Feed: My Secret Life as a Spaghetti Coder - AggScore: 68.2

Future Companies

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My take at this concept was too long for twitter, and I was too lazy to pare it down: In ...

Rethinking Routing in Rails

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You know when you see code like this: class CompulsionsController < ApplicationController     # ... standard actions above here     def update       if params [ :obsessions ] . include ? ( ObsessionsTypes [ :murdering_small_animals ] )         handle_sociopathic_obsessions         redirect_to socio_path and return       elsif params [ :obsessions ]         handle_normal_obsessions         redirect_to standard_obsessions_path and return       end       ...

APIs have the signup process backwards

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Most online developer API services that I've used are set up as if the customer is also the software developer. That should change. As the software developer, I don't want to be the owner of my customer's accounts, and I don't want to worry about trying to figure out how to transfer ownership (if your service allows it, that is). Because of that, theres a lot of waste that goes on: wastes of my time, which wastes my customer's or my company's money. I'm saying "customer" here, but you might substitute that with "the person who really needs / ...

Three passive-aggressive ways to feel like you're getting back at typecasers

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Type Casing is the act of using case statements in a program to determine what to do with an object based on what type of object it is. It's an OO fail, often hoping to implement Multiple Dispatch . (See also Case Statements Considered Harmful ) Here are three passive-aggressive ways to feel like you're getting back at typecasers. The first tactic turns your object into an everything , so it's whatever the typecaser was looking for. I've called it OmniObject . module OmniObject   def is_a? ( * ...

How do you get two secure sites to cooperate and operate seamlessly for the end user?

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Suppose you have some awesome analytics tool that provides great value to a bank's customer, but they need to interact with it through the bank's website, and you need to host the tool. You already have the data you need for the analytics to work, and the only missing piece you're left to consider is "how do I know to whom to show which data?" The data is private, so you need to ensure you're not showing it to someone who's not authorized to see it. Photo by pbkwee Some more constraints: ...

I'm sorry I didn't give you a chance, #each_cons

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With a name like each_cons , I thought you were going to iterate through all the permutations of how I could construct a list you operated upon. For example, I thought [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ] . each_cons do | x | # I did not notice the required argument   puts x. inspect end   would output: [[1,2,3,4], []] [[1,2,3], [4]] [[1,2], [3,4]] [[1], [2,3,4]] [[], [1,2,3,4]] So when I needed to find the ...

Algorithmically recognizing the staff in sheet music

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It's a small step, but emcee-3PO can now identify the staves in an image of sheet music for my single test case of "My Darling Clementine." I need to include hundreds more test cases, and I plan to when I implement code to make the tests mark the sheet music with what emcee3po detected so I can visually inspect the accuracy. Ichiro Fujinaga's "Optical Music Recognition using Projections" (PDF) explains the process in detail, but it turns out to be relatively simple. To locate the staves: Do a y-projection on the image. ...

plupload-rails3 available as gem; works on 3.1

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plupload-rails3 is ...

How to save your ass when tech support tells you the best way to solve your problem is to start over with a new server

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If you follow me on twitter , you already know I ran into some trouble compiling Ruby and OpenSSL the other day. Calling it "Some Trouble" might be a bit of an understatement. The next morning, I likened it to this title bout: Not only was Ruby and OpenSSL giving me trouble, in my quest to get it working, I totally messed up everything that depended on OpenSSL . Email with TLS? Gone. SSH? Yep, gone as well. Tech support's first recommendation was to requisition a new server. Of course I wasn't going ...

Dealing With Embarrassing Breaking Changes

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Frequent changes and deprecations to technology you rely upon cause dependencies to break if you want to upgrade. In many cases, you'll find yourself hacking through someone else's code to try to fix it, because a new version has yet to be release (and probably never will). That can be a chore. I get embarrassed when something I've recommended falls prey to this cycle. Backwards compatibility is one way to deal with the issue, but in the Rails world, few seem worried about it. It doesn't bother me that code and interface quality is a high priority, but it does cause ...

Pipe music through a Markov Model to generate new, similar music

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emcee-3PO takes a text file of music, runs it through a Markov Model, and generates new music to be played with Archaeopteryx . It's an idea I've had for a while, which _why day gave me a good excuse to start. There's not much there yet -- the first sentence above tells you exactly what it does -- but I hope to add some features to it as time allows: Read from sheet music Use different instruments instead of simply playing the notes as written / make it symphonic Choose probabilities in some smart way to ...

Ruby random numbers

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Update: Ruby 1.9.3 adds the ability to use ranges as arguments to rand , which produces more obvious code. So if you're using it, instead of using "magic offsets" like I did in the original post (as Joni Orponen mentions in the comments below), it would be better to use rand(1..6) to simulate a die roll. So to summarize: if you need a percentage between 0 and 1, just call rand . If you need an integer between 0 and x (not including x), you can still call rand(x) . Finally, if you need a number in a specific range, ...