June 2011
1 post
Robocop 2 Quick Review
I have spent the last few years doing live tweets of B Movies, but there is a certain impermanence to them and I don’t think they are generating much of an audience. I started messing around with the same concept on Facebook and I will try to cross post my reviews here. If I have time I will come back and enhance w/ links and images.
Here is my magic commentary for Robocop 2.
Robocop 2...
March 2011
1 post
Compiling Node.js on Ubuntu 10.10
I need to remember to document my code adventures here. I am quickly becoming enamored of Node.js as a complement to Ruby on Rails. Going to play with a chat server this afternoon.
As soon as I tried to build from source I received a missing OpenSSL error.
I had to grab these:
apt-get install libssl-dev
apt-get install pkg-config
After that it was just:
git clone...
January 2011
1 post
Historical wildlife deaths
This list is by no means scientific and deals primarily with animals falling from the sky.
I know it has often rained fishes….it once rained fish uninterruptedly for three days. Athenaeus 200AD
Norfolk, England - small toads fell from the sky in such vast numbers that the local people were greatly inconvenienced. October 1683 Phenomena: A book of wonders
Andes - 43 square English miles...
September 2010
1 post
My Hilarious and Frustrating talk w/ XboxSupport
Conversation via Twitter that highlights the problem with modern customer support. Granted this is all over $10 and I can get a decent price through a retailer, but c’mon. In the 3-4 hours span this conversation took place I also emailed customer support, but they have yet to reply. They suggest that I try phone support but last time I did it took forever to talk to someone, and they...
May 2010
2 posts
March 2010
2 posts
Let me tell you a story...
Jillian Michaels comes to the nearest man, that man he starts poundin’ and hollerin’ and screamin’ and sometimes Jillian Michaels go away… but sometimes she wouldn’t go away. Sometimes Jillian Michaels looks right into ya. Right into your eyes. And, you know, the thing about Jillian Michaels…. she’s got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll’s eyes....
Happy St. Patrick's Day
When I think about today it reminds me of how people treat immigrants. I think of the Irish 100 years ago and how the exact same arguments were leveraged against them. They are taking our jobs, schools, bringing disease, consuming our social services, they don’t assimilate our traditions, etc etc.
If certain people had their way the Irish would have been sent back home, the richness that...
February 2010
2 posts
December 2009
2 posts
November 2009
3 posts
October 2009
5 posts
7 tags
Ruby on Rails: String to Object
In my new app I have a whole bunch of nested models. For the most part they all have the same database structure and can use very similar partials. I hate to repeat code because it usually makes my life more difficult when I need to go back and change something or do maintenance. I am now placing these partials in a single location that all of these models have access to.
Problem is I had a...
September 2009
3 posts
5 tags
Ruby on Rails: String to Boolean
Really, this should be simpler. Knowing Rails folks there is probably some deep philosophical reason this isn’t included, but I hold no grudge.
So….I’m converting objects back and forth to JSON and when they return all my pretty Booleans are converted into strings. My assumption was that there was a handy little .to_b(ool) method for String, but alas there does not appear to...
7 tags
Ruby on Rails: Single Table Inheritance and...
I am writing this out of a bit of frustration. I have a solution here, but it took too long and it can not be correct. I am hoping some smarter folks will chime in with some thoughts.
I have a model called Questions which has many subtypes using single table inheritance. Basically types of questions dropdown, checkbox, radio, etc etc.
These are set up as resources so I can use restful...
August 2009
3 posts
4 tags
has_many :through & Acts_As_List
Following post is for Ruby on Rails geeks.
I don’t normally post my programming adventures here, but maybe I should. This is a simple thing and should have been obvious right away to me, but it wasn’t so I am posting it here for future generations. Thanks to Geek Mama for shaming me into posting this.
I have a “has_many :choices, :through => :question_items” model...
July 2009
7 posts
June 2009
4 posts
Earlier version of Dune that never was
From Wikipedia:
In December 1974, a French consortium led by Jean-Paul Gibon purchased the film rights from APJ. Alejandro Jodorowsky was set to direct. In 1975, Jodorowsky planned to film the story as a ten hour feature, in collaboration with Orson Welles, Dan O’Bannon, Salvador Dalí, Gloria Swanson, Hervé Villechaize and others (whom he nicknamed his “seven samurais”). The...
From the Stretch Armstrong press release
“Stretch Armstrong is a character I have wanted to see on screen for a long time,” said Imagine Entertainment’s Brian Grazer. “He’s an unconventional kind of super hero with a power that no one would want. It’s a story about a guy stretching – if you will – the limits of what is possible to become all that he can be.”
May 2009
11 posts
Saving the video game industry and the Nintendo...
A Giant in Our Midst
The Nintendo Wii is a beautiful thing. It arrived at a time when the other gaming consoles were fighting a war for supreme mediocrity. In the front lines were rehashes of first person shooters that looked like high definition DOOM, tired licenses where the producers forgot why we loved the original in the first place and movie titles that were positioned to catch sixty...
Classic arcade games for $2.96 on Xbox Live...
Link
The Casual Myth
There is nothing casual about the way my spouse plays Scrabble. She stands above the steaming corpses of her opponents and nods graciously at their efforts, futile as they may be. She checks her stats and her turns every day, she works on strategies and learns new ways of winning. She doesn’t cheat, and takes the ethics of the game seriously. The very thought of a “hardcore” fifteen year old gamer...
WatchMarvel VS. Capcom 2 Trailer for XBLA.
What is your favorite song from the Transformers movie soundtrack? Oh old school geeks, you know what I mean.
April 2009
11 posts
