Calamity Lane

Zombie Songs

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 10:06:04 GMT

For all those times when you’ve been thinking to yourself “Man, this would be the perfect situation in which to play a zombie song,” I’m glad to say modern independent musicians have stepped up to fill this gap:

Jonathan Coulton, Re: Your Brains
No More Kings, Zombie Me

Further zombie song recommendations are welcome in the comments.

A More Effective Name

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 00:28:53 GMT

A quick note:

If you are:

Using Rails
Using RSpec
Have just discovered the incredible joy of named scopes

…restrain yourself, by any means available (up to and including physical violence) from creating a named scope called “public” or “private.” The reasons for this should be fairly obvious.

Really, whoever ends up cleaning up behind you will appreciate it.

Annihilate Ubuntu's Annoying System Beep

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 21:17:08 GMT

A quickie to remind myself next time I build an Ubuntu box, and am being slowly driven batty by a tiny, tinny obsolete PC speaker made of hate:

sudo gvim /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

(or /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf, for Ubuntu 9.04) …and add the following line:

blacklist pcspkr

From the command line, kill it in the current session:

sudo rmmod pcspkr

No more waking the baby with late-night hacking sessions!

Select Tag Funkiness With Merb

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 23:53:24 GMT

In my ongoing travails with Merb & Friends, I’ve run across a few behaviors with the select() form helper method. Since there’s currently a dearth of examples, I thought I’d document them for myself and future googlers.

A Rails Developer Spends One Week With Merb (and HAML and JQuery and DataMapper)

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 22:57:18 GMT

Developers often talk about some hot new technology they plan on spending time with, but very rarely do they ever get around to it. I’m ordinarily in the same boat, but last week I had a new personal project crop up for a simple web application (5-6 models) which was an ideal candidate for testing out a slew of new tech that I’ve been meaning to get around to.

Merb, an erstwhile competitor to Rails, has been making a big splash lately. I decided to step out of my comfort zone of Rails/Acti* and into the wild and woolly world of young, cutting-edge frameworks. Since I’m undergoing the pain of learning a new framework, I figured I’d go whole hog and use Haml, jQuery, and DataMapper, as well.

Before last week, I’d never done much more than spin through the initial tutorials for any of these tools. That being the case, I can’t really speak to performance, deployment, or any of half-a-hundred other critical issues to consider when selecting a framework– this is strictly a shallow, first-impressions review.

I welcome comments and corrections to my observations, and suggestions for easing some of the new-developer pain.

If You Like Lyrical Code...

Sun, 07 Dec 2008 01:00:13 GMT

Osake reminded me this morning that I hadn't posted this one up yet...

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4if (self =~ /pina coladas/ && Rain.caught(self)
    && !yoga.include?(self) && self.brain == 0.5)
  Personals.answer
  self.relationship = :train_wreck
end

Bank of America: Bad, Bad, Bad

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 08:59:20 GMT

So, yeah, this is going to be a little ranty; feel free to skip it if you like Bank of America, or just don’t feel like hearing a windy blowhard spouting bile.

I’m not going into the many reasons I decided to close out my Bank of America account, just the representative experience of actually doing it.

Code Lyrical Umpteen-something...

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 10:08:42 GMT

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19class MaryMoon < Vegetarian

  def initialize
    @ttl = 2_524_554_080
    doowop
    @loves = Miso.new
    @alone.ambivalence = false
  end

  def eat(type)
    doowop
    raise ArgumentError if type.is_a? Meat
    return sho_like() if type.is_a? Bone
  end

  def doowop
    Thread.new { 3.times { 'Mary Moon' } }
  end
end

As always, jump for answers!

Mysterious, Incomprehensible Capistrano Errors

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 09:18:04 GMT

So yesterday a co-worker and I were fighting fires in our Capistrano deploy scripts. We'd been updating a crufty monstrosity of a cap script, and were getting an error along the lines of:

uninitialized constant #<Class:0x7f3230382cf0>::Capistrano::Deploy

After half a day of rolling back every single change we'd made to the scripts in the last week, we discovered a small junk file with some test code we'd stuck in the 'lib/recipes' directory. It was getting included even though it was not 'require'd anywhere.

PROTIP: CAPISTRANO INCLUDES EVERYTHING IN THE 'lib/recipes' DIRECTORY BECAUSE IT HATES YOU.

Also, it saves typing maybe three lines of code.

Berceuse Code Lyrical

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 12:22:08 GMT

Somewhat in the same vein as our last one:

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32def Son
  def pray(beneficiaries)
    unless beneficiaries.uniq.size == EVERYONE.size
      raise(ArgumentError, "Prayers should include everyone!")
    end
    @prayed = true
  end

  def tuck
    if @prayed
      internal_temperature = 99.9
      @sin_free = true
    end
  end

  def sleeping
    unless @eyes_open >= 1 && @pillow.gripped?
      @anthropomrphic_personification = Sandman.enter
      @sin_free = false
    end
  end
end

def Sandman
  def enter
    Light.exit
    Night.enter
    Hand.take
    never_never_land(:off)
    self.new
  end
end