house of warwick

The cryptic title doesn’t tell you much but I’d bet you’re interested, eh?

I ordered the second edition of Agile Web Development with Rails today via the magic of the mobile web. The first edition was so good (and Rails development has changed at lightspeed) that I figured the $50 was worth it. I’m still working on my wife’s site but the new book with it’s updated practices and sample code would benefit significantly.

You can count on me buying this one and wasting several hours this winter…

Xbox Live Arcade: “Seventeen years ago, you survived a vicious Pfhor assault on the U.E.S.C. Marathon. Now you have been awakened by the enigmatic, sentient A.I. called Durandal and sent to an alien world to uncover the mysteries of their advanced technology. In Marathon: Durandal, armed with only a pistol, you are humanity%u2019s last champion!”

Redirects work easily in Rails. Modify the routes.rb file and the application can process it’s own redirects without messing with the server’s config files. This is handy for situations like my wife’s business website where her old content and URLs need to be preserved while the new stuff is being built.

Example: http://redbeedesigns.com/about and http://redbeedesigns.com/about.html look the same because the are exactly the same content generated exactly the same way.

Again, nothing new to a profession web developer, but gratifying nonetheless.

Tonight, time permitting, we’ll do some database work with the “shop” page.

I’ve been working on and off on a Universal Binary version of Radio Userland. I spent some time last night (late last night) working on the core issue, the code that handles the resources in the kernel. For the first time, I think I have a good idea of what really happens during startup with Radio. The worst part is I’m no closer to fixing the problem. I offered cash payments on the kernel mailing list, but everyone is too busy to make this work right now.

Anyone with some hardcore C experience out there?

Boing Boing: “The folks at OSFlash have figured out how to emulate a Commodore 64 computer in Flash, so that old C64 apps can be run within a Flash app. The source for the emulator is licensed under the GPL.”

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I wanted to write a Mac app in Cocoa and I was soliciting advice. Dwight Shih, my iBook’s original owner (it’s running great!), says that I write something for myself and not for others. I’d have to agree and here’s what I have in mind:

I need an easy app to start with so it’s going to be an adding machine. For the “younger” folks out there, adding machines were like calculators, but the generally did the four big operations: add, subtract, multiply and divide. I’m picking those four to work on because the functions are easy to program in C and the concept leaves plenty of room to grow. Also, with an adding machine interface, I can grow to a custom window type, “tapes” that you tear off and save as documents, preferences for the look and feel and more. The way I see it, this concept will help me focus on Cocoa fundamentals first instead of C functions and object-oriented concepts.