http://blog.sietsma.com The personal blog of Korny Sietsma Mon, 13 Oct 2008 11:21:28 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The joy of Ruby - writing simple DSLs is so very easy.  (That's "Domain Specific Language" for the uninitiated - go look it up, it's good for you) I have some code that builds a tree of info from the file system - basically traversing directories and files and loading up ... http://blog.sietsma.com/2008/10/13/ruby-dsls-so-easy/ RMagick is a great ruby library for image manipulation - it's basically a wrapper around the venerable ImageMagick libraries.  There are some complexities around installing it on some platforms, and you have to be careful with garbage collection, but it's still very easy to use and very powerful. The curved corner ... http://blog.sietsma.com/2008/07/20/curved-corner-images-in-rmagick/ Well, my previous post and linked page seems to work nicely. (I did fix a minor glitch in ie7) However, since then I've done some more reading - and my conclusion is, don't do what I did - ie6 png transparency is just too risky. Have a read of ... http://blog.sietsma.com/2008/07/06/sigh-ie6-defeats-my-cunningness/ I've been playing in the wonderful world of css - partly for work, and partly for fun. I wanted to have fluid sized, png-based, rounded-corner dialogs for a web site. This is something that has been solved many times, but not (as far as I can see) for internet explorer ... http://blog.sietsma.com/2008/06/11/curved-corners-with-transparent-png-background-on-ie6/ I'm still getting spam in the moderation queue. Poot. I've gone through and disabled more stuff, I'll see if I can work this out somehow. Things seem to have been somewhat down lately. We've had two funerals in the past month, one for Yolande's grandmother, a fabuous gal who is ... http://blog.sietsma.com/2008/06/07/updates/ Disabling comments for now (not that I get many!) - despite making comments moderation-only, I still get a vast number of failed spam attempts. Maybe if I turn off comments I'll drop off their lists. And maybe I'll get a pet unicorn for Christmas! http://blog.sietsma.com/2008/03/31/no-comment/ I had an annoying problem, so I needed a hacky solution... At work, we have a large number of boxes with dynamic IP addresses. Getting a static IP address is a complete pain, and keeping boxes running is bad for the planet. IP addresses don't *usually* change, but the do change ... http://blog.sietsma.com/2008/03/07/faking-dns-with-ruby-and-sinatra/ While I'm blogging... I've started using a Getting Things Done TiddlyWiki - there seem to be a few of these around, I'm using the d-cubed tiddlywiki from http://www.dcubed.ca/ - it's quite neat, and I seem to be managing to keep it up to date. I've set up a second standard ... http://blog.sietsma.com/2008/02/15/getting-things-done-again/ I've been getting hooked on twitter - you can find me at http://twitter.com/kornys . Ephemeral micro-blogging! Beware, most of what I write is entirely trivial - but that's half the fun. Worse than that, I've found 'twibble' (http://www.das-zentralorgan.de/twibble/) , a java phone app that lets me sent tweets on ... http://blog.sietsma.com/2008/02/15/twitter-twibble-gps-and-maps/ I foolishly left the default wordpress setting to "send me an e-mail but allow comments". So now I'm on some spam source - I've made comments "moderate only" but I have to log in regularly and kill a pile of spam in the "to-moderate" folder. Maybe it'll force ... http://blog.sietsma.com/2008/02/11/comments-trackbacks-eggs-and-spam/