buffington

A project I'm working on, which, while not totally a secret, will remain so here so that I might have an opportunity later to break the story, needs help from people with skills.

Specifically, I'm looking for an excellent web designer. Like one who really gets CSS and XHTML, but also wields a might sword in Photoshop and thinks about every single pixel.

I'm also looking for a Ruby on Rails developer who would love nothing more in life than to build games using Ruby and Rails.

Check out each job post here (designer, developer), send your resumes and your friends' resumes to me.

Doing a lot of work with Ruby's IRB or a Rails app's console? Create a file called .irbrc in your home directory with the following Ruby code and you'll have tab completion and most importantly, input history across IRB sessions. A huge time saver.


require 'irb/completion'
require 'irb/ext/save-history'
ARGV.concat [ "—readline", "—prompt-mode", "simple" ]
IRB.conf[:SAVE_HISTORY] = 100
IRB.conf[:HISTORY_FILE] = "#{ENV['HOME']}/.irb-save-history"

So this is a pure out and out rant against Ruby, and it's short, and when it comes down to it it's the kind of rant that gets hard core developers to say "so just do it the right way yourself". To them, I say "do it the right way yourself" preemptively and launch into my rant.

The Ruby Time class sucks. If I do Time.now, I get back a time object tied to my current time zone, which it determines by looking at what time zone my computer is set to. Not that big of a deal.


>> Time.now
=> Wed Oct 11 00:01:43 PDT 2006


The problem is, I can't adjust that time zone at all, not without some pretty serious hacks, and that's stupid. I can't even create a UTC time (essentially Greenwich Mean Time) and say "Hey, this time here, let's convert it to Mountain Standard Time", or even GMT-7 for that matter. Once it's UTC, always UTC. Once it's PDT, always PDT.

Of course there are hacks (and truthfully, I've already come up with a not so elegant solution which I won't yet share [can't effectively rant and foam at the mouth with a solution in hand]) but Ruby should just make this easy. I should be able to do:


>>t = Time.now
=> Wed Oct 11 00:01:43 PDT 2006
>>t.convert("GMT-6")
=> Wed Oct 11 01:01:43 MDT 2006


But I can't. I can't even extend the Time class by making a Time#convert that will return the time as MDT without converting the original time to a string, individually poking at it's parts, messing with system internals that may break other stuff, and hope that it'll go quickly.

Ruby, why do you hurt me so?

Also, I know about TZinfo and it's giganté sized pile of international time zones. It's a good library, but not very fast, and converting one time to another time when you don't know exactly what zone you're converting too or from is nigh impossible.

Perhaps when Ruby is back in my good graces (tomorrow morning after a vigorous night of sleeping) I'll write up my solution.

Today was full of ambition, full of failure. To start:

Went to get the truck's crunchy feeling brake pads replaced. Had an appointment and everything, and after the mechanic looked at if for two hours, he came back out and said "All set, we made some adjustments and replaced your wiper blades. And oh, the only way to fix that crunchy feeling is to replace your brake pads, otherwise the rotor will get messed up."

I asked if he could just do that now, and, seriously, he said "Oh, well, we're all booked up now, you'll have to make an appointment."

Later on I figured I'd have a better hand at making some code work for a client project I'm finishing up. In this case, I needed to get ImageMagick and Ruby to work nicely with each other on my machine.

Let me just say this - if the journey to get that combo working starts in say, Los Angeles, then the destination is, I don't know, somewhere at the core of Jupiter. I have never in my life seen such a brittle installation of software. One part requires another part, which requires another part of a certain version, which in turn needs all parts to be Capricorns unless they were born in a leap year at which point they need be Sagitarius, and you must make sure you already have a natural gas dryer, fourteen boa constrictors, three of them female, an Audi Quattro balancing on two wheels, a Pygmy who can speak Mandarin while feeding narcaleptic goats with his belly button, and a bathtub full of nachos, cats, and silent children.

And so, I spent nearly my entire day working feverishly, but getting absolutely nothing accomplished.

This sort of thing grinds me up because it's hard enough to get deeply into flow in the first place to solve these kinds of problems - when it's fruitless is seems like all the more the waste, and especially so when you're working on a Saturday so that when Monday comes you can work on the good stuff without feeling swamped.