I finished my radio play off today and will be sending it to the BBC next week. Quite excited about it but not really holding out a huge amount of hope because there isn't a lot of point getting too worked up about stuff.I've been reading num

Way back in the mists of time men were just men. They had the dominant role in society, at least in theory, and women couldn't compete with them in the workplace because they had other things to worry about. In some ways this was less of an issue

Comment left here - it's also worth following some of the links in the article.Never install the Java Decompiler, JAD, and look at the library code you are dependent on.Just don't.If you do, however, never run the FindBugs utility (which I re

One of the consequences of meditating a lot over several years is you start to see how your own mind works. Obviously, this gives you insight into other people's too.If you are feeling down and oppressed by the world, well, how about getting the

Just in case this burns someone elseTalking to a web service that returns an array of mixed complex types (ooh goody!)soap4r returns a lot of SOAP::Mapping::ObjectThese pretend to be a kind of hash (of hashes of hashes if you go really deep), so I co

Comment left here. My lama says that you should allow your subjective pain to awaken compassion for others that also suffer from whatever condition you are suffering with. Then take the medicine!I no longer need to take antidepressants

Comment left here ... and that's why I use RoR. 90% of the "anti" opinions here don't get it. It's quick, it has a low entry barrier, and, if you want the Ajax stuff, it's very easy to do simple things. If you want stuff tha

Here lies the one that works, not the old one I posted ages ago. It also uses dates instead of timestamp differences and should therefore not break if you ask it to go before the Epoch (some time in 1970 I think):

Start here to see what this is in response to. ... how many of you go back to the pre-web days? I do - graduated in 1987, I've had to practically start again 3 or 4 times in the last 20 years - Un

Comment left here  Didn't realise that phorm were the timewasting bastards who were behind 121 - spent many a happy hour trying to get rid of their viral nonsense from a machine my then 10 year old son was using (no idea how they got past hi

Bloody hell! Although I suppose it might save us from tourists (joke, definitely joke, I hope). Is there any forum you can have a go at them about wasting public money? There's an idea - why not get off your backsides and do your job preventing i

Comment left here  I am a Rails developer who uses a proper IDE (Netbeans for Ruby) and Windows. Installed Cygwin to give me the bash shell and the other tools I need to talk to our Linux server backbones. I started on Unix/Sun workstations, wen

Following on from the talk I tried to give on why Java is bad for your brain at Barcamp I thought I'd dig out some of my old blog posts and present them here - try and explain the argument (which is more of a feeling

Create an active record object, retrieve some stuff from a soap service and then get this:NoMethodError: You have a nil object when you didn't expect it!The error occurred while evaluating nil.has_key?        fr

Comment left here.  XML - sighI read Oracle's early papers on XML DB - "we store the schema and the data separately, with pointers into the data"Codasyl in disguise. The same with the o-o databases, hierarchical databases - none of

I was doing some hacking with lists of valid phone number codes (3,4,5 digits depending upon various factors). I used hashes that could be walked down because of the key lengths. Now we've decided to do it  differently because the data file

Insightful few paragraphs here.  If John and others are right, the climate change folks look like tools, if they are wrong we might be in deep trouble.That's the problem.That said, I agree that we can overcome difficulties with technology an

I was getting this: undefined method `to_f' for {}:HashWithIndifferentAccessThis was happening in the after_create method. We have a table that lists fields and what validation is needed, we use this to pick out the value in the record so we can

Comment left  Eschew bullet points - they are there to prompt the speaker Use diagrams and pictures - people think in pictures Give handouts - That's where screeds of text belongs. I read a paper that says one of the shuttle disasters was i

  http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/databreaches/BNNaxVBItj5pAYGDpTAAoCg 

Posted here. I've been using it for a while now, moved because of incompatibility issues.Perhaps the complete redesign of the interface? Try finding "save as" in Excel - the File menu no longer exists FFS! It is there, but now

I've said that I use netbeans on this blog a few times but never really gone into why.First, I can park all of the class/project browsers and output windows in the margins of the page and they only pop-up when I click on them.Second, I can tear o

We migrated a core system to our shiny new cluster on Friday. Colin got everything going apart from a call-out to a 3rd party back-end system that uses SOAP. Tracking down the problem:The error message was a method_missing talking about load_file.I d

Managed to post this twice becuase their system wouldn't let me log in ... http://www.adtmag.com/article.aspx?id=21641> Absence of sophisticated IDE/Debugging tools - Eclips

If your code throws exceptions then beware that RSpec uses exceptions to talk to itself, if you catch exceptions then beware that you could be masking the error RSpec is trying to report.If you're staring at something tha