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Archives for July, 2011

notes on books

Some tangentially related notes on recent experiences reading books: When I was thinking about getting an iPad, I wondered what format I should buy books in. I was thinking the contenders were Amazon’s proprietary format versus ePub books (sadly largely with encryption in both cases); but when I actually got the iPad, I discovered that […]

testing updates via unobtrusive javascript

When talking about upgrading memory to Rails 3.0, I mentioned that I’d had trouble testing a bit of the unobtrusive JavaScript code. Specifically, I had a file answer.js.erb that contained the following: $(‘answer’).update(“<%= escape_javascript(render :partial => ‘answer’, :object => @item) %>”); and I wanted to take apart the HTML returned by that render :partial section. […]

being on call

At work, our service has been in a pre-alpha mode for the last month or so. Which has been a fascinating experience, one that I’ve never been so heavily involved in before: in the StreamStar group, we were selling a product rather than running a service, so there wasn’t the same visibility into how well […]

upgrading memory to rails 3.0

I wrote a program to help me memorize stuff a few years, partly for reviewing Japanese vocabulary (and grammar) and partly to give me an excuse to learn Rails. It’s done very well in the former regard; it was somewhat useful in the latter regard, but it’s simple enough (and used by few enough people) […]

out of control

As I’ve mentioned before, we often play Burnout Revenge after lunch at work. Not always—we play board games once a week, we recently got a nice Rock Band setup, and several people have started playing ping pong—but Burnout Revenge continues to be our go-to game. A month or two ago, we unlocked a Formula 1-style […]