Today I went on a bike ride, I had originally planned to ride from Adelaide to Elizabeth but Tom decided he wasn’t going to go so I’d thought I’d just make it up as I went along. I changed my idea to Adelaide to the other end of the Obahn (Tea Tree Gully) and back, but took a few detours along the way and actually did something more like this. I could not show the exact path as google maps does not yet do the Linear Park trail. Thankfully, Mr. GPS does and it’s telling me that I did 40.7km today, and I’m proud of that fact. I got burnt again and that irritates me for not taking my sunscreen with me.

I am in a moderate amount of pain right now and I know tomorrow will be a day of almost complete stiffness, so if you want me to do anything for you that involves pedalling, running, jumping, throwing, catching or generally moving my legs and arms fast or lifting heavy items, it can wait.

The Torrens looked its most disgusting and it’s now a string of puddles and ponds more than a river. I say we rename the whole thing to “The Chain of Ponds Formerly Known As The River Torrens”! And to think! This is what the Murray’s going to look like if the government doesn’t pick up their game.

In other news, I took some not-so-pretty pictures of Thomo, Paul and Kello (somehow Joe escaped the lens) at the last Poker Night. There’s also a picture of my uncleaned keyboard.

I took some pretty pictures today on my ride: a flower, the suspension bridge, the dryness of the Torrens and the convention centre.

I’m sure that if you help out people and live in the help channels of the multitude of IRC servers on the interwebs that you’re sick of telling people to “JFGI” or “Just Fucking Google It”, and then end up googling it yourself to provide them with a link so they can go away.

So I created the mIRC alias script known only as “google”. Type /google <query> to get a url like http://www.google.com/search?q=rails+2.0+scaffold. Chuck the following in your alias file and never have to google anything again!

jfgi { /msg $active http://www.google.com/search?q= $+ $replace($1-,$chr(32),+) }

I originally had this posted as “google” but apparently users of NoNameScript already have a google alias, so I changed it for them.

I would just like to take this opportunity to say that I might not be attending the next Valhalla. This will be the first Valhalla I have not attended since 2004. This is due to a complete lack of communication in the administration team. This is not anyone’s fault.

Please note: This is now hosted at Github. Please use this page to get the latest changeset.

As a result of Tom (0.01%) and mine’s (99.9%) work on-and-off for a few months, we’ve managed to get to a first release of Rails Forum. The goal is to “be inspired by” and supercede PunBB and I think we’re almost there.

The PunBB about page states that:

Some features that have so far not been implemented are: private messaging, file attachments in posts, polls, linking to off-site avatars, advanced text formatting controls, subforums etc etc. Some of these features might still get implemented, just not in the near future.

We have private messaging, and we use Gravatar for our avatar system and we have subforums. There’s only three and a half things on that list (polls, real off-site avatars, adavanced text formatting controls and file attachments) that we have still to do. Polls are easy enough and probably my next goal, off-site avatars will be a bit tricky but I think we’ll manage and advanced text formatting controls are as easy as installing something like TinyMCE. File attachments can be done with attachment_fu.

What I would like to see is the whole site converted over to HAML as I enjoy working in it’s strictly tabbed environment and it’s just so much easier to read as you’re not reading what is basically the same thing twice. Another thing I would like to see is some bloody tests written for it! We were bad and only wrote a few tests. Pagination would be lovely too!

To run this forum system, you’ll need to download and extract it onto your computer. Then install Ruby and then Rubygems. After that, do

gem install mongrel rails chronic RedCloth tzinfo

To install mongrel and rails. Hopefully that’s all you’ll need.

Tom asked me Sunday night if I wanted to go over to his house and code with him for the day and I said yes. I joked about being there at 7 in the morning and he said that would be fine.

I woke up at 10:30 and went on IRC and ping’d him only to get no reply, he was watching Burn Notice. Eventually he did reply, and re-scheduled it for 12pm, so I played TF2 for 2 hours.

I went to his house and immediately he wanted to get lunch, so we got lunch. Then whilst we’re eating lunch he said he just wanted to finish watching Burn Notice before beginning to code. He did that, he finished watching his show whilst we worked out how to get the local SVN repo going, which is much faster than the Google code repo.

I fixed up all the bugs (stuff not making the code work on 2.0, mainly) whilst he talked on IRC. He thinks he wasn’t able to fix up the bugs, but I’m sure if he just focussed and googled the error messages that came up, he would have the necessary mental capabilities to fix them himself.

