Couch Str0m and the Great Chicken

The hole Couchdb act as a Str0m sheds an interesting light on a notion I’m pretty fond of, because it partially reveals the mechanisms of community formation : it’s called intersubjectivity.

Before I start throwing Lacan at you, let me illustrate it with a (famous) joke : the guy thinks he’s a corn weed and is terrified he’ll be eaten by the giant chicken. He’s locked up in an asylum, follows a successful treatment and the doctors free him after 6 months. But as soon as he’s out the guy comes running back. Puzzled doctors ask : “What’s the matter, you know you’re not a corn weed don’t you ?”. “Yes I know it, but does the giant chicken know it ?”

What stroke me is that most of the posts/comments I stumbled upon while discovering all the rage were saying : “I’m not personnaly offended, don’t get mistaken by the idea i’m some prude, political correct fanatic, it’s just that i am offended for the people whom were offended”. So the question raises : who was really offended ? The giant chicken ?



As soon as you are in the social sphere, presuming people think a certain way almost automatically constrains your thoughts in shaping themselves like theirs. A portion of yourself might still whisper “these aren’t your own thoughts, you are not a corn seed”, and that voice may remain, but you’ll defend them and act upon them as if they were yours. The funny thing is that everybody is doing the same things which is acting upon the assumption the others think and believe a certain way.

Yes I just dicovered social convention, big deal ! More interestingly it is the fact that social convention is based on the implicit. By that i mean what is explicit is meant to be debated, questionned, opened to the games of construction & deconstruction under the knife of language. Implicit is sacred : as soon as someone breaks in and says “THE KING IS NAKED”, or “THE GREAT CHIKEN DOESN’T EXIST”which is throwing the implicit in the explicit, the community ciment cracks... violently.

It’s also very healthy.

default_scope use case

Ryan Bate in rails 2.3 extras episode throws 2 sugestions on when to use default_scope (which is a sort of global named_scope, that can be overriden).

1. default_scope :conditions => "deleted_at is not NULL"
2. default_scope :order => "position DESC"

Ok thats fine but recently i've come up with a more interesting use.

I've built an online payment system for chaplin's image bank and going through all the hastle of getting ssl certificate, a new ip for the subdomain etc etc it certenly not something I wanted to repeat. (BTW thanks again to Ryan bates for the great serie of episodes on paypal). Well since I would be using it for other parts of charliechaplin.com domain I decided to share the payment table, invoice table and user table through differant rails application. That way I could also have an app gathering all the info for budget management.

Yes Rails modularization is definitely one aspect of the framework I was eager to explore at some point specially when it came to membership. However you still need to know if a payment comes from the image bank app, or the live perfomance app, or the funny hat app.

So instead of using STI with the risk of breaking things by renaming Payment with PhotoPayment or something, i brought default_scope in the game along with a before_save (or before_create if you prefer)





And voilà, nothing else to change.

Charly