beetlefeet.net

Git Tip

beetlefeet — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 02:02:44 +0000

When resolving conflicts you sometimes want to just take all changes from one side, discarding the other, especially in the case of binary files.

In SVN we had "svn resolve –accept=working/theirs".

in GIT you must add one version of the file or other and then commit the merge.

To keep the file as it was (keep 'ours'):
git add

To use 'theirs' (accept all the incoming changes, throwing away all the local changes)
git checkout –theirs —
git add

Then after resolving all conflicts:
git commit

Rails Gotcha

beetlefeet — Mon, 16 May 2011 09:10:19 +0000

So this was a bit of a baby puncher this arvo…

If you add a column in a rails migration, rails will NOT correctly save to column in the same migration. You can access it and assign to it, but it will not be saved to the database ever.)

For example if you have something like:

class UpdateSubscriptions < ActiveRecord::Migration
def up
    add_column :subscriptions, :user_id, :integer
    Subscription.all.each do |s|
      s.user = User.find_by_subscription_key( s.key )
      s.save
end
end

Rails happily ignores your change and silently only updates the "updated_at" column (if you have timestamp columns).

So split this into 2 migrations! Or perhaps some amount of "reload!" type action might work as well..

Ruby on Rails Tip: .blank? .present? if and unless

beetlefeet — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 04:20:52 +0000

I've long known about the rails convenience method .blank? but only recently learned about its twin: .present?
Combined with the ability to use "unless" instead of "if" means you can really tweak your conditional statements for readability.
I like to use "unless" over "if" when I expect the conditional to be false (and the statement to be executed) and I like to use ".present?" over ".blank?" when I don't necessarily expect the attribute or variable to exist.

Some examples:

render "no id specified", :status => :unprocessable_entity if params[:id].blank?
# I don't expect to render the error, I do expect params[:id] to be available

user.nickname.downcase! unless user.nickname.blank?
# I do expect to perform the downcase, I do expect nickname to be available

conditions << {:style => params[:style]} if params[:style].present?
# I don't assume I'll add the condition, I don't necessarily expect the style parameter to have been passed

I'm sure some people disagree, but I think those are about as readable as they get. They're also more writable in that you just write what you think rather than having to transform the expression with one or more levels of negation.

I love how ruby (especially rails) can be so self documenting based on this sorts of almost natural language syntax.

Scott Pilgrim

beetlefeet — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 04:18:31 +0000

So this is a really out of context and late review because I just found it lying in my gmail drafts folder Thought I’d may as well send it on.

Scott Pilgrim vs the World is pretty fun with some very awesome scenes and sequences. With some cool gamer in-jokes (I loved the the name of the band) and content (is that ninja rhythm game real? If not it really should be…) It obviously plays on the good feeling you get from understanding in-jokes. Thats fine by me. The characters were also pretty cool, none of them being overly annoying. I thought the fight scenes were actually really well done (esp the first), and more satisfying than most ’serious’ fight scenes I’ve seen recently. I also liked the fancy editing with the disjoint cuts and the hat gag. More of that would have been good.

One thing I did feel was that the progression was slightly off or something. Some of the earlier stuff seemed more interesting and exciting than some of the later stuff, when I guess ideally you have the ‘coolness’ factor building throughout. I think I enjoyed the first half considerably more than the second. I guess that might be pretty subjective though. And the Katayanagi Twins sequence was great. Other than that I’m annoyed that Ramona didn’t even get to properly use her weapon (bam!) and that the final boss wasn’t worth 9001 points. (I guess that’d be asking a lot from a ‘gamer’ movie though)

Anyway, if you know your Super Mario enemies and what a triforce is (knowing how to triforce isn’t required) you should probably watch Scott Pilgrim vs The World. I can understand people might find it a bit meh or silly, but I was fine with that. Also if you aren’t keen on Michael Sera you might not like it

Global Gamejam 2011

beetlefeet — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 11:03:04 +0000

Global Gamejam 2011 is over. At least for Perth as of this writing. I made a flash game with SimonB.

