Addiction is like email. With my apologies to Why for borrowing. Email has become the default action while online. At least it has for me and I’m guessing many others. What are we looking for when we check email every few moments? After watching Lars Pind’s screencast on PeepCode I decided to try to back off on the checking.  view full post →

Yesterday, during an interview, I was asked how to programatically solve a sliding puzzle. Given a mixed up puzzle, solve it and output a list of moves that would take you to the solution. After working it through for a bit we seemed to have a decent approach and moved on to other questions and interview stuff. However, thinking about it later in the day, I realized we missed something. I enjoy puzzles and programming, so last night I decided to look at it again and actually write the program.  view full post →

Finally! I created the project on GitHub a few months ago, added the first file a month ago and tonight I added the rest of the files. If you grab the source you should be able to have your own blog, just like this one, up and running in short order. What I need to do next is create some rake tasks to make the setup a little easier. If you check it out, please let me know!  view full post →

After being out of the country for five weeks with somewhat limited internet access I returned to find all sorts of comment spam on my blog. I also realized that I haven’t posted, or worked on the code, since October! When I first started Luna I had hoped to make regular posts and additions to the code. Today, instead of feeling bad about not doing what I originally set out to do, I got back on the horse and gave it another shot.  view full post →

You can now subscribe to my shiny new RSS Feed. I decided that an XML feed would be relatively quick and easy to build, so I rolled up my sleeves and went for it. The link is to a feedburner feed, however, you can also visit /rss.xml and get it.  view full post →

It was working well for a while but some bot latched on to my first post and managed to figure out how to post comments. The rest of the posts seem to be okay, but I was getting tired of deleting all of them from the first one. So until I come up with a new plan (I don’t like image captchas) comments are disabled.  view full post →

update – The iPhone optimized version of Luna is now live on this server. Visit it from your iPhone to check it out. Please let me know what you think!  view full post →

It’s Wednesday night, my GF has major corporate happenings going on, I’m watching some Railscasts and Battlestar Galactica on the Apple TV, I’m drinking some wine… You get the idea, code is being written. I’m doing some cleanup on Luna. I’m changing the authentication so it uses authenticate_or_request_with_http_basic. A nicely descriptive, albeit not short, method name. I’m also moving constants out of environment.rb and into a a YAML file, called luna.yml. Both of these changes come from Railscasts.  view full post →

It’s late and I’m tired and I thought I was done when I uploaded the formatting changes. But then I finished that and was thinking about comment spam and decided to do a quick test. I think it’s going to work.  view full post →

Finally, Textile formatting with RedCloth has arrived. It was super easy to implement. I have a helper function that takes a string argument and returns html. Bingo. I edited some of the older posts, added a little formatting and I’m pretty happy with it.  view full post →

I was re-reading my last two posts and decided that I might be straying from my original idea of stating my intent before doing any new development. So, I hereby state that the next piece of development is to add “static” pages to Luna.  view full post →

I made a few small tweaks that I think will improve Luna a little bit. They are all display related and took about 10 minutes.  view full post →

This blog started out, and still is, very simple. Even so I have decided to remove something. The Post model has an intro attribute, which was displayed on the index page along with the post title. I’m replacing it with the first paragraph of the post body.  view full post →

Ack. Another post bites the dust.  view full post →

Bots seem to be screwing up some of my posts. I really ought to look into that before they are all gone.  view full post →