Category Archives: Ruby

Fat Fucking Bastard

If you’ve met me, you might’ve noticed that I’m a massive fat cunt. This has been the case for all of my life, and I’m mostly happy with it. It keeps me warm in winter and if I fall overboard on a boat I’ll float. What I’m so not happy about is my level of [...]

Awesome New Job

After a pleasingly brief period of unemployment (where I mostly applied for jobs online and watched The West Wing), I’ve managed to land myself a job with PickLive, who are doing cool and interesting things with live event pool betting. They’ve even announced it on their blog, which is kinda cool. I’m going to be [...]

#scotfail

I’ve just published the source code to @scotfail, as it was overdue a rewrite and a couple of people had expressed an interest in seeing how it worked. It’s not the most advanced code I’ve ever written – the ‘Twitter’ RubyGem does all the real work. If @scotfail is a success it’s not because of [...]

Salvaging a failed iPhone app

The first of my ‘being productive at the weekend’ projects was something I’d actually started over the Christmas holidays – a pretty simple iOS app for checking domain name availability. The few apps I’d found all had the same restriction – they could only check .com/.net/.org domains. At a guess, they were just making a [...]

Status Update

Last November I handed in my notice at Daxtra Technologies. I didn’t have anything else lined up, but after three and a quarter years I felt I needed to move on, largely because I didn’t see any opportunity to move my career in the direction I wanted. I want to be working on awesome scaling [...]

One Line Ruby Webserver

This weekend I’ve been working on an iPhone app which is entirely HTML, CSS, and Javascript. I’ve been missing script/server as an easy way to spawn a web server for testing on an iPhone. There’s a Python one-liner I usually use for this sort of thing, but I don’t otherwise use Python and figured it [...]

Your 140 Seconds

I gave a talk about Adhearsion, the Ruby VoIP framework that interfaces with Asterisk, to ScotRUG. You can see the video on Vimeo. The talk wasn’t too well-prepared, in particular I hadn’t tested to see if Asterisk was working properly on my netbook. Of course, it wasn’t, and so I couldn’t do a demo. The [...]

Scraping the money together.

I have a mortgage with Northern Rock, a UK bank which collapsed (triggering the first run on a UK bank) a couple of months after we got our mortgage. It’s a bit of a nightmare, and one of the (many) things that I lie in bed thinking about at 3am when I should be sleeping. [...]

Twittermancy and Open Sourcery

This article was originally published at Witchvox. At times, Technopaganism can seem like an almost invisible niche of Paganism. Mainstream books and online resources nearly always have a very heavy pastoral or rural slant and it can be very difficult to find real examples of everyday Technopagan practices. To help counter this, I am going [...]

Doing it wrong.

I’m going to start by proposing the following: Doing it right > doing it wrong > not doing it at all. I do firmly believe that in terms of software development, test-driven development (or ‘test-first’, or ‘behaviour-driven’ development, which all seem to be variations on a theme) is the right way to do it. You [...]