Posted by Johnnie
Actually, if you and I ever do hook up, you’ll be able to tell when our relationship has moved on to a very special level – it’s the day I give you my root password. Which, by the way, I will never do. What if we split up?
My life at the moment is basically a series of XKCD strips, loosely strung together by sleep and beer.
Posted by Johnnie
My book has just been published. Let the reserved and repressed white middle-class celebrations begin! Hurrah!
The title of this post will make no sense to anybody outside of the UK, by the way, so don’t even try.
Apologies to anyone reading this via the Machinifeed, who must by now be thoroughly sick of hearing that Machinima For Dummies has been published. Between us, Hugh and I have announced it on darn near every Machinima site on the net.
Posted by Johnnie
I’m writing this from one of the public-access terminals at my local library. It’s a thin client system, which needless-to-say runs Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6. Gah!
Every two minutes, the system tray pops up a balloon to helpfully tell me that A Java update is available. Apparently I also have unused icons on my desktop – click here to clean them up. Every three minutes, that one.
Finally, the most annoying Helpful Windows Prompt™ of all time, Your computer needs to be restarted in order for the new updates to take effect. Restart now? No, Windows! Don’t restart now, thank you very much! In fact, don’t restart at all. As I’m not logged on as an administrator, I don’t have the privileges to restart anyway, so if I clicked the restart button, you’d just tell me I couldn’t. You know it, and I know it, so stop bugging me! Goddam it! Every five accursed minutes!
God, this site looks fugly on IE, doesn’t it? Sorry about that, those who are forced by circumstance to use The Cancer Of The Internet. Those who do so by choice have earned my eternal hatred. I’m not going to fix it – I spend far too much of my life making websites work under IE.
Oh, for heaven’s sake. The restrictions on this computer are crazy. I just tried to open up a second IE window to grab some urls for this post. Apparantly This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions in effect on this computer. Are you kidding me? Two browser windows is too much anarchy for you? Give me a break.
Ah-ha! I’ve just remembered – I’ve got Portable Firefox on a USB stick in my bag. Happy browsing here we come … nope. Can’t use external storage either.
Bollocks to it. I’m going home. There’s a *nix box with my name on it.
Posted by Johnnie
How have I missed this? Why did nobody tell me about Active Scaffold before now?
Most of my Rails apps site on a CRUD backend, which I usually generate using Rails built-in scaffold, just to get things going. Inevitably, I’ll rewrite 9/10 of the code, because the default scaffold is clunky and decidedly non-scaleable.
ActiveScaffold scales like vectored gold. What’s more, it reads your Models and dynamically generates an AJAX-powered CRUD interface for them, including their relationships. So, if your Farmer model has_many :cows, and your Cow model belongs_to :farmer, you’ll find the ability to create a new Cow, or add an existing one, has been baked in to the interface for creating a new Farmer. Awesome.
Posted by johnnie
Even given the geek-skewed bellcurve of my friends and stalkers, this one will appeal to maybe one in a hundred readers. Since only three people actually read this blog, that basically means that it will keep Keiran amused for about three-eighths of a second. Nevertheless, Keiran, this is for you: Open Source Superstar and GNU facist Richard Stallman sings The Free Software Song. Nothing can prepare your ears for this.
Posted by johnnie
Now, what in the name of Harvard is this?
I was rooting around in the OOo menus looking for a function that I couldn’t locate, when I came across the Bibliography Database tool. How long has that been there? Why couldn’t I have found it before I had to write a 20,000 word dissertation? It seems like it’s a database tool specifically designed to maintain a bibliography and list in using Harvard style (the most widely accepted citation style, for the non-academia-tainted among us). Exactly what I would have used, had I known about it. My dissertation was done entirely in OOo, but I never came across this tool. I want to do another degree now, just so I can use this.
Posted by johnnie
I’m writing this post from my mum’s computer. I’m back in Yorkshire over the weekend, for a friend’s 21st birthday party, and I’m taking the opportunity to get some work hours in whilst Laura’s in Leeds (buying a present for the afore-mentioned party – we’re really not too organised about these things). Actually, I kind of feel like I’ve broken in to the house. Both parents are away for the weekend (it’s their wedding anniversay), so I’ve let myself in. The cats don’t know what’s going on – they haven’t seen me for months.
So, like I said, using my mum’s PC. It’s a fairly standard PC World-a-like, with winxp home installed. As you might expect, the pre-installed software is still in place. She browses the net with an unpatched copy of IE6 and uses Outlook Express for her email (automatically configured by her ISP). The thing is, some of my favourite websites look totally different on this machine.
Read more...Posted by johnnie
Have you noticed the downright weird behaviour on the links (comment and categories) at the bottom of each post? On first loading the page, they display in some weird illegible grey colour. Hover over them and they darken. Here’s the strange bit, though – once you’ve hovered once, they stay dark. This only happens in non-IE browsers, and only affects <a> tags within an <h2> block.
Answers on a postcard please. I’m stumped on this one.