The SquizLog

Writing with Stones

What a beautiful stone wall! My family is now lucky enough to have this wall in our back yard. The bloke who built it is obviously a master of his craft.

What does our wall have to do with writing? The answer is to be found in "Weinberg on Writing", a thought-provoking book about how to write using the metaphor of building a fieldstone wall.

Jerry Weinberg addresses the problem of writer's block by showing how metaphorical stones can be continually collected. Each stone may or may not end up as part of a published work. The process of collecting stones typically contributes to ongoing work on a number of potential finished books, articles, reports or even blog entries. The trick is to always be ready to write. Carry a pen and notebook everywhere so that ideas can be readily captured. Later on the stones can be organised, perhaps eventually being crafted together in a finished wall to be admired. Or perhaps not. Stones may be thrown away during the editing process.

I think the Fieldstone Method employs a useful metaphor that keeps the writer productive. Of the many lessons in this book worth heeding my favourite is Jerry's first: "Never attempt to write something you don't care about". After all, a fine stone wall is built by a master craftsman with passion. Writing should be similar.

Offline Rails API Doc

What do why's movies have in common with RDoc?

Well, they both deal with the Ruby programming language and they both formed a part of a talk at last night's Sydney Rails meetup. Apparently Tim Lucas was concerned that his RDoc material may be a little dry so he interspersed it with some whacky why humour.

Anyway, to the point of this post. I often find myself doing Rails development offline whilst I'm commuting on the train. So having the Rails API doc handy is invaluable. As Tim pointed out, one way of producing the Rails RDoc is using:

rake doc:rails

from within a freshly created rails project directory. However, as I discovered today, there is a trap to watch out for. Make sure you freeze rails first, for example as follows: