A New Software-centric Blog: Binary Code

Introducing Binary Code.
Late last night (or maybe it was early this morning) I decided that I ought to separate my software and code-centric posts from my other posts. I know that of the two of you who read this, one reads for the code and one reads for the rants so I’m segregating the two.
Binary [...]

Beautiful Photograph

Check this out: Abell S0740.
If you looked at that photograph and said “ho hum” or “been there, done that” or “I could do that, better” - shake your head!
The light that made that photograph is 450 million years old. Million! 450 million years ago lichen had made it onto land. No animals, no insects, lichen. [...]

RSS Feed Back to Exerpt

Turns out having Ruby code in the blog posts breaks the full-text RSS feed so until I sort that out, it’s back to the minimalist style. Alas.

Breathe, Dammit

Yesterday, here in Vancouver, the Vancouver Sun led off the day with two “Terrorist Threat” stories on the front page, one about pipelines now being targets, the other about Vancouver’s proposed open WiFi network being a “tool for the terrorists”. Not to be outdone the Province led off with a front-page about how terrorists can [...]

Heckle: Nifty Ruby Code Mutation Tester

I love the idea behind Heckle:

Heckle is a mutation tester. It modifies your code and runs your tests to make sure they fail. The idea is that if code can be changed and your tests don’t notice, either that code isn’t being covered or it doesn’t do anything.

To install:

sudo gem install heckle

Maybe I’ll spend today [...]

Full Text in RSS Feeds

I’m not sure how or when it happened but I just noticed this morning that I’ve been serving up partial text exerpts of my posts in this blog’s RSS feed and not the full text of each post.
Partial-text RSS feeds are, well, quite frankly they suck so to prevent further suckiness I’ve turned on [...]

BSG Renewed?

Wired is reporting, citing SyFy Portal as its source, that the LA Times has reported that SciFi Channel will be announcing that they’re going to renew Battlestar Galactica for another season.
Most excellent.
Says SyFy Portal:

The move comes despite lower-than-expected ratings

Two words: needs more space battles.
(Via Adam)

Graphs in PHP

I’m all about the graphs these days. Graphs, graphs, graphs…. “Graphs are great! Great for Rails”, you say, “but what about PHP?”
I hear you, and so does Terrill Dent who’s created Vertical Bar Graphs with CSS and PHP.
I’m not plugging these just because they’re graphs, or just because Terrill goes to the University of [...]

Rails: Bar Graph Helper 0.1 Released

As promised yesterday, I’ve rewritten the CSS Graphs Helper to provide much more functionality and flexibility. It is also not as a plugin, nor as a class, but as a Rails helper module. You can skip straight to the “manual” here: Rails: Bar Graph Helper or go right to the source code here: Rails: Bar [...]

Rails Gems Pr0n

In the spirit of Robby and Chad et al. posting their Rails gems in response to Mike’s question:

Which RubyGems are you sporting?

actionmailer (1.3.2, 1.3.1, 1.2.5)
actionpack (1.13.2, 1.13.1, 1.12.5)
actionwebservice (1.2.2, 1.2.1, 1.1.6)
activerecord (1.15.2, 1.15.1, 1.14.4)
activesupport (1.4.1, 1.4.0, 1.3.1)
fcgi (0.8.7)
ferret (0.10.14)
hoe (1.1.7)
mysql (2.7)
rails (1.2.2, 1.2.1, 1.1.6)
railsbench (0.9.1)
rake (0.7.1)
rmagick (1.15.2)
rubyforge (0.4.0)
sources (0.0.1)

Which just goes to show that I [...]

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