfect fit for what I’m doing, I do have to get into the guts. I think of modifiability for other purposes an important design feature, so that’s why it bothers me.

Having the name ActiveRecord makes me think it’s the One True Implementation of the pattern — the one-size-fits-all, ultra-flexible version. Just as I’d expect Enumerable to be the one implementation of Enumerable, I expect the same of ActiveRecord. You choose an ambitious title.

All told, ActiveRecord is solidly implemented. What it was designed to do, it does well.

I look forward to the _with_parts accessors and the composed_of macros. They’ll solve some of the problems neatly.

More coming.

---

Responses? Comments? Email me. I’ll post them here if you say I can and they’re reasonable.

So I bought a CopperEdge-150 DSLAM on eBay for a very good price.

It didn’t come with the password.

CopperMountain is widely regarded as tight-lipped unless you have a service contract costing five figures with them.

So I broke in.

The CE-150 has two serial ports: the CRAFT port, for management, and the Diagnostic port, which is the equivalent to the console on a PC.

It has a pretty spiffy BIOS, based on vxWorks, so there’s something to work with.

First, I plugged my serial cable plus null modem adaptor plus gender changer into the Diagnostic port.

Then, found the IP address: ifShow, and looked through the output and found 63.171.192.23, with a netmask of 0xffffffe0

On my workstation, I set up an FTP server, added a temporary IP address to my machine: ip addr add dev eth0 63.171.192.24/27, and got to work.

On the CE-150, hostAdd “betelgeuse”,“63.171.192.24” sets up a host entry, then netDevCreate “betelgeuse:”,“betelgeuse”,1 sets up an FTP session device.

Then, cd “/CE200/SYSTEM”, and iam “username”,“password” for logging into the FTP server.

Then, the magic copy “CONFIG.TGZ”.“betelgeuse:cf.tgz”.

Voila, I have the config file, a gzipped text file (not a TAR file!). In it is an encrypted (hashed, I suspect) copy of the admin password.

So in the morning, I’ll have to edit the config file, re-gzip, and copy it back. With luck, it’ll take a blank. We’ll see.

(The next morning) No, no go. I was trying too hard. Just rm “CONFIG.TGZ”.

Playing the cello just now, I got some of the worst cramps in my left hand that I’ve ever had. I’ve had cramps like that twice, and never before while playing the cello. Ow.

On the other hand, I can play the Suzuki etude now, decently. Still a couple screeky bits to smooth out, but not bad.

</body>

I played Ultimate Frisbee for an hour and a half yesterday. Now, I can hardly walk since my calves hurt so much. They feel like rocks I can’t even stretch without pain.

On the other hand, I got the DSLAM working part way today. Now I need to find the software for it, since it didn’t come along with it. Sigh. There’s always one more part that you have to get from Cisco.

I think I’ll test the Copper Mountain one tomorrow, since I think I have all the parts.

So much to do.

I do believe that Vruba now approaches Phil Greenspun in my approval of travel stories with pictures.