I went to the Reloaded festival over the weekend just gone, it was awesome save for the lack of toilets (2 between 400 != good) and complete lack of decently quiet, not bright, comfortable sleeping area and the idiot who made the police come in. A bit tough on the mind, as I was still a tad zombified yesterday, but now I’m back up to normal. Wookie did a wonderful job with the event even though people will always find something to complain about (and did). The main complaint was that the competitions were not ran on time, or ran way overtime (i.e. the CS:S grand final ending hours after the event was supposed to finish)

I didn’t take as many photos as last time, mostly because I found other things to do, such as walking around and telling people to shut down their DC++ and FTP servers as they were lagging the network.

There was some Team Fortress 2 playing as well, which is now my favourite game (having racked up ~24 hours on it, I might also be addicted) which was fun listening to people shouting out as well as sending back a few insults of my own.

It was incredibly fun and I won’t blog about it too much here because there’s too much to blog about. If you want to know what other people thought there is a thread on the valhalla forums and one on the reloaded forums.

In other news, I’m holding another RadarLAN at my dad’s house this coming Friday. As far as I know these are the people who are coming:

1. Me
2. Tom
3. Devastator
4. Freddy
5. minus_infinite
6. ax
7. Thommo
8. Paul
9. Michael
10. Michael’s Friend
11. James
12. Terra
13. Joe
14. Nathan So if people drop out we should still have enough for a decent one.

Last week I posted about a job advertisement I dissected and picked at on the Ruby on Rails mailing-list and now I’m happy to bring you another dissection direct from a job advertisement for a nameless large financial company based in Manhattan.

I take much joy in writing these and I feel a sense of irony that I should be reading job advertisements (I’m out of one next week) and yet I’m picking them apart.

Also on the job front my friend Paul, whom I met back in Ye Olde TAFE days has finally got a real job (he’s only had one other job I know of, and that was cleaning dishes at Charlies). In light of this momentous occasion, the world has announced it will be ending on Monday 28th January 2008 at 9am Australian Central Standard Time. There will be free headless horsemen and enternal damnation for all. Afterwards, there shall be cake. Delicious, moist cake.

Entirely coincidentally, Telstra will be shutting down their CDMA network on the same day.

Later on in the day I stopped in at the mallrat-infested Elizabeth City shopping centre to get some cash out. As I walked back to my car, I was followed slowly by someone who looked like they just wanted a parking space. I thought I would just test the waters, so to speak, and enacted a prank.

I walked up to a car in the parking lot and pretended it was mine. I took my keys out of my pocket and approached the driver’s side of the car, and looked casually around to see if anyone was walking towards that car. Thankfully there wasn’t anyone. So I fiddled with my keys for a few seconds, just long enough to make the driver think I was actually going to get in this car (I had no shopping with me).

I pretended to stick the key into the door and try to turn it, only to frown at it and lift my keys closer to my face to fiddle with them longer. Surely the driver would’ve left by now. I looked over and saw he was there and gave him a wave, the kind of wave where you say “won’t be long” with just a wave and went back to my keys.

Fiddled with them for a few seconds longer and looked puzzled. I look inside the car, making an even more puzzled look on my face and walk to the back passenger window. I look inside, check the rear number plate, and then look up with a big “Oh!” look on my face, and do a 270 degree scan of the car park. I look surprised & embarrassed and point my arm towards my real car and walk off towards that with my head bowed.

Today I wrote my first Rails patch: http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/10799

I was infuriated at this method over the weekend when I found out that it didn’t use the current year, but instead always guessed Feb. to be 28 days regardless of the current year. My patch uses the current year.

+1 it if you think it’s a good idea.

This patch is now verified! This means that it will be more than likely to be included inside of Rails 2.1, whenever that’s released! Thanks to DevF and nzkoz from #rails-contrib on freenode for suggesting that I write tests as well as telling me a cool few tricks.

This patch is now in Rails! http://dev.rubyonrails.org/changeset/8715

I’m going to go see the movie Cloverfield on Friday night.

Wednesday is my sister’s wedding, and I don’t get back until Thursday.

Also, I’m planning on holding a poker night on Saturday night at my house, starting at 7. People have already expressed interest in it and I hope it’ll be as good as a turn out as last time.

I’m going to go see the movie Cloverfield on Friday night.

Wednesday is my sister’s wedding, and I don’t get back until Thursday.

Also, I’m planning on holding a poker night on Saturday night at my house, starting at 7. People have already expressed interest in it and I hope it’ll be as good as a turn out as last time.

Tom is known to be not the smartest person in the world, and I thought, well maybe it’s just Tom. Today I was proven that it actually runs in his family. His Aunty Mary stayed over for a week at his house, and left a few things behind including a small keyring with a light on it, a mouse, a keyboard, and a laptop. Yes, a laptop.

Tom’s mum came home and later on phoned up Aunty Mary and the conversation went a bit like this:

Tom’s Mum: Hi, have you left anything behind? Mary: Not that I can think of. Tom’s Mum: What about a keyring, with a light on it? Mary: Oh yeah that’s Daniel’s… Tom’s Mum: Anything else? Mary: Noooooo…. Tom’s Mum: What about a laptop? Mary: Oh! Right…

I hate testing in Ruby on Rails. I hate writing tests, and I especially hate running them. At work, we have 618 examples and it takes 346 seconds to run. That’s 5 minutes and 46 seconds to run 6000 lines of code, it’s pathetic!

The reason for this is that we have a central object which a lot of other objects are related to, called booking. Now, without giving too much away I’ll say that, along with the bookings table, there are 8 other tables that are emptied and loaded with data during a large majority of the tests. All this emptying and refilling is taking time, time that could be better spent not waiting for the tests to finish!

This is why I propose a system that entirely relies on fixtures for its data supply, so it doesn’t have to empty & load the tables again and again, but instead reads directly from the fixture files every time. I have no idea how to go about making one, but if anyone reads this and wants to collaborate with me on something like it, by all means please do. I hate having to read my emails whilst waiting for the tests to finish, I run out of emails.

I replied to a job advertisement on the rubyonrails-talk mailing list, explaining that all job advertisements look the same:

I would only dream that somebody will produce a job advertisement that does not copy the same style as all the others. Someone needs to break free of the mould. If I hear or read another buzzword in a job advertisement I’ll go postal.

In other news, there was a post on Rails Forum by pullmonkey who gave a rather helpful roundup method. His method lets you round up to the nearest 1o. I altered his code some and added in a new method called rounddown which will round it down to the nearest multiple of whatever argument you pass in.

I have opened up comments to the general public at the bequest of Ralxz. No more do you need to look for the non-existent register link to post a comment, just specify your name and a message when you post a comment. Don’t be surprised if it doesn’t come up instantly, I (with a little help from Akismet) moderate all the comments on the site.