I wrote a Pager class in PHP to handle the annoying task of breaking a long list of items up into pages of 10 records per page. According to wc, it’s 243 lines long. Using it takes maybe ten lines of code.
Pagination in Rails is baked in, and I just implemented it (on [...]
…at the same time.
Yesterday, a classmate gave me a copy of Agile Web Development With Rails: A Pragmatic Guide. (I don’t feel particularly bad about the piracy; I’ll wind up buying the book soon enough. They’ll get my money, and they’ll probably get it faster now that I’m all excited about Rails.)
But back [...]
On the one hand, The Sisters of Mercy will be in town next month. On the other, so will Cirque du Soleil. And while I do <heart> the Sisters, I also own a bootleg of theirs which, not to put too fine a point on it, sucks big fat donkey balls.
One can hope [...]
Best political filk EVAR. (Flash animation. Work safety depends on your workplace, but sound is a requirement.)
(Thanks to graethorne for the link!)
Interactive Flash-based graph showing birth rates and infant mortality rates, 1962-2003. This is a very cool way of using animation to make graphs make sense. (The animation also has sound, but it’s not required.) It’s neat to watch the countries migrate over 40 years from high birth rates and high infant mortality [...]
Try Ruby in your browser — very cool dynamic, interactive introduction to the interactive Ruby interpreter. Non-geeks, at least check out the first instruction or two.
Probably not a good tutorial to Ruby if you aren’t already familiar with other modern programming languages — in particular, I’d have been very very confused by section 4 [...]
This guy didn’t bother with anything fancy like hiring a lawyer or using a spelling and grammar checker, but did go to some lengths to draw up a four-page “Contract of Wifely Expectations.”
We may soon be able to abolish sleep. Or at least reduce our need for it. Cool.
Sweet demo video of a touchscreen interface, with the additional wrinkle that this device can detect and respond to multiple finger touches at the same time. This has limited wide-range applicability, but looks like it would speed up certain kinds of tasks (primarily the ones shown in the video; the picture resizing and map [...]
Guy Kawasaki (whoever he is) writes about The Art of Creating a Community. As someone thinking about writing the third version of a piece of software that, as far as I know, nobody uses, this is of particular interest.
(Actually, I’m told that there are a handful of organizations using version 2. But I [...]
Several seconds shy of twenty minutes. That’s how long fawnapril and I made it into The Aristocrats before we turned it off. That’s *with* fast-forwarding past about half of George Carlin’s telling of the joke.
Glad it’s out there and protected speech, but I just don’t have the stomach for it.
Code Kata. (Why yes, I *am* up at 4am, thanks for noticing!)
At the arena! Monster DeLorean MADNESS! Be there unless you’re dead or in jail!
The perpetrator’s site is here.
(Thanks to the_misha for the “sunday sunday sunday” bit, and to tshuma for accidentally posting the wrong link, thus letting me know that such a sublimely ridiculous thing exists!)
I’m sure there will be more entries and higher version numbers in the field by the time I get around to needing them, but for my own reference later, two Ruby libraries for generating charts:
SVG::Graph (not particularly browser-friendly, but apparently one can generate PNGs from them)
Gruff, which only does two kinds of graphs (coincidentally, the [...]
Given my abysmal failure to use any sort of organizational system — even the uber-simple “carry some blank white index cards” non-system — since abandoning my ancient Palm Vx, I’ve started eyeing the Tungsten C, which has a built-in thumb keyboard (I *really* hate Graffiti) and wifi. Then, while picking up some printer paper [...]
Las Vegas SUN article: Inmates learn to make it on the outside
The Nevada Corrections Department just opened a 400-bed transitional facility. During the last three months of their sentences, prisoners at the facility are allowed to commute to jobs offsite, and the program offers classes in survival skills useful on the outside. They’re [...]
Article at The New Yorker about how some social problems have not a normal distribution, but a power-law (or “hockey stick”) distribution.
Reading it, I’m struck by the similarity, once again, to work my father has done. About ten years ago, the county he lives in tried to radically restructure their service programs to account [...]
A while back, I bought a bunch of cotton cosmetic pads, since these tend to be a little easier to use than cotton balls. Got ‘em home, then went to use one a few nights later, and said aloud to fawnapril, “Oh. I’m going to have to return these.”
The package reads:
100 ROUND COSMETIC [...]
The more super-slick code I write in PHP, the more I have a sneaking suspicion that I’m reinventing Rails or TurboGears, and that I’m doing it poorly. The irony is that I haven’t got time to sit down with those frameworks and find out if that’s the case.
For when, in my copious spare time, I ever get around to upgrading WordPress, some themes that don’t completely suck:
Branches
Subnixus
The Cabinet