Monty Python passes the torch...
Just watched my first episode of The Wrong Door - it’s like Flying Circus has been resurrected. (With crappy CG!)
Only those with a U.K. IP address are supposed to be able to get to it, but there’s some kind of fluke that makes it available right now. I’m not gonna count on its release over here; watch while you can.
Read more...Well, that was easy.
I showed Diana the demo rails site I was working on for Jeremy, but she wasn’t much impressed. She used layman’s terms, but in effect said she was sure the modelling and authentication work I’d done was very impressive, but that she couldn’t really appreciate that if all she saw was a plain white screen with some forms on it. Visual design is not my area, so I wasn’t looking forward to the effort required to make something pretty.
Well, one visit to a CSS templates site later, I have something I can drop into my application.html.erb, a default.css I can drop in public/stylesheets, and a much prettier demo. No sweeping revision of my entire code base, no GUI layout editors, and almost no hand-editing. Better yet, all I have to do to make the site skinnable is say
<%= stylesheet_link_tag(session[:user].style || "default") %>
in the default layout, and add a style attribute to the User model. (This last idea from Chad Fowler’s Rails Recipes.) Pretty freakin’ sweet.
Read more...Thunderstorm...
Insane storm tonight - lightning every half second, and the thunder is a constant roar instead of single bursts. Got a couple pictures…
I got this one…
And Diana got this…
OK, so it's not useful NOW...
Added to “utility/enhancements.rb”…
class String
#Uses Windows Speech API to speak string.
def speak
require 'win32/sapi5'
Win32::SpVoice.new.Speak(self.to_s)
end
end
99.downto(1) {|n| "#{n} bottles of beer on the wall".speak}MiniMe's back!
Dell doesn’t mess around on repairs. I stalled forever before requesting service on the Inspiron laptop, ‘cause I figured it would be gone for 4 weeks and come back with a note saying “could not find problem” and nothing repaired.
Nope - they sent a box to pack it in, DHL shipping prepaid, it was at the depot the day after we sent it, and on its way back to us a day after that. Dunno if they reproduced the error successfully (the keyboard was sending code “141” repeatedly, which basically only interfered with Alt-Tabbing), but they replaced the keyboard regardless. Diana just tested it, and everything’s working. (So it really was the hardware; I was starting to doubt myself.)
Anyway, except for the scripted tech support, Dell gets a big thumbs-up on customer service. (And Acer, whose Aspire died on us one month out of warranty, still gets the finger.)
Read more...