The inimitable Jakob tells all about the upcoming Rails patch night, so I won’t say more than “it is a great way of getting into Rails” (Rails, the Open Source project; and Rails, the codebase). (I won’t be there, I have a family thing to travel to, but please fill my seat, you.) Hm, I …
Category Archives: Technology
List outdated port names with awk
MacPorts. Sometimes your ports are outdated. There’s a pseudo-portname for them. The report has many columns. And I only want the names, not their versions. port list outdated | awk ‘BEGIN { RS=”\n” } { print $1 }’ > names_of_old_ports.txt Done. Update: got a bug, fixed it. Sheesh. [tags]awk,unix[/tags]
Look, Ma! (linked Io glimpse)
The Io blog points to a ramshackle example Io thing authored by me and quag. If you’ve heard about Io, and wonder what it looks like, this is a… very small example. (I didn’t know they’d gone and published it, and it turned up in my newsreader. Now I have to improve it. Gosh, the …
Speaking at RuPy conference in Poland
Hey! Even more Ruby crap. They said yes. The RuPy conference (at Adam M University, in Poznan, Poland) wants me to run a RubyGems tutorial. To make it a pleasant event, I’ve started thinking about how to make Win32 users comfortable. Anyone of my readers using Ruby on Windows? What I want my co-tutorialists (tutees?) …
Intro to J language
Via Dave, my favorite Dutch-speaking Australian Computer Scientist, I got wind of this fine J programming language introduction, written by our common acquaintance Cratylus. A short text, it goes directly into parsing how J looks, and then a bit about its operators. No speculation, just explanation. Thanks, C! And, Dave: I love the new handle-bars. …
Ruby and libxml: Collect your XML::Node::Set
Use collect and map in Ruby says Lucas Carlson. Thanks for pointing out that code arthritis, Lucas. So, I was working with the libxml-ruby library (fast XML parsing) and found some loops in my code which could be converted. But, XML::Node::Set did not support collect. I mumbled something inaudible, grabbed the Pickaxe book, found the …
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Installing libxml-ruby for libxml2 with Ruby, on OS X
Update 2012: This material was written in 2006. Now, many years later, it still poisons the search engines with its presence. If you want to use Ruby and a package manager on OS X, you should use RVM and Homebrew. I will leave this page here as a warning to you, dear reader. Do not …
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irb with wirble
Using irb with your Ruby? Yeah, I thought so. If you want syntax coloring, ri inside irb and a shorter prompt, get Wirble: sudo gem install wirble And add an .irbrc file to your home directory, following Wirble’s advice on what to put there. Oh, and when you have one of those, you could add …
Go snippet away, Rubyboy
Just started my morning with fixing a personal annoyance with the current Rails distribution I am using with Ruby 1.8.5: warning messages about deprecated syntax. All I did was heed the advice in the warnings and edit all the when and else control structures that were using colons to using semi-colons. After that, my Rails …
My Dashboard widget stopped working
A while ago me and my wife created a simple Dashboard widget that displayed our current amount of bonus accrued at the foodstore “club” we’re in. Since the website was just using a form which accepted member ID and PIN code, and the only thing you could do with the club website was enter see …