I’m learning Ruby on Rails starting with 2.0. This is occasionally problematic, as it was only released a few days ago, and the tutorials are still all for 1.2. So, to help others, something not mentioned in the release notes, which causes errors if you’re following the official tutorial. Scaffolding has changed. The 1.2 way …
Author Archives: kemayo
Niche WoW news
* NEW – freeSlots, bagType = GetContainerNumFreeSlots(bagIndex) — Returns the number of free slots in a bag, and the type of items that can go in the bag. For bagType, 0 means any item can go in the bag. * NEW – bagType = GetItemFamily(itemID | “name” | “itemLink”) — When used with a container, …
git
I just watched Linus Torvalds talking about git, the distributed version control system he wrote. What struck me here is that several times in this talk he was asked by Google employees variations on the theme of “why should we use git?”, and he didn’t have a compelling answer. His statements boiled down to “we …
FicWhat?
As an amusing personal idiosyncrasy I run a fiction archive called FicWad. (I believe much Katamari Damacy had been played just before the name was chosen.) I call this idiosyncratic because I don’t use it myself. I’m not, generally speaking, a fanfic-reading sort of person. I run it because my wife wanted to start a …
Python whitespace doesn’t matter
If you have some programming experience then there is one particular feature of Python that is likely to turn you off. Whitespace matters. Indentation is significant. This comes as a shock to many people who are used to it being meaningless. Most languages in common use designate code blocks with braces ({ … }), or …
svn synonym
I’d like to take a moment to (a) completely alienate my audience, and (b) ruin my credibility. I will do this by discussing the semantics of a particular operation of the Subversion version control system, and explaining how poorly I initially understood it. It took me a while to realize how svn merge should be …
Yahoo! Pipes is awesome
I like Dan Savage’s column in the Seattle newspaper The Stranger. He also writes a blog for them. However, his entries are all mixed in with a great many other people’s entries, and there’s only an RSS feed for the amalgam. This wasn’t a problem, because his entries were output at the bottom of the …
Yes, I said PHP
I mentioned that I got my start programming with PHP. Depending on the crowd you’re in, this can be a bit of an unsavory thing to admit to. Especially if you’re in the hip crowd, with their Django on Ruby or whatever. Why’s that? Well, PHP sucks. In numerous ways. Some of them are a …
David Lynch has a blog
It is possible that this blog’s naming scheme could be construed as being a bit egotistical. I just want to reclaim my name from popular culture! But enough of that. Who am I? I’m a 23 year old who immigrated to the USA from England when I was 17. I possess many useful insights into …