Seen on a mailing list:

Question:
How can I disable this warning:
"warning: no newline at end of file"

Answer:
Put a newline at the end of the file.

I managed to drag myself away from my computers this afternoon and have a lovely time outside.

First i went to visit this space of land that the WinACC local food group are hoping to renovate and turn into a city farm. I got these two lovely ducks on camera … they thought i had food for them. No such luck, heh!

I'll go back again soon and take some more photos of the area of land. If we go ahead with the transformation, it'll be really good to keep a photo blog! But today i didn't stay long because i was off to visit some friends and see the Christmas market. It was the first weekend, so it was predictably extremely busy, but again such a lovely atmosphere. The bells of the cathedral were ringing, there was carol singing, the crafts on offer were so beautiful and creative. We had mince pies and mulled wine! :)

This is without a doubt my favourite picture of the day:

Is that not just beautiful? Here are some other pictures of gorgeous lovely Winchester today …

There's more on Flickr.

Remember my LOLCAT Cucumber post?

Guess who came along and found it? Aslak Hellesøy who actually wrote Cucumber! As a result, Cucumber now speaks LOLCAT!

I never thought it would make it into the official repository! I only did it for the lolz! :)

By the way, i have now started actually testing MyChores with Cucumber. Here is my first feature test, which is surprisingly similar to the LOLCAT one, only in English, heh!

Further to yesterday's post, "Rails on a netbook", i found everything went well except Gitk. The fonts were too big to be useful, and the settings dialog box was too big for me to change it. But look now:

(Yes, that is the MyChores repository, now cloned on to my netbook! Yey!)

I plugged into an external monitor in order to access the settings, but for anyone who does not have that option, i've since found out you can edit ~/.gitk configuration file. My font settings are thus:

set mainfont {helvetica 7}
set textfont {courier 6}
set uifont {helvetica 7 bold}

There are also many other settings that you could tweak if you wanted to.

When using a package manager it is helpful to know how to search for available packages. You can search for part of the package name, so that mysql- returns both mysql-server and mysql-client …

On Debian-based systems:

sudo apt-cache search mysql-

On Fedora-based systems:

sudo yum list "*mysql-*"

On Mac with MacPorts:

port search mysql-

I am here today to ask a question and then answer it. The question is: Can you run Ruby on Rails on a netbook? Specifically, an Acer Aspire One. My motivation is … since buying my netbook, i have completely fallen in love with it, and much prefer it to the desktop computer. I want to do as much as possible on the netbook. I don't think i'd spend a whole day coding on it, but just for quick little things it could be wonderful!

Now that MyChores is open source i really like this idea of code anywhere. Wherever i have my netbook and an internet connection, i can code! If there's an emergency bug needs fixing on MyChores, i could make the fix and push it. Or if i'm feeling lazy one Saturday morning there can surely be nothing better than a cup of coffee and coding in bed! ;)

So without further ado, let's see if you can put Rails on a netbook …

(more…)

This week i went to a talk encouraging artists to help take action on climate change. If you don't think artists can make a difference, i challenge you to watch this video.

Are you hoping for a miracle, as the ice caps melt away?
No use hoping for a miracle
There's a price we’ll have to pay

It's too easy to turn a blind eye to the light
It's too easy to bow your head and pray
But there are some times when you should try to find your voice
This is one voice that you must find today.

A lovely song, and such beautiful imagery in the video. This has really made an impression on me today.

For those who may not have seen it on the MyChores journal, i started a MyChores pledge campaign last night. I kind of stumbled into it by accident, via github, but i thought i may as well publicise it a little bit.

Already we've had one confirmed pledge of $10 and another $10 waiting to be cleared! I am making people site supporters on MyChores, so if you pledge and you have an account, please let me know your login ID so i can give you the additional features.

These are exciting times for MyChores. The code has gone open source and there are some people expressing a serious interest in helping to improve the codebase. We are going to make the site more reliable, faster, more intuitive. One of my colleagues is hopefully coming for a weekend code-a-thon sometime soon! So i think this is a very worthy cause to support! :)

There are two things that i am especially looking forward to in Rails 2.3.

I use named_scope like all the time now since i figured out what they are and how useful they can be. I often find myself doing something like this:

named_scope :ordered, :order => 'surname ASC, first_name ASC'

Just so that i can append .ordered to any other named_scope and get my objects out in a sensible order. Well in Rails 2.3 we're going to have a default_scope

default_scope :order => 'surname ASC, first_name ASC'

Marvellous! :D

The other thing i'm looking forward to is the new super-slick render for partials. No more

render :partial => 'articles/article', :locals => { :article => @article }
render :partial => 'articles/article', :collection => @articles

Those now become the splendidly simple

render @article
render @articles

Thanks to Ryan's Scraps for explaining to me how that's going to work!