Plenty of Fish

You can play it online: here.

This gamejam was more chilled than the past. It seemed like we chose realistic projects on the whole and didn’t stress about staying up without sleep or get too frazzled about finishing everything. We’re becoming seasoned

Thanks so much to Simon Wittber for running things and getting Perth organised yet again, I hope whoever decides to ( or is badgered into) organising future gamejams does even half as good a job. Cheers!

See other entries from around the world here. You can limit games to those made in Perth by selecting the Jam site “Australia – Perth – Different Methods” on the left and clicking Apply.

G.Rid

beetlefeet — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 03:48:03 +0000

Just cleaning up some loose ends: Here is the download for G.Rid, a one button game. (Windows executable and python source.)

Check out it's majesy!

A while back I posted about my entry for a one button game competition called G.Rid. I said I’d post the game and source after the judging which I obviously never did.

Anyway I didn’t win (you’d have heard about that!) and only after playing a couple great one button games recently I remembered/decided to finally post my one button game for all to see. So here it is! The source code is in the zip as well (uncommented, it was a limited time competition!)

The game is meant to be on the obfuscated side, where learning what is going on is a bit of the charm. That or I’m too lazy to add instructions. But the only key is space.

Note that the game is built as a windows executable, but if you’re a little techy you can install python and the required python libraries and run it from the source on any platform. (you might need to fiddle with the asset path…)

Download

Optus + Samsung Hmmm

beetlefeet — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 09:53:14 +0000

So I'm not officialy pissed but I am kind of annoyed.

My Samsung Galaxy S started going a little wonky a while ago and this weekend went crazy enough for me to take it back to the shop. The issue was the touchscreen would glitch or have phantom touches along a straight vertical line on the right hand side, and sometimes stop responding altogether.

So I went to the optus store in the city and arrived about about 12:10pm on Sunday, and they were still closed. How annoying is when you go up to a closed store and you just assume the people inside are being all smug and dicky. Anyway the lady gestured 5 minutes and so I sat outside across the 'plaza' and then went back like 15 minutes later and they opened up for me at that point. So that was freaking annoying.

I was secretly hoping they'd just hand me a new phone there and then (it's about a month and a half old) but I guess that was pretty unlikely. I that they do do that within the first 2 weeks or so. So anyway it's sent away for repair and will probably be 2 weeks. So I'm back on my Motorolla Razr and iPod touch for now. but still paying $50 / mnth even though I'll not be able to use data etc for 2 weeks :/

[PIGMI] Gamejam

beetlefeet — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 03:39:57 +0000

GameJam was good fun. The theme and asset were IMO very cool. Helped to guide ideas without being too restrictive.

Thanks heaps to Simon for all the organisation and looking after us all over the weekend. (the donuts were like mana from god)

We got to see some pretty nifty and awesome (and well realised) games on the projector.
My standout was probably Trineion (sp?) Very polished and fun looking. I didn't get around to playing it though, too busy working!

Personally, Nick and my pixely story game didn't get completed. It always seemed like we only had a few hours work to go, but then after a few hours we still had the same amount of work left! ><; We will finish it off properly though so lookout for it in a couple weeks!

Testing posterous, vegetarianism over!

beetlefeet — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 07:04:47 +0000

So It is August the second. One day after our 6 months experiment in partial vegetarianism (pescatarianism) has ended.

We're still meat free as of this minute (though I dunno if Chrystal has pounced on a sausage roll at some point today). We decided against having pork sausages and bacon for breakfast yesterday morning to celerbrate, even though we passed a parent-recommended butcher in Narrogin on Saturday arvo the day before. We had mushrooms, eggs and fried potatoes instead. We're not entirely sure what to do now that we're 'free'. One thing we will do is spend a restaurant voucher that Chrystal received from work. We decided to hold on to that until we can eat more than 15% of the menu.

