Archive: 2007-05
Cactus flower
When my grandmother died about two and a half years ago, I inherited a few small cacti that she had had around her flat. Yesterday, one of them flowered for the first time.
Spooky action at a distance in Ruby
I spent some time on Friday trying to get to the bottom of a particularly strange effect in Ruby. Changing completely unrelated lines of code elsewhere in the project would change the behaviour of YAML and cause a test to fail.
Free the Windsors!
There’s something inherently absurd about the idea of hereditary rulers, but in a world where millions of people still believe in flying zombies it’s certainly not the most peculiar of the beliefs out there.
Hack Day, June 2007
Camellia and Ruby on Mac OS X
Camellia is ‘an open source Image Processing & Computer Vision library’ that can do some interesting stuff directly from Ruby.
Bleeding-edge ffmpeg on Ubuntu Feisty
Want to feel old?
Read this chat with the 14-year-old responsible for TeenWag:
Another social networking site for me to ignore
I’ve been getting a lot of emails like this lately, sent on behalf of friends and acquaintances:
Disposable tables for Rails tests
It turns out that it’s really easy to create tables and models dynamically within a Rails unit test. It’s a useful technique for reducing dependencies when testing.
RubyGems eats babies
I’ve been responsible for enough technocentric, user-hostile interfaces in my time to know one when I see one, and RubyGems’s
gemutility is a classic of the genre: it’s influenced by implementation details rather than end-user usage patterns, and it manages to frustrate me every time I have to deal with it. Here’s a real-life transcript that demonstrates some of the issues:Olympian waste
I’ve been listening to this year’s BBC Reith Lectures given by Jeffrey Sachs. It’s interesting and thought-provoking stuff, even if I don’t agree with everything he says, and it’s good to hear someone talk about Africa’s problems without blaming everything on government corruption.
Zero niner foxtrot niner
Six colours they want to ban.
