Practicing JavaScript with Dilbert

I discovered that there was a flash widget displaying Dilbert archives in color, back to the start of 2007. Naturally I thought to myself “aha, there must be an XML data feed somewhere in that!” Some light flash-decompilation later, I discovered that I was right. I then seized on this as a learning opportunity, and …

Three gigabytes free…ish

WordPress.com announced yesterday that all users get three gigabytes of upload space for free. This is a teensy upgrade from 50MB. This seems to be primarily for psychological reasons, because there’s a big fat * after the upgrade. The footnote is that Mr. Mullenweg mentions in this post that “[y]ou still need a space upgrade …

Why I can’t play Dungeon Runners

Last night I thought to myself “hey, I know, I’ll try out Dungeon Runners!” It’s a pseudo-free pseudo-MMO, which could be described as a Diablo parody – that’s the sort of game that sounds appealing to me. Sadly, I discovered that Dungeon Runners is not a game I can play. You see, it requires that …

How to generate PDFs from XML using Apache FOP in Ruby on Rails

The title is a bit of a mouthful. Sorry. Before we begin, I present the caveat that this code should not be used on a production system. It launches a java runtime for every single request, which would cripple you. This would need (a) output caching, and (b) some sort of persistent FOP server process …

Thoughts on Ruby on Rails after one day of work

I started looking at Rails (leading to my talking about scaffolding) because I wanted to try writing my next work-project in it. I don’t know about others… but I hate learning a language/framework in isolation from a project. Writing an insipid tutorial project that I don’t care about doesn’t involve me, and so I don’t …

Rails 2.0 Scaffolding

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 …