http://jay.mcgavren.com/blog Ramblings on Ruby on Rails Sun, 07 Mar 2010 07:09:07 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Was browsing the new Popular Science archives, which led to an article from 1984, which had a picture of the book Creative Graphics for the BBC Microcomputer, which led me to an archived copy of the book online, which had a dirt-simple program to draw Lissajous curves, which led me ... http://jay.mcgavren.com/blog/archives/1385 If your code base has .xsl files, and you sometimes confuse them with with the .xls files... You might be a Java dev. http://jay.mcgavren.com/blog/archives/1384 Posted (in vain, I'm sure) to Sen. Jon Kyl's Facebook wall: I'm a productive, tax-paying, native-born American with inadequate health insurance for myself and my family. Oh, we tried to purchase private insurance, but no one will underwrite us because my wife had major surgery too recently. We wound ... http://jay.mcgavren.com/blog/archives/1379 ruby -e "i=0;loop{puts ' '*(29*(Math.sin(i)/2+1))+'|'*(29*(Math.cos(i)/2+1)); i+=0.1}" #ruby about 23 hours ago via web ruby -rtk -e "w=TkCanvas.new(TkRoot.new{title:paint});w.pack.bind('B1-Motion',proc{|x,y|TkcOval.new(w,x,y,x+4,y+4)},'%x %y').mainloop" #ruby about 3 hours ago via web Almost got this one short enough to tweet: ruby -rtk -e"v,w=0,0;a=[1]*9;c=TkCanvas.new;c.pack.bind('Motion',proc{|x,y|a<<TkcLine.new(c,v,w,v=x,w=y,:arrow=>'last');a.shift.delete rescue 1},'%x %y').mainloop" http://jay.mcgavren.com/blog/archives/1378 Going salaried at my current employer, and have to fill out a job application as a formality. So I was digging around for past employer info in my archives, and came across this e-mail, sent on the occasion of departing Pegasus Solutions... Date: Sat, 22 Oct 2005 From: Me User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird ... http://jay.mcgavren.com/blog/archives/1373 In Part 2 of our tutorial, we'll create some enemies for our player to fight. We'll set up collision detection, use timers to make a pretty fading effect, and set up a custom manager to coordinate enemy movements and shooting. Be sure to visit jemini.org for help on starting ... http://jay.mcgavren.com/blog/archives/1371 Jemini is a Ruby-based framework for game development. In this screencast, we'll create a shooter game from scratch. Part 1 shows creating a project, setting up a game state, loading animations, music and sound effects, and setting up keyboard input and event handlers. (Not bad for 22 minutes, right?) You can view ... http://jay.mcgavren.com/blog/archives/1369 Puerto Penasco/Rocky Point was fun, if not exactly my cup of tea... This was my first time to Mexico, so we weren't exactly seasoned travelers, but we got by and actually had a good time. http://jay.mcgavren.com/blog/archives/1365 Everything so far has relied on some tricky-to-install GUI gem... Working in SVG lets Ruby On Acid make pretty graphics (viewable in any modern browser) by outputting plain text. Here's a few samples. I'm sure I could produce more consistently pretty results with more SVG expertise, but that's something ... http://jay.mcgavren.com/blog/archives/1359 A computer can mimic the style of a classical composer by analyzing sheet music. I bet GUIs could be (partially) generated for command-line tools. You just analyze how people mapped a CLI tool's functions to a GUI wrapper (say, Git vs. GitX), then apply the rules you learn ... http://jay.mcgavren.com/blog/archives/1357