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 …
Category Archives: programming
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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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 …