A Word From Our Sponsor

Posted by Christopher Smith Sat, 11 Oct 2008 09:02:00 GMT

Okay, I’ve now finally updated to Typo 5.. I can’t say the experience was entirely painful. It turns out that “typo install” doesn’t migrate terribly well in a few nasty corner cases that I hit smack dab in the middle. The solution is to do a fresh typo install and then invoke the database migration manually with 

RAILS_ENV=production db:migrate
.

The other problem I had was that the last migration script (071fixtags_naming.rb if you are curious) somehow failed (apparently some kind of issue with Ruby/Rails/ActiveRecord and Postgreql). Being comfortable with SQL but not comfortable with Rails, I just commented it out and then did the fix manually. Here is the magic SQL invocation I used for posterity:

 update tags set name = replace(name, '.', '_');

Other than the migration update, the new Typo does seem to be better and faster than the old one, although I really need to fool around with it at a time when I’m not ready to crash hard.

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Stupid Blog Meme's

Posted by Christopher Smith Sat, 11 Oct 2008 08:39:00 GMT

Because I just do whatever Corey tells me to do, here is perhaps the greatest waste of my blog’s resources (and that is something). I present “Page 56 of the book nearest to you”:

The rules:

  • Grab the nearest book.
  • Open the book to page 56.
  • Find the fifth sentence.
  • Post the text of the next two to five sentences in your journal along with these instructions.
  • Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

And my entry:

“We’ve also provided a name field, which gives us a way to uniquely identify a particular shared variable without having to subclass SharedVar for each shared variable we need to create. To create a shared variable, we simply pass a unique name and initial value to the SharedVar constructor, and write the result to a space:

SharedVar myvar = new SharedVar("duke's counter", 0);
space.write(myvar, null, Lease.FOREVER);

“3.2 Shared Variables” from Chapter 3, “Building Blocks”, in Freeman, Hupfer & Arnold’s “JavaSpaces Principles, Patterns, and Practice”, laying amongst the junk on my desk for reasons long since forgotten.

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Why Object-Oriented UI's Might Be A Bad Idea

Posted by Christopher Smith Wed, 01 Oct 2008 21:11:00 GMT

This has got to be the best example of exactly what can go wrong when you go crazy with an OOUI. Of course, in fairness, a well implemented OOUI would always use a security context when accessing objects, but this is Windows. ;-)

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