doing it for science
Jun 10th 2009
Here's a little gem I've been working on that just might be ready to show it's face in public:

http://github.com/jedediah/print_members/tree/master




It's an interactive doodad for Ruby 1.9 that probes a class/module and shows you just about everything there is to know about it, in pretty colors. I find that about every second or third line I enter in IRB is a call to this thing.



For the most part, the info comes from Ruby's reflection features but it also parses source files to get method parameters, which is surprisingly non-slow.


The gem can be installed directly from github:
gem install \
    --source http://gems.github.com \
    jedediah-print_members

I'm taking suggestions for a more fun name.
Jun 10th 2009
If you have a Telus mobility account and you're having trouble logging in to their new "improved" web site, and your username is longer than 15 characters, try just the first 15 characters.

Also, if you use http://guru.com and your username is longer than 12 characters, ditto.

And lastly, if you are a web developer building an account system, or overhauling an old one, and for some reason you feel compelled to impose a length limit on usernames or passwords, please give your users at least a subtle hint that you are doing so, rather than silently mangling their credentials.