Sirius Cybernetics Corporation now make pizza

January 29, 2006 by Oliver · Comments Off
Filed under: Personal 

I had a frozen pizza today, Goodfellas Delicia. And much to my surprise their slogan is the same as the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation (from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy).

Hitchhikers, H2G2, Share and Enjoy

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AJAXy Scriptaculous goodness

January 27, 2006 by Oliver · Comments Off
Filed under: Computers, Galaxia, Games, Javascript, MPOGs, Programming, Ruby on Rails, Technology, Web Programming 

Scriptaculous is a Javascript library used for doing AJAX stuff and certain visual effects. It’s very well written, has excellent cross browser support and best of all there are cool functions in Ruby on Rails for using it.

One of the coolest features is drag and drop. I’ve already implemented it in Galaxia Ruby for adding ships to fleets :)

AJAX, Javascript, Scriptaculous, Ruby, Rails

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Saddam Hussein to sue George Bush and Tony Blair

January 26, 2006 by Oliver · Comments Off
Filed under: Personal 

In an interesting twist, Saddam Hussein is trying to sue George Bush and Tony Blair for a range of offences related to the invasion of Iraq.

Some of the points seem valid, some are rather silly. To read more detail, check out the Washington Post.

Washington Post, law

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Tree structures in Ruby on Rails

January 24, 2006 by Oliver · Comments Off
Filed under: Galaxia, Games, MPOGs, Programming, Ruby on Rails, Technology, Web Programming 

This is becoming a trend – another built-in feature of Rails that will seriously help Galaxia development.

You can use acts_as_tree in a model to make it, well, act as a tree. What this means is you add an extra field to the database called parent_id that tracks object’s parents. Rails automatically manages this for you and adds extra methods for dealing with trees (things for accessing parent, ancestors, children etc.). Just like the post on type, this is something I was already doing with Galaxia but managing myself.

OOP

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Using “type” in Ruby on Rails

January 22, 2006 by Oliver · Comments Off
Filed under: Galaxia, Games, MPOGs, Programming, Ruby on Rails, Technology, Web Programming 

By default Rails applies special meaning to certain fields in a database table. One of these fields is “type”. The type fields is used by Rails to create a “single table inheritance model”. This sounds fairly complicated and is best explained with an example:

Imagine a forum system. A forum will have threads and replies. Threads and replies are different and have different functionality, but certainly share a lot of characteristics. So you might create a class message with two sub classes: replies and threads.

In Rails you can store all these in one messages table with a type field set to either reply” or thread. When you load a message it will actually create either a reply or thread object (in stead of a message object). When you create a new object it stores it in the messages table with the correct type.

This is ideal for Galaxia. In fact it’s the model I used all along – I just had to write the functionality myself.

Single Table Inheritance, OOP, MVC, Ruby, Rails

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