Jay McGavren's Journal

Ruby and GTK...

Spent the last couple days flipping back and forth through the API docs for a Ruby GTK library and the source code for somebody’s C game. The result is a quick demo of tearing-free GTK animation in Ruby.

It still skips some frames, though. Can’t remember quite what I did to address this in Zyps…

I telecommute on Thursday, and since I’ll be around to lend Diana a hand, we’re gonna try getting the baby up at 10 AM or so, continuing each day through the weekend. Right now, he’s sleeping until noon, which is great, but he’s also up until 3 or 4 AM.

Diana sends me to bed earlier and stays up with him, but I’m still lucky if I get 6 hours of sleep a night. This morning I showed up late for a 10 AM meeting. Needless to say, this can’t continue. .

LJXP test...

Originally published at nephariuz's blog. Please leave any comments there.

Test of WordPress crossposting…

Been mucking with the new Dreamhost account...

As those of you subscribed to this journal saw, I have cross-posting to LiveJournal from WordPress working. I’m tired of my blog sitting on a server I have no control over, especially when there’s no proper export feature, so I’m just going to skip right over Vox and go to WordPress. I can import all my LiveJournal posts thanks to ljArchive, I can finally post via e-mail, and everything will be copied back here for my LiveJournal friends as if nothing had happened.

They do Subversion hosting, too. All my repositories currently sit on a second hard drive within my PC (the condition of which you read about in an earlier post), and they’re all too big to burn to DVD. They’ve got family photos, code, and records, so I’m pretty nervous to have them all in one place. Hopefully a server in another city is far enough away.

Photo galleries and Rails are next on the “let’s see what we can do with it” list…

I need more practice with Ruby mixins, so I thought I’d do a quick port of my Java game/simulation. It looks like the result will be as little as one source file where there used to be dozens of files and folders, a fraction of the number of classes, and a fraction of the line count.

I haven’t gotten to mess with mixins much yet, though. What I am learning about is Procs, blocks of code that keep all their context (variables, methods, etc.)

In Java, I always had to call an action object with both the actor and the target, even if the action only cared about one of those two. Now, I just provide a block (I don’t even have to create an action object), and refer to the variables I need from the scope in which the block is declared. Magically, even though the block is called from a completely different context, it acts from the block “owner’s” perspective.

A code sample is in order…