Scottish Ruby Conference
I'm very excited to be speaking at the Scottish Ruby Conference on Saturday. I've been an attendee at the conference (well, in its previous incarnation …
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How to review a game
Let's start with how not to review a game. This is quite possibly the worst review ever. I don't know if the Star-Telegram reviews games often, but this is a phenomenally lazy attempt. They couldn't figure out how to play two of the games, so they give …
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Thermostat
I wonder if some of the reason that there are so many Climate Change Skeptics in North America has to do with the overall temperature here being kinda coldish.
I mean, if you asked most North Americans how they'd like the temperature if it were a couple …
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Is this thing on?
I'm contemplating starting to blog more regularly. Trying this on for size.
Dominion
A little game called Dominion, possibly my favorite game in recent years, has just won a very prestigious game award, and is nominated for another — perhaps even more prestigious — award.
Dominion is a card game for 2-4 players (or up …
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Language filter
One of the spoiling things about living for two years where you don't fluently speak the local language, is that the range of external communication you can safely ignore expands dramatically. In fact, my brain's ability to filter irrelevant conversations …
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Moving bits
Standing in our new flat, looking south-east
Shower spray
When we inspected the new flat, along with the building management, we noticed spots of water …
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Using iText to generate PDFs in Rails; JRuby vs. Ruby Java Bridge
So I need to generate a PDF, using data coming out of a Rails-based app. I started looking at Prawn and Prawnto, but I need to prepend the PDF with some boilerplate material, ideally another PDF. In other words, I'd like to programmatically generate …
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Concerning the thickness of fantasy novels
I love this detail from Brandon Sanderson's explanation of the decision to turn the final Wheel of Time novel into 3 parts:
When I'd mentioned 400k to him once, he'd been wary. He explained to me that he felt 400k was unprintably large in today's publishing …
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Dog bites man, indeed
Some things should be, on the contrary, celebrated for their very groundedness and averageness and relatability. Human interest stories — when they're of true human interest (rather than the products of cable's attempts to sensationalize the serious …
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