Viewing only published posts
Created: 2010-01-11 21:14:59 UTC / Updated: 2010-01-11 21:14:59 UTC
I haven't been blogging here much for awhile. That'll remain true for at least a bit longer. I hope to have some real progress next week, and then may go dark again. No readers, so you'll all vacuously cope.
I'm not saying you're vacuous. I'm saying you're absent, so the statement is vacuously true. There's a logic joke in there somewhere.
Created: 2009-12-27 05:32:21 UTC / Updated: 2009-12-27 05:32:21 UTC
I finally figured out how to set up a tracking branch properly with Git to use my Git project pages.
It looks obvious in retrospect: do the usual git-clone for the repository, then "git checkout --track gh-pages". This sets up a tracking branch locally for the gh-pages branch on the server, and links the two together properly. Using a regular "-b" checkout won't quite work -- you get the files, but you can't push them back to the server.
Created: 2009-12-27 05:30:37 UTC / Updated: 2009-12-27 05:30:37 UTC
I started on a little project to download HTML documentation automatically for installed gems. That'd be useful because some gems, like Rails, have no (or no useful) RDoc documentation, and just link you to a web page somewhere.
That means no useful offline use of documentation, for instance.
So I wrote a quick spider with Anemone to mirror with a few simple limits -- only a couple of bounces through pages, only on the same site, etc. I figured I could then hook up my little spidering mini-format to something that traversed your gem list and found HTML doc links, and that'd pretty much work.
Unfortunately, Anemone doesn't seem to follow "frame" links in HTML, which means it won't spider the Rails documentation successfully. I'm suspending work on it for now until I'm ready to dig into Anemone a bit more (or until they fix that -- I filed a bug report).
Created: 2009-12-21 16:59:31 UTC / Updated: 2009-12-21 16:59:31 UTC
The very best projects tend to come from guys who are very, very good, doing what they're good at, with some time pressure coming from a real project that needs to use what they're building.
If you're doing that right now, ignore this post and move on. You're golden.
For the rest of us, you're going to need to get smarter until you can be one of those guys, doing that. I've been there and it's awesome -- but now I need to get smarter so I can do it again, on a harder project. So do you.
The way to get smarter in a hurry is to write something that you're just slightly too dumb to do. For preference you should be under schedule pressure as well, from a real project. Having an application focuses your mind like nothing else, and it's especially vital when you're not smart enough to work it out ahead of time (pro tip: nobody is ever smart enough to work it all out ahead of time).
The nice thing about working out a hard problem is that you're forced to work just outside your comfort zone. The nice thing about having an application is that you find out if you were right about it. The nice thing about working only slightly outside what you can do is that you get to work on a lot of problems, with frequent feedback -- waiting too long between problems won't advance you as quickly. Yay for quantity over quality :-)
Created: 2009-12-21 16:44:20 UTC / Updated: 2009-12-21 16:44:20 UTC
I'm rewriting and repackaging an old AI project called "Maslow". I got it to the point of doing some semi-interesting things, but the infrastructure and plumbing for it was a complete awful mess.
I'm fixing the latter. There's a GitHub repo up for it now.
Created: 2009-12-15 21:15:10 UTC / Updated: 2009-12-15 21:15:10 UTC
DiffEQ 0.0.3 has been pushed to RubyForge.
I should really look into gemcutter. Most of the Ruby world seems to be passing me by on that one :-)
