Archive: 2006-09
EuroOSCON 2006
Children of Men
One of the many perks of my new flat is having a cinema five minutes’ walk away. Tonight, I strolled down there at five past nine for the nine o’clock showing. Being ten minutes late still gave me plenty of time before the actual picture but enabled me to avoid the adverts for Gillette’s latest 98-blade face-scraper or whatever. Advertising subsidises the cinema’s running costs and I don’t have to watch it. Everyone’s happy!
RailsConf Europe 2006
Along with my fellow Reevoo developers, I spent Thursday and Friday at RailsConf Europe, conveniently held here in London at the TUC Conference Centre (which was swankier than I expected, albeit in a slightly Soviet way). Looking back through my program, I realise how few of the sessions on offer I actually attended. About a quarter of them, in fact: having four simultaneous tracks made sure of that, of course.
The enemy within
Five years ago today, communists burned down the Reichstag.
Sort Ruby tests
I was merging the functions of a couple of Rails controllers the other day, and started by combining the tests. For a couple of reasons, I found myself wishing for a way to sort Ruby Test::Unit test methods. First, I wanted to know if there were any test methods with duplicate names. Second, more importantly, I wanted to be able to work methodically through the failing tests—and those are run in alphabetical order.
Sun adopts JRuby
I’m excited by the news that Sun has hired the JRuby developers.
Merry Christmas, everybody!
Tesco seem to think it’s Christmas time, and who am I to argue with their judgement? My local branch now has half an aisle dedicated to seasonal fare like Christmas puddings and mince pies. They should put up a sign: Hurry! Only 92 shopping days left until Christmas!
Telling SSH your account name
Here’s a handy SSH hint for when your remote account name is different to the local one. It isn’t an earth-shattering discovery: it’s something that I had done before, forgotten, and was just reminded of.
Severance
My Apple is a lemon
A lot of people complain that Apple computers are expensive, but I’m not really sure that it’s true. Certainly, they are more expensive than the crappy £450 laptops sold in Tesco, but that’s not a particularly informative comparison. Compared to Thinkpads or Dell’s business ranges, the price of Apple hardware is pretty competitive.