Digital Digressions by Stuart Sierra
From programming to everything else
AltLaw.org began life as a Ruby on Rails project. I was enamored of Rails at the time (who wasn’t?) and rapid-prototyping helped me get it up and running in just a few months. The problem is that I’ve been trying to follow Rails’ conventions even when they aren’t exactly in line with what I need…
An interesting tidbit: can your programming language parse a < b < c? Perl can’t. Ruby can, but returns an error “undefined method `>’ for false:FalseClass.” Interestingly, Python accepts it, and even gives the correct result. Something clever must be going on in the parser to make that work. Update October 17: Although Lisp can’t parse the expression…
A cool new site, with the best possible slogan, “All the code that’s fit to printf().” Nice to see a giant media company getting into this.
Answer: you’re using the latest version of Rails (1.2.3), which slightly changes the syntax of its SQL statements. cached_model relies on a regular expression to match that SQL statement. To fix: Dive into the source of the cached_model gem, find the file lib/cached_model.rb, and change the first line after def self.find_by_sql to this: return super…
I decided to run AltLaw.org under a “/v1” URL prefix. It’s still beta, and the URL structure will likely change in the future. I don’t want to break 160,000 links when that day comes. Fortunately, Mongrel makes this pretty easy with the –prefix option to mongrel_rails. I added –prefix ‘/v1’ to my mongrel_rails command line.…
I’ve used Darcs as my only version-control system for a while now. When I got into Rails, I naturally wanted to use Capistrano. Unfortunately, Darcs and Capistrano don’t get along too well. Darcs’ file-based repositories don’t mesh well with Capistrano’s assumption that the repository is accessed through a server, a la Subversion. I ran into…
Trying to set up Apache2 as a proxy for mongrel on my new Ruby on Rails server, following the instructions on the mongrel site. I kept getting “403 Forbidden” errors on every request. I found a comment that seemed to describe the same situation. Sure enough, editing /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/proxy.conf to change “Deny” to “Allow” fixed the…
Wowsers. I just spent two nail-biting, hair-pulling days getting Ruby on Rails running on a new dedicated server. What’s the deal here? I spent the first six hours trying to get Capistrano to work with darcs. Then I gave up on Capistrano. I didn’t know anything about Mongrel, nginx, Lighttpd, or any of that stuff,…
I recently picked up The LaTeX Companion, 2nd Edition. It’s… dense. It shows a lot of amazing things LaTeX can do, but also highlights its weaknesses. Most of these weaknesses have to do with the legacy of TeX itself. For example, it’s difficult to flow text around objects, because TeX determines line widths before it…
From a 1995 paper on intentional programming: “Present day syntax had [sic] been predicated on a character stream that could have been input from punch cards, or teletypes.” Exactly! Why are we still working in a punch-card manner on million-pixel displays? Why are we still arguing about curly brackets versus parentheses when Unicode has millions…