Posts under ‘bugfix’

One thing about buying a new(ish) MacBook Pro loaded with Tiger: they really aren’t cutting a lot of corners. This includes in the area of resource usage (see e.g. memory usage, as you buy another gig of RAM). This, of course, is done in the name of an “Insanely Great” user experience, and mostly, it [...]

The opinionated programmers behind Rails have generally done a good job. (There are couple of FUBARs in their bag of tricks, such as the boneheaded choice to use pluralized table names (in some places) and use automagical pluralization code to try and mediate between the singular and plural.) There’s another item I’d like to bring [...]

(Programmers: skip down to the Meat section below.) If you are so bored as to actually have read all the articles on this blog, you may have noticed that the “Id: lucas blah blah blah” string that shows up at the bottom of the articles. This is an interpolated keyword, put in by the revision [...]

… and for Jeremy Smith. Thanks to Jeremy’s hack on top of Ingy’s quickie wiki, we can now get proper behavior inside of table cells. In a nutshell, Kwiki didn’t handle things like italics inside of a table. This should fix it. Previous posts that used the stock Kwiki should be fixed now. Now, to [...]

Hold on: I’m not sure that the below works right. Don’t use it yet. There are lots of instructions out there for installing RMagick, which is a graphics manipulation library used by many Ruby-istas for things like thumbnailing, resizing, etc. I wanted to use it for an internal database I’m building in Rails. Some of [...]

The more interesting things you do in life, the more likely it is that some jackass will sue you. If this happens, you will probably be faced with giving one or more sets of attorneys access to your electronic documents. If, like all right-thinking citizens, you store your documents in a Subversion repository organized hierarchically [...]

I am throwing together a quick Curses (console / terminal) based UI for a database here, prior to putting (or hiring someone to put!) a Web front-end on it. In keeping with my experience with elinks, I wanted the menubar activation key to be Escape. However, it was running slower than molasses in February — [...]

Medical laboratory results these days are a hodgepodge of numbers on various scales and with various units. For example, the Merck Manual lists various laboratory test normal ranges and their units: Hematocrit: Male 41-50%, Female 35-46% Hemoglobin: Male 13.8-17.2 g/dL, Female 12.0-15.6 g/dL … Sodium: 135-146 mmol/L These “normal ranges” can be sort of misleading. [...]

A couple of weeks ago, I had the bright idea to move an internal server here at Voyager from my office into a data room. I issued the customary sudo shutdown now and proceeded to move the box. I was dismayed not to see it boot right back up afterwards. Ouch! I had specifically configured [...]

Two-part posting. 1. The hot-shit developer boys at http://dev.rubyonrails.org apparently use Python (Trac) for their bug-tracking system, and for extra chuckles, it’s broken. From http://dev.rubyonrails.org/newticket#preview (removed a Python stack trace that came down to a NOT NULL constraint violation in the underlying database — the error message was messing up the blog formatting software.) Not [...]