January 2010
67 posts
Darrell: The Crackhead
So I hung out with a crackhead today. His name is Darrell. I mean Dave Chapelle would have been proud of this neck scratching, front teeth missing, fucked up crackhead. I didn’t really hang out with him. It was more, he saw me carrying groceries upstairs. He insisted he had extra hands to help at a $1 a hand. So Darrell helped me carry up my groceries. Beer was part of my grocery trip and of...
Rockin' the Moleskine Notebook (the Nerpster Way)
smnhm:I agree w 1-8 below although I have no need to draw attention of the crowd when Im in a huff. As for the large design book advice accepted but I have a computer to organize and visualize my code. I like the small portability. It was lugging a large legal size binder from meeting to meeting that was getting drudgy. Now I rock the Moleskine and yes clients probably wonder a bit…
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Update with a touch
One of those little rails subtleties I didn’t know.
rubyquicktips:
From Rails 2.3.3 on, you can update the updated_at time stamp of an instance with touch:
user.updated_at #=> "Wed Jan 27 23:29:22 +1300 2010"
user.touch
user.updated_at #=> "Wed Jan 27 23:30:08 +1300 2010"
You can also update associated parent models by specifying the :touch option on the relation:
class...
clientsfromhell:
A client once gave me some text which included a spelling error. Instead of saying “you spelled that wrong” I tried to be tactful about it. I said I wasn’t sure about the spelling so I looked it up in the dictionary and discovered that it was spelled differently. Then the client insisted that there was a typo in the dictionary and we had to go to press with the spelling mistake.
clientsfromhell:
This was for a series of employee training modules at a nuclear power plant:
“That chart about the different kinds of radiation makes the radiation seem too scary. Can you make it look friendlier?”
Rockin' the Moleskine Notebook (the Math Nerd Way)
So in September I adopted a new way of trying to cram all my random notes and thoughts that I put on paper into one medium. I’ve used leather-bound legal pads, five stars, graph-paper legal pads, graph-paper five stars, free floating legal pads, white paper, post it notes, big post it notes, etc… Nothing really seemed to work. I was at a staples and saw a graph paper lined (at the time...
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iPad Thoughts
Watching the iPad video now. Some thoughts:
- Like many I do not like the name. iTablet wasn’t good enough?
- One reason I don’t like the name is its really not a pad. I can’t write on it like say, my notepad.
- The iBook store is cool but because I have just finger input I dont think I would use it much. What if I want to highlight?
- With no stylus input taking notes...
iPaaaad
mattonrails:
Well, my first thoughts on hearing about the iPad today:
Doesn’t that just sound like “iPod” but with a Boston accent?
Just sayin.
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Correct, Beautiful then Fast Code →
John Nunemaker discusses a chapter from Beautiful Code (OReilly) about writing first code that is correct. Then making it beautiful for you and others to come. Finally, make it fast.
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RSpec 2.0; RSpec-Rails 2.0 => Rails 3 →
I really want this now! As well as updates to cucumber-rails. Its been stopping me from developing a new app using edge. Figure it will be a bit until it is stable I guess I will develop in 2.3.5 for now and hope the upgrade path is well thought out.
See this gist if you wanna get up and running with rspec 2.0.0.a2 http://gist.github.com/286830
Continuous Testing With Unobtrusive System...
erictarn:
I tried to set up ZenTest and autotest-rails today, but I kept on getting these annoying errors:
/usr/local/lib/ruby19/1.9.1/pathname.rb:270: warning: `*' interpreted as argument prefix
/usr/local/lib/ruby19/gems/1.9.1/gems/ZenTest-4.2.1/lib/unit_diff.rb:100: warning: shadowing outer local variable - line
/usr/local/lib/ruby19/gems/1.9.1/gems/ZenTest-4.2.1/lib/unit_diff.rb:104:...
clientsfromhell:
After having delivered an eCommerce site to a client, he called me on the phone, explaining that he had experienced some problems ordering products. While on the phone, I explained to him that I would do a test order to see if I could reconstruct the problem he experienced. The ordering went fine, but suddenly he says
Client: “Wow, I got an order from you here. You want that...
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The Path to Rails 3: Approaching the upgrade
omgbloglol:
Now that we’ve looked at some of the core architecture, I’d like to shift my focus first to upgrading an application. Originally I had planned on writing about upgrading plugins first, but apparently that API isn’t quite stable, so I figured rather than write a blog post that will be deprecated in 2 weeks, I’d rather write one that will be deprecated in 3-6 months instead. So, this...
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7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on... →
Do not agree with everything the original author said but it definitely is thought provoking. As someone who used PHP mainly (this is not exactly true depending on where I worked I have bounced around in many languages) and now uses mainly Ruby (and a decent amount of rails) I have always felt it important to remember my PHP roots In fact I have to because several of my clients still have sites...
