Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Vinyl Siding Undone

Posted: January 7, 2012 by Steve in Uncategorized

A very penguin Christmas

Posted: December 20, 2011 by Steve in Uncategorized

Have you ever wondered how those DSL’s in ruby managed to get rid of the requirement to pass a variable to a block to indicate the context of the enclosed block? An example of this in Rails route definitions where the blocks are simply just nested. My question was how does each block know what […]

Funny thing that hubris

Posted: December 5, 2011 by Steve in Uncategorized
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About 5 weeks ago I mentioned to a friend of mine that my fantasy football team was a team without a weakness. I was undefeated, leading the league in points, and firing on all cylinders. He said to be careful, as he had just won his fantasy baseball league over a team like that. That […]

programming and driving

Posted: December 2, 2011 by Steve in Uncategorized

Today I did something that sounds illegal, but actually wasn’t. You see I had a programming issue that was perplexing me and didn’t require a lot of typing. I had an opportunity to drive the slow way from downtown St. Paul to uptown Minneapolis and think about my problem. With some black rebel motorcycle cycle […]

Help me!

Posted: November 24, 2011 by Steve in Uncategorized

Notice the drowning man in the orange destined for to drown in the Thanksgiving wassail

<3 me

Posted: September 25, 2011 by Steve in Uncategorized

The main ingredient missing in our current news system is the systematic pursuit of truth. It is riddled with attempts to distract, obscure, mislead and confuse the public. The reasons are many and varied, but my thesis is centered on the idea that the powers that own or control the media have no interest in […]

Towards a better news system

Posted: June 5, 2011 by Steve in Uncategorized

The following post was going to be my submission to the Mozilla-Knight Foundation challenge for People Powered News, until I realized that the limit was 500 words. My next posting was my actual submission. Background I follow Jay Rosen and Dave Winer and love their take on a new news system and how it might […]

This may not be a common pattern in rails applications, but a recent change in activerecord (somewhere between 2.3.5 and 2.3.11) code broke the following scenario: class LineItem < ActiveRecord::Base before_validation :build_visual_attributes attr_writer :color, :height, :width # the components of visual attributes   serialize :visual_attributes attr_accessible :quantity, :cost   def build_visual_attributes write_attribute(:attributes, {:color => color, […]