Tyler Clemons

I was talking to Ben and saw another opening for the classic and overused “That’s what she said” joke.  As I was typing it in, I realized I should just make it easier on myself and write a simple script to do it for me.  So I did.

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Back in undergrad, the majority of our classes taught us sound software engineering principles using Python, C++, and sometimes Java.  The first two were used quite extensively.  The resource I used was invaluable to my success in mastering data structures, learning OOP, and granting me proper exposure to Python and C++.  Data Structures and Algorithms Using Python and C++ is a great resource and I wanted to share it here.  I believe it is great for beginners of both Python and C++ and those entering a data structures course.  Click HERE to order a copy.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/09/01/12/02NF-ruby-on-rails-merb_1.html

Rails will add some new features and enhancements by merging with MERB.  Should be interesting.

I use Adium and iTunes frequently. One of the cool things about the OS X environment is the integration between applications. For instance, Adium contacts can be linked to Address Book accounts. One of my personal favorites is the integration of Adium and iTunes. Adium can display details of what is currently playing on iTunes such as the name of the song and the artist. The trick is customizing these messages so that they can be presented as suitable away or status messages.
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So much fun open source applications are.  Adium allows tons of customization.  The best part is that it does not take an extensive knowledge of Objective-C, Adium’s primary language, to customize some if it’s features.  One customizable feature is the emoticon set.  Emoticons, Emotion Icons, are the combination of characters that resemble faces.  In some web browsers and most chat programs, such as Firefox and Adium, emoticons are automatically translated into pictures.  But there are so many emoticons that some clients do not include every combination.  Good thing we can create our own.

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Adium is a free mesenger client for the Mac OS X.  It allows users to connect to multiple chat services, such as AIM and ICQ, at once.  It is open source, which means users are allowed to tinker with it as they see fit.  With this extensibility, it becomes possible to type something like “/random” and generate a random message.  I decided to take a quick look at what goes on under the hood and decided to give a go at creating some easy scripts.

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I ran across scripting for the Mac OSX awhile ago. I finally decided to take a look at it when I decided to play around with Adium’s open source code. The most dominant prescene I observed was Applescript. Applescript is nice and all, but Python is nicer. Scripting OSX applications with Python has been around for a bit. Using the easy to install appscript, scripting can be leveraged by the power of Python and Ruby.

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I’m sure anyone that has spent enough time with Rails has found this little annoyance.  The basic find() is pretty simple.

A select query is performed on Table that seeks the row whose primary key matches the value returned by params[:id] Pretty cool, until it fails

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I ran into this problem awhile ago. I was tasked with making Excel reports using Ruby on Rails. Since I was running on Windows, I just used Win32ole. It worked quite well until I remembered that Win32 is not platform independent.  Basically, if the system is hosted on a non-Windows machine the Excel Report will fail.  Great.  But, Ruby isn’t out for the count yet.  I found a pretty cool spreadsheet generator at RubyForge.  After installing spreadsheet, it is pretty simple to use. You can either install it by downloading it from the web, click HERE, or use ruby gems by typing this on the command line: “gem install spreadsheet-excel”

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Learned a new trick the other day. I was searching around and I found out how to make Ruby talk. So far this only works for Windows machines because the win32 files are only available in Windows… as far as my knowledge. Copy and paste the following code into any editor. It prompts the user for a file and reads it.

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