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Open Source Apple Mail? Sounds Cool →
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The Path to Rails 3: Introduction
Pretty in depth overview
yuya-lush:
omgbloglol:
Wow, over half a year with no blog post. That may be a new record for blog laziness for me, but fear not! This bout of sloth shall not last, and the dearth of blog entries shall come to and end! This cure should come partially because I’ve switched to Tumblr and can now compose my entries in Markdown, and partially because that’s part of my...
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New App Up On GitHub →
Pushed up a new repo yesterday. LogWizard is the next step in the same project as logist and will use it process the log files its given. LogWizard is the app that will perform the Extract Transform Load (ETL) process on given source files (logs). At its completion the logs should be represented in a dimensional model.
Right now the app is extremely raw. A few features have been defined (im using...
Awesome utility of the day: pigz
andrew:
Pronounced “pig-zee”, the description off their site is pretty self-explanatory: A parallel implementation of gzip for modern multi-processor, multi-core machines.
Since most servers now have multi processors, compressing large data can be accelerated using pigz (download here) as opposed to common built-in single-threaded tools like gzip/bzip2.
A quick comparison of gzip vs pigz on a...
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WatchNola getting a little angry at the rope.
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21 Rack Middlewares →
Need a place to put this old article. Plus its a good one.
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Net::HTTP Cheat Sheet →
Concise examples of how to use Net::HTTP in many common situations (basic auth, ssl, REST, etc…)
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Logist v0.0.0 pushed to GitHub →
Just tagged and pushed the initial release of my Logist library. As I mentioned before this library is really only useful for two log formats I am currently working with right now. And I really have only been working on it as needed. Since its the first release I have actually used the project more to become acquainted with GitHub and Git so I wanted to include a very minimal amount of work up to...
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Interested in college basketball? March madness? Wanna manage content for a website owned by some of college ball’s big names (Billy Packer, Coach Knight, Fantasy Sports Ventures). Checkout http://www.surviveandadvance.net . If you’re interested send me a message or email me your resume. I will pass it on to the proper people.
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Rails 3 BugMash →
Report bugs to BugMash January 16th and 17th and help make Rails 3 a better tool. This comes at a time prefect for me. Just tried to use edgerails and found some issues trying to setup things up such as cucumber-rails and rspec-rails . There are other types of bugs you can submit on these special days and submitters are entered into a raffle. I know I will be one of the many people complaining...
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The Asterisk Club: Response
smnhm responded to my post (via text), The Asterisk Club, with a quote from an article (sorry I cant link here but I’m not copying a tinyurl from my phone by hand right now). The quote discussed the end of the steroid era (or that it has ended), that McGuire’s admition was a step in the right direction. I do not agree that the use of steroids is no longer non-existent. What society has...
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1 in 285,000. Your chances of finding ms. right →
Kind of stupid application of probability but I ran across it and couldn’t help but laugh. The original application was for finding extra terrestrial life (or well the probability how much of it exists).
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Installing Edge Rails →
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And We Think the Patriot Act Sucks →
“China” or as the article calls it a politically-motivated attacked tried to hack its citizens Gmail accounts who may have been activists. For those of you that do not know, Google currently has a deal with China to censor some of the information available through its search engine. For example, you cannot search “democracy” (not sure if that is still true but it used to...
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The Asterisk Club
So now that McGuire has come clean the cheating debate has resurfaced. At first I was all for putting an asterisk next to Bonds name, but by opinions quickly changed. Using steroids is not cheating (this is to the CNN guest who said he cheated to get healthy). Cheating implies a rule was broken, at the time there were none or drugs were available that were not against the rules. Cheating does not...
Chillin on Campus
So this is the first semester I have had classes close enough together to have to stay on campus in between. Actually, I could have like 30 minutes at home but I decided to give this a shot. I’m at the union lounge which is quite comfortable. Without music, however, would be torture. Currently rocking out to the new Darkest Hour album currently. I am however annoyed because I am pretty much...
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Include ActiveRecord functionality in you Ruby... →
Rails 3 will pulls out some nice features of ActiveRecord into ActiveModel. You can include parts of ActiveModel in your own classes so they act more ActiveRecord like.
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Fuck Party Politics (Part 2): Bush & Obama...
Let me start this post with a few disclaimers. I did not like President Bush but did agree then and do agree now with some of his policies. I did vote for Obama more because the McCain camp, namely Sarah Palin swayed me that way. I consider myself a “swing voter” in media terms. I, personally, consider myself a citizen who has politics beliefs based on the issue. Sometimes I’m...
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Configliere: lightweight configuration management... →
thechangelog:
Configliere manage settings from many sources: static constants, simple config files, environment variables, commandline options, straight ruby. You don’t have to predefine anything, but you can ask configliere to type-convert, require, document or password-obscure any of its fields. Modules can define config settings independently of each other and the main program.
Bonus...
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Loving my Tablet
No not Tablet PC but the Wacom Intuos4 I recently picked up. I have been using it for a little over a week now (took a break while I was home) and have really become accustomed to using the absolute positioning and pen style input as opposed to a mouse. I am normally an all keyboard kind of guy. Partially because I like the keyboard and partially because I do not like the mouse. I still use the...