I created a docx-to-txt converter (more like adapted it from: http://progit.org/book/ch7-2.html)
You can use it in your Git repositories to do some simple diffing of Office Open XML formatted Word files (.docx file extension).
I have a Sinatra app that wouldn't show the exception backtrace in the log when an error occured. Obviously, it's a bad idea to log backtraces, but in development/pre-production it can be really handy. It turns out that in my modular app, I needed to disable :show_exceptions. Once that was disabled I wouldn't see the error page in my browser, but the side effect is that I get the backtrace available to me in my log. I didn't expect such a side effect.
My actual code is something like this:
Here's a sample application that shows the behavior a bit better:
If you remove ", :show_exceptions" from line 9 of app.rb you won't get the backtrace in the log that is being logged at line 18 in the "error" block.
GMail's new scrolling mail header bar is nice, but it doesn't quite work in composition mode. All too often, I am writing a new email, or responding to one and the scrolling header has scrolled right over my send button. Out of habit I click the button that is in the same area as the Send button, which in this case is the back-to-your-search-or-inbox-or-whatever-context-you-were-in-before-getting-here button, a.k.a. the left arrow button.
Inevitably, I think I've sent my mail only to find that it's in my Drafts folder -- I then bang my head and exclaim "stupid me, I did it again". But it isn't "stupid me". This is a serious usability design flaw in GMail. I find the floating bar very useful when reading emails, but it just gets in the way when writing.
I just found the Vintage mode in SublimeText2: http://www.sublimetext.com/docs/2/vintage.html
Now, I can have vi-like capabilities in my quickly-becoming-favorite-non-Mac text editor.
For major text manipulation and/or macro recording I will probably still need to dump out to vim. We'll see how it goes.
I just came across a neat little gem that helps you generate random data: http://random-data.rubyforge.org/. Great for generating random test data.
It is also simple to extend. Can't find the random data you are looking for? Create a data file for it, put it in your load_path and Random will look for it when you call a method on Random that doesn't exist (uses #method_missing). If Random can't find a data file on your load path, it will raise an error.
In this example, we are creating records for UK expatriates that are living in the United States, with their county of birth being read from the uk_county.dat file.
I've been playing with Highcharts.js recently (http://highcharts.com).
Sometimes the markers on lines, splines, areas, etc. can get really
annoying. You can get rid of those pretty easily by setting the
plotOptions.series.marker.fillColor to 'none' and the
plotOptions.series.marker.lineColor to null (which causes it to
inherit the line color from the axis line). Here's a Gist to show what
I mean, lines 19-26 are the relevant code in this case:
Dell's "Speed of Thought" photo booth at the Austin City Limits Music Festival looked pretty neat: http://www.youtube.com/user/DellVlog
Check out the water balloon video: http://youtu.be/irwjERZgjR8
Recently, a famous post to the Squeak mailing list was resurrected in my memory. It's from Alan Kay on the real power of Smalltalk (http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/1998-October/017019.html). I am including the message in its entirety here:
Folks -- Just a gentle reminder that I took some pains at the last OOPSLA to try to remind everyone that Smalltalk is not only NOT its syntax or the class library, it is not even about classes. I'm sorry that I long ago coined the term "objects" for this topic because it gets many people to focus on the lesser idea. The big idea is "messaging" -- that is what the kernal of Smalltalk/Squeak is all about (and it's something that was never quite completed in our Xerox PARC phase). The Japanese have a small word -- ma -- for "that which is in between" -- perhaps the nearest English equivalent is "interstitial". The key in making great and growable systems is much more to design how its modules communicate rather than what their internal properties and behaviors should be. Think of the internet -- to live, it (a) has to allow many different kinds of ideas and realizations that are beyond any single standard and (b) to allow varying degrees of safe interoperability between these ideas. If you focus on just messaging -- and realize that a good metasystem can late bind the various 2nd level architectures used in objects -- then much of the language-, UI-, and OS based discussions on this thread are really quite moot. This was why I complained at the last OOPSLA that -- whereas at PARC we changed Smalltalk constantly, treating it always as a work in progress -- when ST hit the larger world, it was pretty much taken as "something just to be learned", as though it were Pascal or Algol. Smalltalk-80 never really was mutated into the next better versions of OOP. Given the current low state of programming in general, I think this is a real mistake. I think I recall also pointing out that it is vitally important not just to have a complete metasystem, but to have fences that help guard the crossing of metaboundaries. One of the simplest of these was one of the motivations for my original excursions in the late sixties: the realization that assignments are a metalevel change from functions, and therefore should not be dealt with at the same level -- this was one of the motivations to encapsulate these kinds of state changes, and not let them be done willy nilly. I would say that a system that allowed other metathings to be done in the ordinary course of programming (like changing what inheritance means, or what is an instance) is a bad design. (I believe that systems should allow these things, but the design should be such that there are clear fences that have to be crossed when serious extensions are made.) I would suggest that more progress could be made if the smart and talented Squeak list would think more about what the next step in metaprogramming should be -- how can we get great power, parsimony, AND security of meaning? Cheers to all, Alan
Good article by Nick Sieger:
http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2011/concurrency-in-jruby/
I am running a 64bit Linux Mint distro and wanted to connect it to my
Dell V715w printer (made by Lexmark for Dell). The driver that comes
from Dell is for 32bit installations only (SuSE, Ubuntu, and RedHat).
What to do?
Husband of one, Father of four.
Christian looking for the coming of the Lord.
Programmer by trade: Ruby, Smalltalk, others.
Anything else? That's enough to cover it.
