Powdered Non Sequitur Man

Vacation photo!

Three guesses where we are…

We heard shanamadele on the radio this morning. Cool!

The Ruby coolness just keeps on coming.
For the other app I’m writing, I have a “next actions” list at the bottom of every page, to give the users, who may not be terribly computer-savvy, some prompts about what they can do next.
I’ve got a dozen pages or so, and already I’ve been rather inconsistent in [...]

So I’ve been noticing that more and more, I tend to want to blog about programming (especially how freakin’ cool Ruby is). Given that most of the people I know of that read this (especially via the LJ feed) aren’t remotely interested in programming, I’m considering starting a geek blog, and leaving this one [...]

In the app I’m writing for work, I keep running into objects that have date ranges associated with them — time periods with a start and end date. (For example: pay periods, timecards, holidays, etc.)
I wanted a simple way to print a description of such a range, preferably one that didn’t require me [...]

Molly Ivins suggests running fellow Texan Bill Moyers for President.
Hell, I’d volunteer for the campaign.

At OSCAMP, hanging around waiting for an interesting topic that comes up at 4pm. A guy just swooped by on a Segway, attracting virtually no attention.
[UPDATE: five minutes later, someone else rode by on a Zappy3 Pro. Looks like almost as much fun, slightly quieter, and about a fifth of the price.]

Caught by my spam filters this morning: a message from one Eigenvalue J. Flintlock. Most amusing.

A Dictionary of Useful Research Phrases sent to me by my friend Steve.

Mister Language Person took the bus into the office yesterday, because it was effin’ hot and he didn’t feel like riding his bike in 100-degree weather. On the way, MLP espied the following sign. See if you can spot what’s wrong with this picture…

I’m guessing this is just a sneaky way to recruit [...]

Generate your own animated AJAX indicator here. Note the scrawled-looking text at the top…

Say you’re writing a test, and you want to create three new client objects, called client1 through client3.
In Java, you’d do something like this:

Client client1 = new Client();
Client client2 = new Client();
Client client3 = new Client();

…and if that looked ugly, well, that’s Java for you.
Here’s a Ruby equivalent.

client1, client2, client3 = *(1..3).collect { |i| Client.new [...]

Over at Coding Horror, which is quickly becoming one of my favorite blogs, there’s a mention of a recent academic paper about teaching programming. Since one of my long-term goals is to teach programming, it seemed worthwhile to read.
I’m of two minds on teaching programming: on the one hand, I think this kind [...]

For almost a month now, I’ve been using a dual-monitor setup: my original 17″ Dell LCD monitor (1280×1024) has become my secondary display, and for the primary I’m using a 20″ widescreen Viewsonic VX2025wm (1680×1050, CNET review).
The Viewsonic, by the way, is an excellent monitor, equivalent in size to Apple’s $799 Cinema Display, but [...]

Sledgehammers are heavy. Swinging them is hard. Fun, but hard.

My call will not be answered “in the order it was received.” It should, rather, be answered in the order IN WHICH it was received.
To quote a character from Pulp Fiction: “English, motherfucker! Do you speak it?”

Our house has a tiny little laundry room — and I do mean tiny. When we moved in, it had a crappy old washer and dryer side by side, but no dishwasher… so we replaced those items with a rolling dishwasher and one of those Equator all-in-one washer/dryer combo units. The Equator never [...]

It is apparently quite difficult to find a patio set after the 4th of July.
Especially if you wait until the last day of the sale to make up your mind, and discover that they’ve sold out of the one you wanted.

Photos taken from the sky that look like extremely elaborate models: “Olivo Barbieri’s aerial photographs” on Signal vs. Noise.
Really fun stuff — and, for once, not about programming. (= Definitely check out the links in the comments, too.

The following code snippet should illustrate why I like Ruby (and Rails) so much:
  def require_login
    redirect_to ‘/login’ and return false unless user_logged_in?
  end
That’s even more readable than Visual Basic, which, despite its other flaws, is quite approachable by non-programmers.
Granted, there’s a lot in Ruby that provokes a bit of head-scratching on first glance, but even in the [...]