Jay McGavren's Journal

Dear Department of Reincarnation...

This current life is headed in a promising direction overall, so thank you. If you’re keeping a playlist for me, I’d like to add the following items…

1. Manga artist
2. John Cleese (not any comedian, this one in particular)
3. Barn swallow (the swooping looks fun)

Linux Live Arcade?

You know, it wouldn’t be that hard to re-do the MythTV frontend system to be like XBox Live/Wii channels. Instead of shows, you’d flip through games available for download. When you found one you wanted, you could choose a menu entry to install it via the package manager.

Networking would be a little harder - you’d need a list of IP addresses for your friends/party members, which would then need to be fed to the command line for each game using that game’s options. I don’t think exiting back to the menu in the event of a connection failure could be made automatic in most cases, either, but that may not be a show-stopper.

I’m on this train of thought because I’m a little tired of dumping money into these locked-down ecosystems that I know will go away as soon as my console dies. I know I can’t attract people to play open-source games when the consoles are so much better integrated, so anything that ties a few titles together can surely help. There were some efforts in this regard a few years back, but I haven’t heard anything of them since…

Robert Frost once defined poetry as that which cannot be translated. No wonder anime and manga arrive in the US with the poetry removed.

Quick HOWTO for Hirb formatter for irb/Rails console...

Hirb is pretty object formatting for irb (and the Rails console). If squinting at the standard Object#inspect output is slowing you down (trust me, it is), you should look into Hirb. Here’s <5 minute setup…

Install the gem:

sudo gem install hirb

Add these lines to your $HOME/.irbrc file, which will cause Hirb to be auto-loaded at startup for both irb and script/console:

require 'rubygems'

require 'hirb'
extend Hirb::Console
Hirb::View.enable

Try it out in irb:

$ irb
irb(main):001:0> table ['foo', 'bar']
+-------+
| value |
+-------+
| foo   |
| bar   |
+-------+
2 rows in set
=> true
irb(main):002:0>

Try it out in script/console:

jay@dandelion:~/Projects/myproject
$ script/console
Loading development environment (Rails 2.3.2)
>> MyModel.all
+----+-----------------+-------------------------+-------------------------+
| id | name            | created_at              | updated_at              |
+----+-----------------+-------------------------+-------------------------+
| 1  | Foo             | 2009-06-16 23:38:10 UTC | 2009-06-16 23:38:10 UTC |
| 2  | Bar             | 2009-06-17 00:38:16 UTC | 2009-06-17 00:38:16 UTC |
+----+-----------------+-------------------------+-------------------------+
2 rows in set

Hirb has customization options I haven’t even begun to explore, so be sure to look at its docs.