I’ve completely moved the admin stuff over to a namespace, changed all the .rhtml files to .html.erb files, made a completely new styles controller (the other one just disappeared) and fixed a few display nuances and as far as I know he has only begun to work on his events thing. I think he’s written a migration and worked on the form.

At the moment, he has his laptop’s back facing me, and he’s talking on IRC about becoming an oper on wombat.eyerc.net with Xaphan and also talking with his girlfriend. It makes me wonder why I even came over in the first place.

Back to work, I suppose.

No, I’m not mimicing what the heavy says in Team Fortress 2 when a Pyro has freshly set him alight, I’m doing something that’s not TF2! Coding PHP!

After living in a fantasy world of Ruby on Rails for around 8 months, and then jumping straight back into PHP at the niggling, horribly maintained Whatpulse Signature Images site and it was like jumping into a vat of Sulphuric Acid, not that I know what that’s like.

Lets lead off with a few bad things:

1. Mother-fucking semi-colons

What. The. Fuck. Why do I have to end my lines with semi-colons? There’s been about a hundred times (it feels it) TODAY that I’ve been caught out because I’ve missed a semi-colon somewhere.

2. Brackets

Why does my if statement need to have ( and ) around the argument? Isn’t the text after the if ALWAYS the argument? Why the hell does it need curly brackets too?

3. Coding in Notepad++

Yay for no syntax highlighting and only bolding the ending bracket or parenthesis. It’s REALLY hard to tell the difference between } and } in Monaco. Same with Courier New.

Yay for also 8-months-ago Ryan not knowing how truly bloody awesome line indentation is and how much it makes code easier to read. Thanks for Adam for making his code more readable than mine. The guy’s a PHP God. He probably solves advanced calculus equations simultaneously, for fun.

Enough ranting. Got to go try out this crap known as “Eclipse PDT” to see if it’s better than Notepad++.

So I finally signed up. I got sick of Mr. Thorpe spamming his MySpace page and all of my cool friends having Facebooks and me being a stubborn little bastard.

Great, now I have two sites to maintain. Oh the stress. Hand me the Valium.

Powerthirst #1:

Powerthirst #2:

Poker at my house (the one I’m currently at, not Dad’s) this friday from 6:30. Be there or be tessaract.

Powerthirst #1:

Powerthirst #2:

Poker at my house (the one I’m currently at, not Dad’s) this friday from 6:30. Be there or be tessaract.

Today I visited a place I have only visited around three times. It’s plain and boring and generally you only ever go there to lose a lot of money very quickly so you can move around faster (legally) than if you never gave that money away. I made a terrible, terrible mistake by going in at lunchtime. The line was half way to the back of the place and by the time I reached the front the line extended out of it, and then more. I filled out a form with my details on it.

I sat down and read a book, a 70-something page book, whilst little children squealed and bashed trolleys against the bench. I watched as a grown man was pleading with the police to “stop breaking my arms dudes!” as he was escorted out. I finished the book, extremely bored with what I just read and let’s just say it wasn’t a Lord of the Rings or Curse of the Chosen.

I lined up again in the almost-impossibly long line that was moving even more impossibly slower, thankful that it wasn’t my child that was making all that racquet. If only there were noise laws against children and people talking on mobile phones obnoxiously loud. The line shuffled forward, ever slowly. I reached the front and was told to fill out yet another form with my details on it (maybe they just really need to make sure it was me?) and to walk over to the other counter with a piece of paper.

I waited whilst a man of asian appearance argued with one of the staff about the identity of his wife (she had a different last name on her passport) and thankfully another staffer came over and assisted me. He told me to sit down at a desk, walked around a corner and asked if I could see anything. I said I couldn’t,  and he disappeared for a few more seconds. Something came up on the screen and he asked if I could see anything, and I politely (but nervously) replied that I could.

I touched the screen and followed the instructions, I focussed eagerly, and at times I suspect on the wrong things and pressed the screen when I was told to. After a few minutes of doing this and listening to the asian man still get more frustrated about the identity of his wife, I completed it.

I was congratulated, and asked to fill yet another form about my identity (maybe they just really really needed to make sure it was me) and walked out of there with a smile on my face and two pieces of paper in my hand.

I did my Hazard Perception Test. I passed first go. I beat my brother to it. That’s all that matters. One step closer to a full license.

If you do it, pay more attention to the indicators.