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Here we are, back into the Tri For Fun series of Pleasanton Sprint Triathlons. I did it last weekend, and this time Jessica did it too!

I actually made it all the way through this time without a bike dying on me, but unfortunately, Jessica did not. Her bike tire went flat a few miles into the ride and she had to turn back and do the run.

For those of you interested, here are my results (there are no rankings – I don’t think they post them for this event) :

I’m not sure what the next Tri will be, as I think Jessica and I will both be gone for the next Tri for Fun.

(warning, the following blog post is exceedingly geeky…)

This is about the smallest thing I could have possibly done, but I am now a Ruby on Rails contributor.

I found a bug with Rails Calculations
where I was trying to do this :


@object.linking_tables.count(:conditions => ['fieldname = ?', 1])


and it was failing with malformed SQL. Apparently, in 1.1, it is only designed to do stuff like this :


ObjectClass.count(:conditions => ['fieldname = ?', 1])


Which may not look that different, but it really loses a lot of power - the instantiated object and the association are both scope limiters on the query.

So, I thought I’d be all cool and make the former work - so I setup a patch environment and ran the base AR tests and one broke. I figured out what it was that broke and generated a tiny (tiny) patch and submitted it and it was applied to the trunk a few minutes ago. So, now I’m the worlds smallest Rails contributor:

http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/5268

However, I then soon found out that the Calculations have already been modified in the way I was hoping, after I wrote a few tests and they all passed fine. So, edge Rails works the way I hoped, but I don’t get to contribute in a substantial way. Well, at least I know something that will be in 1.2. Hopefully next time I can do something more useful.

I am continually being impressed by Mark Warner’s rumblings over at ForwardTogetherPAC.com.

I just found their Flickr feed today.

The pictures are a little bit more candid than what I would have expected – it’s reminding me a bit of some of the forward thinking and really embracing the first pieces of an Open Source Politics that I can’t wait to see when the presidential stuff starts.

I got a bulk email from them the other day that was short and to the point, letting me know about the new podcast they were launching. It was only a few paragraphs long and the last one was this:

This is just the beginning of the conversation. In future shows Governor Warner will be responding to questions from pod people like you. On our podcast page there’s a form for you to submit questions and comments to Mark Warner. Every month the Governor will respond to the most interesting submissions as determined in a very subjective manner by flunkies on his staff. Ask Governor Warner: http://www.forwardtogetherpac.com/pages/podcast

I just like “a very subjective manner by flunkies on his staff” – it says to me that they’re not posturing and it makes me think he’s a little less calculating and a little more trustworthy.

I’ll keep an eye on them for you.