Regarding pumpkincrumble.com
That blogging experiment didn't go crash hot. As anyone following would have noticed we neglected it pretty hard. We both really enjoyed some aspects of it. Mainly the cooking awesome food and taking photographs and writing little bits of text. We actually took photographs of probably 2 or 3 times as many meals as we ended up blogging about. So I've identified the collating and posting effort as the gating factor.

Ideally after clicking the camera button the photo would magically be in some sort of captioning queue and all we'd have to do is go to some site every couple days and type something up for any photos that weren't captioned and hit go or something like that. In fact the blog runs on wordpress and requires a significant and pretty annoying and cumbersome process in order to put together a post. Including uploading images, resizing them, etc etc. I'd love to get it up and running as a general cookery blog after sorting out those issues.

That is part of the reason I'm trying posterous with this post, seeing what simplification solutions are now available. Just emailing some text and photos seems compelling. I'll also be looking into things I've skipped over in the past like flickr etc. Ideally taking and dumping photos from whatever device and then having them backed up in full locally and available online for posting would be some magical process. Let me know if you have this all sorted out.

Samsung Galaxy S

beetlefeet — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 04:20:48 +0000

Samsung Galaxy S (Android 2.1) micro review as requested by more than one person (2 people).

Tech Specs at some random site (gsmarena), Comparison with other Android phones from this year.

The Galaxy is definitely big. It’s not uncomfortably bulky or anything, and is actually quite slim (about the same thickness as the iphone4 except for a slight lump at the back of the base for the antenna). But it has a 4″ 16:9 (1.67, iphone is 1.5 aspect) screen, and needs room for it. The construction is decent but obviously more plasticy and flimsy feeling than an apple device. (definitely try one in the shop before you buy it to see if this bothers you). It is really light for its size. It’s not a really beautiful phone but it’s definitely not ugly. From the front it is blatantly borrowing the 3Gs appearance.

The screen is AMOLED and is 800×480 (iphone 4 is 960×640). It’s really nice and vivid. Text and UI elements render very smoothly.

I think I noticed some issues with the GPS, although I’m not very experienced with GPS so maybe it’s a case of expecting too much (IE inside a building etc). Also I have read that the default maps application (google maps) has an uncharacteristically long gps sync time as compared to other software on the same device so more investigation is required I guess.

Samsung (and optus) bundle some crap with the device which I’ve largely ignored. Samsung also put their own UI ‘on top of’ android. I’ve not seen a problem with it but apparently HTC custom UI is better. At some point I might have to figure out what I’m missing and see about rectifying it (this phone is easily rooted apparently, allowing you to do all sorts of unsupported things to it. ) But even out of the box you can install downloaded apps and run a file manager and it works as a mass storage device etc. It is so much more open than an iDevice just out of the box.

The down side to that is that you can definitely get it to slow down. A bad app hogging cpu while it is running in the background etc WILL hurt your battery life and slow down the UI in general and cause pauses etc so you need to be a bit technically inclined to keep things running smoothly (or don’t install anything other than stock stuff I guess). Speaking of battery life I assume it’s pretty decent, I’ve not owned a smartphone like this before so am not sure what is good. There is a nifty function in the settigns menu that shows you where you battery has been used, and it is usually 40-60% on the screen.

Swype is a keyboard input system installed on android (you can add also install others) and it blows most other soft keyboards out of the water. Basically you just drag your finger over the letters you want on a keyboard (ie don’t lift your finger up except for between words). and it just works most of the time. You can even be really sloppy and just plain miss letters and it works really well. Checkitout.

Other cool things: Divx playback, just drop movies onto it and they play, no transcoding or going through itunes, same for music. Live wallpaper (silly but nifty), change fonts system wide. Heaps of options.

So yeah, not a very structured or objective review, just a bunch of thoughts. I’m enjoying it so far. I just need a car kit so I can drop the iTouch altogether. (Though I will miss Carcassone).