Nerd test

Oliver Brown
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Apparently I’m 37% nerd. Probably about right. :) Thanks to Rylon for the link.

The end of Hitchhikers

Oliver Brown
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Just to let people know, the ending to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Quintessential Phase is actually pretty good. The ending is far more “together” than the end of the fifth book, Mostly Harmless since it includes both Zaphod Beeblebrox and Fenchurch. Any fans who haven’t heard it yet, should go out and buy it.

Sirius Cybernetics Corporation now make pizza

Oliver Brown
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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).

AJAXy Scriptaculous goodness

Oliver Brown
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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 :)

Saddam Hussein to sue George Bush and Tony Blair

Oliver Brown
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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.

Tree structures in Ruby on Rails

Oliver Brown
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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.

Using “type” in Ruby on Rails

Oliver Brown
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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.

Making the most of dial-up

Oliver Brown
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Ooooh. We’ve just set up an ad-hoc wireless network and are now sharing a 56k dial-up connection between three computers… Clever but not that useful.

Ooh, birthday soon :)

Oliver Brown
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Just thought I’d randomly point out that it’s my birthday soon :) Birthday

Dancing with Stars like Stacy Keibler

Oliver Brown
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Interesting crossover - female wrestler Stacy Keibler is apparently doing well on Dancing with Stars, the American version of Strictly Come Dancing.