I’ve finally finished myseven languages in seven weeks adventure. Ittook, as I’d oringinally expected, significantly morethan seven weeks, though the actual amount of time which I dedicatedwas only a couple of days more that the amount allocated in the book. It wasjust that the wee …

There is an idea, popularized in the Pragmatic Programmer book that its good to learn a new programming language every year. Seven Languages In Seven Weeks takes the concept one stage further, although clearly only for certain values of learning. One is never going to be proficient at any lan …

The last day is definitely the most fun. We get to play with metaprogramming with one bigger question, of which more shortly. My reflections on Ruby were it was cool to catch up with the language. I’d sort of forgotten quite how nifty it was to play with. For my money its more Perlish than th …

The second day of Ruby picks up the pace a bit, mostly focussing on the nice bits of sugar that Ruby provides and the excercises give you a chance to play with them a bit. Find out how to access files with and without blocks.#!/usr/bin/ruby -w# without blockcou …

As I said, Ruby is a language I know pretty well already, so this is a gentle introduction for me. Tate compares Ruby to Mary Poppins — magical and fun. I hated that film. But I take the point. The excercises are pretty trivial, but here are my answers.Print the str …

Just thought I’d document this as its likely to be the sort of thing that others might need. I was doing a bit of a tidyup of our javascript files on the global justice site New Internationalist and I needed to know which javascript files were still in use. Its a recursive grep for .js file …

I recently added a flickrshow to my cider reviews page, Ben Sekulowicz has done a great job with it, it worked exactly like I wanted, well almost. There was something breaking for me, showing up as this error in Firefox:

u …

          

            

              
Posted by: Charlie Harvey
              
On: 
            
          
          

            Read on »
          
          
 
        

There is plenty of other documentation of how to set up remote passwordless ssh logins elsewhere on the web. But it often takes some faffing to make it work as you'd like. Now, I often do this, so I thought I’d write up the easiest way that I’ve found to do so. It only has two steps. How …

I’m a huge fan of the Vimperator Firefox plugin. It works just like you'd want it to and doesn't break much. Well, it breaks one useful thing, which is the almost universal ctrl-c/ctrl-v cut and paste shortcuts. So, I was well chuffed to find a Vimperator cut and paste tip on superuser. I̵ …

Lots of people seem to want to develop applications on the decidedly unfree Adobe Air platform. They provide a .deb for 32 bit systems but not for 64 bit systems. I wanted to check out some software from the dark side, and took a while to suss out what the provided deb needed to make it run …

I’ve wanted to make some code to turn MP3s back into the ones and zeros from which they are made ever since reading Eben Moglen’s Anarchism Triumphant. In that Moglen says: A CD player is a good example[of a digital device]. Its primary input is a bitstream read from an optical …