December 2011
3 posts
Body copy guidelines
I just sent the following email to some cow orkers. It took me ages to dig up the links. It always takes me ages, so I’m blogging it as a bookmark.
Here are two excellent references for my religious perspective on typesetting and layout of body copy. It will take you less than 10 minutes to read both articles, I promise. You will:
Discover why you feel drained after a lot of browsing.
...
Setting HTTP Referer with capybara
Because it took me an hour to find out… To set the HTTP Referer for a request in a cucumber step definition using capybara with the default driver (Capybara::RackTest::Driver):
referer = 'http://example.com/'
Capybara.current_session.driver.header 'Referer', referer
visit '/'
Note that this persists for the remainder of the session. If you know how you’re supposed to unset an...
1 tag
November 2011
2 posts
The Emo Divinyls
I cut myself
I want you to cut me
When I’m feelin’ down
I want you above me
I search myself
I want you to find me
I forget myself
I want you to remind me
I don’t cut anybody else
When I think about you
I cut myself
My first project using my birthday present. I...
October 2011
12 posts
30 second sound byte from last night’s...
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“I will never apologize for the United States of America, I don’t care what...”
– George H. W. Bush on the United States military shooting down an Iranian airliner, killing 290 civilians. And people thought his son was the idiot.
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“The Sabbath Manifesto is a creative project designed to slow down lives in an...”
– Sabbath Manifesto
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Ruby rescue statement modifier
My copy of The Ruby Programming Language arrived today. I dived straight in to find a canonical justification for my superstition that rescue with no arguments only rescues StandardError and its descendants, not Exception and its descendants.
Along the way, I discovered that the rescue keyword can be used as a statement modifier. If the modified statement raises an exception, the argument to the...
The Wallaby Magic
Wondering how the Wallabies do it? After all, the Springboks were playing under the same blind, naive, unfit, incompetent has-been referee.
What the Wallabies do well, is probe the referee’s capabilities and boundaries.
Today, they discovered in the first half that they could get away with their hands in the ruck, coming in from the side, high tackling, shoulder charges, obstruction, early...
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Watch(via PopTech : Popcasts : Benjamin Zander - PopTech 2008)
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Engaging the navigator
The bad habit that I’m unlearning at the moment, is letting myself trail off mid-sentence because it’s gotten too hard to do what I’m doing and describe what I’m doing at the same time. The computer can wait all day and won’t mind; my navigator is a human trying to participate in the thought process, not just the photon gazing.
Thanks to Graham Ashton for making me...
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“Many members of the Agile movement need to learn when to turn down the...”
– (Some) Agilistas: Still Not Yet Lean Thinkers - Martin Burns: PM PoV
As someone familiar with the Agile Manifesto, but not familiar with Lean, I found Martin’s post and follow up to my comment extremely challenging, in a good way.
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magic_options ruby gem
Rory McKinley and I have published a little ruby gem that implements what I call the magic options pattern. You know the drill:
class BigThing
def initialize(options = {})
@height = options[:height]
@width = options[:width]
@depth = options[:depth]
@weight = options[:weight]
end
end
What an epic yawn.
With magic_options, you can just do this:
class BigThing
include...
September 2011
5 posts
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“There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and...”
– Phil Karlton
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Unobtrusive Ruby →
thoughtbot:
Unobtrusive Ruby is any Ruby code that stays out of your way. It does not make you write lots of boilerplate, or stub methods, or open classes. It is decoupled. Its tests run quickly, its classes fit on one screen, its methods are tiny, and it is quickly refactorable.
Unobtrusive Ruby is a state of mind.
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magic_options ruby gem →
MagicOptions is a ruby module that provides mechanisms for splatting an options hash into an object’s instance variables.
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“Does one thing and does it well. This addon is the only fix I could find, for...”
– StartupMaster :: Reviews :: Add-ons for Firefox
August 2011
1 post
Skype contact request
In order to discuss features that you request, as a developer I would like you to add me to your Skype contacts. Scenario 1: Vicci accepts Given I am on Skype And Vicci is on Skype When I send Vicci a contact request And Vicci accepts my contact request Then Vicci and I can converse on Skype.
July 2011
2 posts
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Fedora 15 krb5.conf
To get a Fedora 15 MIT Kerberos client to log into hosts with multiple PTRs using an older MIT Kerberos implementation (e.g. Debian Lenny), you need at least the following in your krb5.conf:
[libdefaults]
rdns = false
June 2011
5 posts
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“A [World of Warcraft] Horde guild proved a lot of the good things people say...”
– The 7 Biggest Dick Moves in the History of Online Gaming | Cracked.com
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“OSX software updates, fuck off and stop bothering me. I’m trying to make...”
– Matt Carroll on #mcollective
Originally quoted without “OSX software updates”, but that put an elitist spin on it, instead of conveying the despair of an Apple customer aspiring to productivity.
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Renewing Kerberos tickets in Gnome3
UPDATED… Some smart arse in the office pointed out that you can change this more easily as follows:
Click on your name in the top right of the screen.
Click System Settings in the drop-down menu.
Click Kerberos Authentication.
Type your preferred Kerberos principal into the Kerberos Principal text field.
Close the Kerberos Authentication window.
The original advice remains below as an...
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May 2011
6 posts
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The Myth of the One-Off
An argument that I regularly hear from people regarding the adoption of configuration management tools is that their systems are unique and comprised of many one-offs. In this article I will address the one-off myth and discuss why your systems are not beautiful snowflakes.
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“The Modernist believes in OR more than AND. Postmodernists believe in AND more...”
– Perl, the first postmodern computer language - Perl.com
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“The best theory is inspired by practice. The best practice is inspired by...”
– Donald E. Knuth
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VirtualBox Guest Control →
I just discovered VirtualBox’s guest control feature.
VboxManage.exe guestcontrol exec tophat \
/bin/uname --arguments "-a" \
--username sheldonh --password secret \
--wait-for stdout
This logs into a virtualbox called tophat as user sheldonh, runs /bin/uname -a and returns the process output:
Linux tophat 2.6.35.13-91.fc14.x86_64 #1 SMP ...
Cute!
April 2011
2 posts
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March 2011
6 posts
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“Maybe Windows developers have a stronger sense of progress because Windows...”
– Software development and the myth of progress — The Endeavour
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“I’ve long been suspicious of speeches that revolve around idiosyncratic...”
– Suspicious definitions — The Endeavour
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Ferrari Shell Commercial →
Thanks, Ric.
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“So, what happened? Why are you getting blocked today, based on utilization of a...”
– Al Iverson’s Spam Resource: What changed?
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Why is Google so bad at security? →
It’s nice to see people outside the antispam community waking up to Google’s seriously broken attitude toward security. It means that it shouldn’t be long before they know that we know, you know?
February 2011
1 post
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December 2010
2 posts
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Gauteng online plan wastes billions →
Here’s another example of the very superficial journalism that the Gauteng Online debacle continues to receive.
The scary thing is not that they’re doing a bad job on site at the schools. The scary thing is that the deal was structured as a lease model. That means that these billions (R3bn, last I heard) were paid to:
Set up a well-connected data centre.
Set up a wireless mesh...
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November 2010
4 posts
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Funniest man on the Web →
This guy has got to be the funniest guy on the Web right now. Thanks, Rob, for the punt.
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