Dear person who writes software with an autoupdater,

I live in a country where the internet is very slow and very expensive. I really like your application, and I would love to be running the latest, greatest version of it, but please let me decide when to update. You have no idea whether I am on free wireless at a coffee shop, the office's ADSL ( Read more... )

Some more hard-to-debug behaviour in Ruby, this time coming from a simple tyop. Consider the following function, noting the misspelling of elsif:

>> def testfoo(foo)
>> if foo.nil?
>> puts "foo is nil"
>> elseif foo.empty?
>> puts "foo is empty"
>> else
>> puts "foo is #{foo}"
>> end
>> end
=> nilNow, consider ( Read more... )

I came up with this on the spur of the moment and it seems that nobody else has used it within the reach of your favourite search engine.

User-coddlement (n):
An annoying modification made to a piece of software specifically to assist users who really should know better.

Examples:

• "Are you sure?" confirmations on non-destructive operations.
• ( Read more... )

Last night was the Garrulous Grape GeekDinner, seventh in the series. A bunch of interesting people (mostly techies, but we had at least one hippie) met at Greens in Plattekloof for an evening of conversation, heckling, food, wine and generally being around like-minded people ( Read more... )

Why is it that people seem to think that autogenerated "API references" count as documentation?

If I am looking at a new library, I want a tutorial and an overview of the major features. I'm happy to dive into code and API references once I know more or less what I need to look at but please, for the sake of all the little children and their ( Read more... )

Today was the SouthYeasters Summer Festival. This involved a Girl Guides hall in Pinelands, a number of interesting people and lots of homebrewed beer. I was invited by Mark from CLUG. He brought along three beers: A wheat beer, a dubbel and a stout. All three were very tasty ( Read more... )

When debugging server-side errors, it helps to be watching the logs on the server you're actually talking to.

Today, one of the guys I work with (any rumours that I occasionally kick his legs under the desk are entirely unfounded) started a blog. As of this post, Primitive Type is completely empty, but the important thing is that it's there.

Another colleague with a blog is Liehann at Profound Coffee. Expect to read quite a lot about mountain bikes here ( Read more... )

I am currently filled with hate and loathing. I'm going to need a few moments to cool off before I carry on working.

I was trying to make an http call from an irb session full of state I had carefully collected. Most of the code I used is in a script, but I had been doing a substantial amount of exploration over data from a few different place. ( Read more... )

Wherein our intrepid protagonist purchases a portable computing device ( Read more... )