Happy Christmas

25 December 2005

Happy Christmas, y’all.

It’s been a lovely day here, doing not a lot. Eating good food, ringing the relatives, a lovely selection of presents given and received, and lots of time to chill out. All quite tiring in fact, so off to bed quite soon. Tomorrow it’s off to Bedford to see aunts, uncles, cousins and grandmother, and then on Tuesday I’m off to Derby to visit the Girl’s extended family. Back in London towards the end of the week, for New Year.

I’ll be posting again before the New Year; a few things to mention, perhaps a retrospective on 2005, and the usual stream from del.icio.us will all be happening before that. Enjoy yourselves!

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Rails and Hypercard

22 December 2005

Gavin mentions the idea that Ruby on Rails might just be the new Hypercard – something I may or may not have discussed with him.

I think he’s right. After one of the London Ruby User Group meets, someone commented that all Rails really needs now is a killer easy-front-end for page layout, or an IDE for apps of some form, and it could really hit the jackpot. I immediately thought of Hypercard; it had the requisite simplicity, grace, and convention, and would be nicely suited to Ruby (just as it was to Applescript).

I’ve mentioned Hypercard before on this site. It was pretty formative in me finding a way I could program computers that wasn’t necessarily reams of code, of first making me aware of UI design, and of making programming fun. Rails has had a similar effect, properly kick-starting me into OO programming, and finally making me understanding and appreciate scripting languages.

The speed of gettings things working, that’s what matters. Not finished – finished might be a long way off – but you’ve always got something to show for your labours. That’s why I like it.

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Powerbook woes: continued

21 December 2005

This is taking the biscuit.

Way into work: unplug Powerbook from PSU, bundle up PSU. Work on train a bit. Get to work. Plug PSU into power socket. Plug PSU into Powerbook.

No light on charger ring; no indication of a charging battery.

Change the fuse, same problem. I think, after two and a half years, the PSU is dead. Investigate buying a new one. A new power supply will be

£55.

I give up.

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A system of the world

19 December 2005

“It’s a hard life, being a games reviewer. You’d think it would all be peaches and cream – playing games for ages and then being allowed to write about them (and if you’re really lucky, being paid for the privilege).

But it’s a lot harder than that.”

Another game review up on Pixelsurgeon. This time, a review of the Xbox port of Half-Life 2. It’s possibly a bit too “heavy” (you’ll see what I mean when you read it), but it was fun to break away from convention for a while. There’s a horrific typo/crap sentence based around a pun that doesn’t quite work and I’m a bit embarassed about that. Other than that, though, one of the better things I’ve written in a while.

Read the full review.

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Rails 1.0 (and Locomotive)

14 December 2005

Congratulations to David, and, of course, the rest of the rails-core gang for getting Rails 1.0 out the door. Much promised, long awaited. I’ve been runing 0.13.8 consistently, and decided not to upgrade to the Release Candidates, instead holding out for 1.0.

Well, my Powerbook reinstall went smoothly last weekend, and all that’s left is to install Rails. I was going to follow Dan Benjamin’s excellent instructions, but decided to leave it a few more days for 1.0. That day came early! Unfortunately, life is chocka right now, so there just isn’t time to install it til the weekend. That’s when I gave Locomotive another shot; a self-contained install of Rails, lighttpd with FastCGI, and sqllite. Very impressive, too; just pointed it at a development app, added it to the list, clicked “run” – and there we were in the browser, running on Rails. For the next few days, it’ll let me vent my PHP frustration with minimum hassle. Come the weekend, I’ll install 1.0 proper. Can’t wait to get back on the railsroad…

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