http://tyler.officialopinion.com Mostly software Tue, 12 May 2009 12:28:35 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en There is no greater validation for a father than the smile of his children. http://tyler.officialopinion.com/2007/07/05/i-learned-something-very-important-today/ I was a happy programmer when I first launched inkscape from the dock on my Mac Book Pro. Here’s how you do it: 1. Install X11. It is on the system disk that came with your Mac. 2. Install macports or fink. 3. Install The Gimp using the ... http://tyler.officialopinion.com/2007/04/26/spicy-recipe-to-make-x11-apps-dock-able-in-osx/ I _love_ wikipedia. Fun *and* educational. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_slang_phrases http://tyler.officialopinion.com/2007/04/25/everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-internet-acronyms/ I never really observed the practical application of continuations until I found these little gems. They describe Ruby implementations of a Lisp operator named amb. With examples. Enjoy. Try this one first. Then check out this for an object-y implementation. An friendly overview of continuations can be found here http://tyler.officialopinion.com/2007/04/09/a-little-about-continuations/ On March 2nd the CRB passed a royalty rate increase that will absolutely destroy small internet broadcasters. If you’re an American and you would like to keep your freedom of choice inform yourself here: http://www.savenetradio.org/ I also urge you to write to your representative and sign the online petition. http://tyler.officialopinion.com/2007/04/01/goodbye-internet-radio-you-will-be-missed/ Yesterday at 5 p.m. I finished instructing my first course on Ruby and Rails. I can say it was an amazing experience for all of us. The course that Dave, Andy, Kevin and I put together some 6 months ago is still excellent stuff. It provided ... http://tyler.officialopinion.com/2007/03/09/reflecting-on-a-week-in-the-instructors-chair/ An unfortunate fact of my career is that I still do a lot of consulting work in Java. I developed my sour disposition, as many others before me have, by learning Ruby. One of the features I miss the most in Java land is Ruby’s succinct way of ... http://tyler.officialopinion.com/2007/02/01/emulating-rubys-enumerable-in-java/ The truth is I have eccentric tastes when it comes to music. It is very rare that I haphazardly wander into a disc I really want to buy at a local Mega Electronics Chain®. Even then I’ll only know if I made a good choice when I listen ... http://tyler.officialopinion.com/2006/11/30/emusic-a-no-brainer-for-indy-classical-fans/ Not too long after I ventured outside the shelter of scaffolding and active record I needed a model to represent transient data. Things that I didn’t plan to persist in the long term (thus, not an ActiveRecord model). For us, this is the form on a search page. ... http://tyler.officialopinion.com/2006/11/29/using-openstruct-for-transient-data/ The last few weeks I’ve been working on an Agile process management tool. We’re building it on Ruby, Rails, and Prototype. If you haven’t tried any of these, you’re missing out. The tool itself uses Prototype’s AJAX framework extensively, which brought me to the topic for this ... http://tyler.officialopinion.com/2006/10/30/updatable-dom-componenets/