I had a thought that in 2017 I should do a little more making and a little less consuming. It’s way too easy to get stuck into a loop of browsing websites, flicking through Facebook and turning off in front of the TV so instead of just doing that sort of stuff, I’m going to spend more time making things.
This post should probably have been written a few months ago, back when I brewed my first beer, but somehow I never got round to it and now I’m sitting here just starting on my second brew day and I figure I should record the first beer I brewed before I get a second under my belt. I’ve been interested in brewing for a while now, but never had the space before. I also moved from Edinburgh to Toronto six months ago. Before the move there was no point buying a bunch of brewing gear that would just be more stuff to move over here (or more likely get rid of and buy again once here) but afterwards I had more space available. I also found (slightly to my dismay) that Ontario has a local monopoly on alcohol sales, with everything going through one of three shops: the LCBO, the Beer Store, and the Wine Rack. The Beer Store mostly deals in 24 packs of lager so for decent beer of any kind the only option is the LCBO. I don’t live that close to one however, and we don’t have a car. This just provided another good reason to try brewing my own beer (as if I needed the excuse).
Github has recently made some small changes to how you comment on pull requests. The button to add a comment is now between the line number gutter and the code and when the form opens it’s aligned with the leftmost edge of the line number columns.
I recently discovered that \z and \Z (which match the end of the input) have subtly different behaviour (this is in Ruby but it behaves the same in most languages other than Python for some reason).
Git has a grep ability. It’s way faster than grep and ignores stuff in the .git directory that you probably weren’t looking for anyway. This git grep command takes a -p argument that shows the method or class the matched lines are in.
Rails has accepts_nested_attributes_for which helps when building forms that combine a parent and their related models. Unfortunately, I normally get it wrong and spend far too long tracking down why it isn’t working. Hopefully this will help reduce that time in future.
I use Trello quite a lot at work and one feature that’s always been quite handy is the checklists you can add to cards. Unfortunately, sometimes these lists get quite long and if you ever need to uncheck them all it can take a while.
Today was the day of the Christmas tree. After a trek around town to all the places that weren’t selling trees we finally made it to Holy Corner where we purchased a delightful little tree complete with a little log stand. We then hauled the tree home down the hill.
So as probably nobody has noticed I’ve switched over to using Ghost to run my blog. I imported all my old posts because hey, then I have content even if it is really old and largely irrelevant.
I’m warning you all in advance, I’m using this category to post completely irrational rant posts about my final year project. Inevitably there are going to be times when I’m bashing at something for ages and then find it’s just one simple thing I’d overlooked or one weirdness in how the code is done that I’d missed. For these times, this is the place I’m going to vent.
During my studies at the University of York I’ve found or been recommended various computer science textbooks that are available online. Since I got bored of looking through my history to find them again I’ve compiled them into a list here. I’ll try to keep it up to date.
So I recently read an article about the death of RSS after Martin Pickett linked to it on Twitter. It’s an interesting article and one I pretty much agree wholeheartedly with but a few things came to mind while reading it.
Gah. My eyes. They hurt! Seriously Google, get rid of it. Nobody likes it and it’s hell for usability. How Marissa Mayer can post about being excited about this “feature” and still keep some claim to being responsible for user experience is beyond me.
I always forget how to copy files easily over the network using Samba so now I’ve just worked it out again for the umpteenth time I’ll record it here.
I have several hard drives and when times are hard and space is scarce I often need to work out how much space I have left to stash random crap in. Now I could look at the output of df -h and do some fairly basic mental arithmetic and come to a reasonable conclusion. Alternatively I could use my super handy shell script I just wrote.