Alex Pooley's Blog

I spent this weekend in geek hell and it was aweful! On Friday my Dell 24″ LCD _finally_ arrived. I plugged it in to my laptop and as I suspected, it was not powerful enough for the monitor. I ran off to the local computer store and bought a PC, but it wasn’t going to be ready until Saturday. On Saturday I picked up my PC and turned it on. Everything was OK for 5 minutes but after rebooting the monitor would stay black. After a while I sussed out the video card was overheating. By this time it was too late to take the PC back. I spent Sunday trying to install _anything_ on the box but nothing was working right. I tried Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Fedora, FreeBSD, Windows XP. To make maters worse, I had just exceeded my download quota so my download speed was capped. Sigh. I think there may be an overheating issue still, and perhaps RAM problems. Anyway, today is Monday and the machine is back at the shop and I’m stuck with my 15″ laptop. My 24″ LCD is currently serving as a very stylish paper weight.

As an aside, Gentoo seemed pretty nice. Almost like a linux’ed FreeBSD.

*Update:* I’ve finally picked up my PC from the shop and apparantly it was a single stick of faulty RAM. They couldn’t reproduce the problems I was seeing. Whatever the case, I hope this thing just works now. Geez, talk about ruining the joy of purchasing a new PC and 24″ LCD!

I woke up at 3am this morning and had no luck getting back to sleep. On the upside, I’m eating guacamole and cracked pepper crackers. MmMmmmm… Even my dog gets better sleep at night than me these days, and he sleeps all day as well.

I’m not sure if it’s insomnia keeping me awake, or I’m simply enjoying what I’m doing these days. I find my thoughts wondering to msgpad at all times of the day. It’s a unique experience and one that I hope I can keep going. I’m fascinated by Ruby, and the Ruby community also. Consider the following Ruby code:

class ActionController::TestResponse
def xhr?
self.headers[’Content-Type’] =~ /javascript/
end
end

The code above is extending ActionController::TestResponse which has been defined somewhere else by Ruby On Rails, with an extra method called xhr?. I defined the above as what I saw as a natural extension to the original class. The method determines if the respone from a get/post request in a test was part of an AJAX call.

Wow, rcov 0.2.0 is way faster than 0.1.0! Even the output is prettier :) “Get it now!”:http://eigenclass.org/hiki.rb?rcov

If your a Windows user you will probably find it too difficult to compile the extension from source so just “grab the cross compiled binary”:http://eigenclass.org/hiki.rb?cross+compiling+rcovrt. The author of rcov claims that the extension increases the execution by two orders of magnitude, and he’s right!

The situation with Ruby extensions and Windows completely sucks. I’ve just set up a Debian box so I can look in to the cross compiling a little further.