Disqus - Latest Comments for philcrissman

Re: Gratitude

philcrissman — Sun, 06 Mar 2016 15:35:26 -0000

Yes, absolutely. All the little annoyances pale in comparison to real suffering. It's good to remember. Thanks for reading!

Re: Gratitude

philcrissman — Sun, 06 Mar 2016 15:34:15 -0000

Thank you! Thanks for reading and commenting. Jocko's podcast has been a big impact on me as well.

Re: Gratitude

philcrissman — Fri, 04 Mar 2016 12:34:19 -0000

Thanks for reading, thanks also for the comment. I know what you mean. I'm aiming every day not to take my life for granted.

Will definitely look up the South Downs. I'd love to visit England some day.

Re: Validating Nested Attributes on Update

philcrissman — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 18:36:27 -0000

You're right, that's exactly what I did, just force it in the controller.

To check that the associations are valid all the time, I could, maybe _should_, have used validates_associated :children

.. but that still doesn't validate the requirement that I had at the time, namely, that at least one child must be present in order for the Parent to be valid. If I was doing this now, I think I would use a custom validation, check the size of the children association, and add the error if the size was zero.

Re: Over the last month or so,

philcrissman — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 09:44:47 -0000

Haven't started Breaking Bad, mostly because I'm certain it will be great and I don't have time to watch it. :-)

Did watch GoT, very good series. The books, as always, are better, but they did a good job (so far) putting them on screen.

LOST did indeed prove to be a waste of time. Worst series ending ever.

Have you yet gone back and watched Firefly? Worthwhile.

Re: Duck Duck Go

philcrissman — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 11:11:15 -0000

I don't know about that. I switched to using ddg over a year ago and have never felt the need to switch back. For the few cases that I know I will get better/more results with google, I just preface the search with !g.

Re: Clearing Form Fields with JQuery

philcrissman — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 11:37:11 -0000

Again, yes. If you're using Internet Explorer, it's going to look like crap. I have not tested with Internet Explorer, other than I checked once, and it's totally broken in IE.

Do I need a disclaimer, somewhere? ;-)

Re: Clearing Form Fields with JQuery

philcrissman — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 12:25:15 -0000

Which browser are you using? I know it renders horribly in IE, and I just haven't cared enough to fix it. AFAIK, it looks fine on Firefox or webkit browsers.

Re: Testing Ajax requests in Rails

philcrissman — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 12:04:00 -0000

That is a good way. I might also use a cucumber feature for something like that, these days. Which is a whole other topic entirely.

Re: Gratuitious web bling

philcrissman — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 13:26:21 -0000

I didn't try that; keyboard shortcuts would really help the user experience for something like this.

Re: The quest for freedom and safety: Why I donated $100,000 to YesOn19

philcrissman — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 17:30:39 -0000

Maybe we should all check with you before we donate any of our own money to any cause whatsoever. Just to certain that you approve, of course.

Re: Howto: Add xscreensavers to gnome-screensaver

philcrissman — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 14:44:34 -0000

Well, I don't know about _that_... Not a big Fedora fan. But it's okay. If I were going to start using Linux for a desktop again today, I'd be tempted to use either Linux Mint or just plain Ubuntu.

If I were feeling really geeky, I think I'd go with http://funtoo.org. :-)

Re: Howto: Add xscreensavers to gnome-screensaver

philcrissman — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 14:59:05 -0000

Nice. This post is pretty old, glad (& not surprised) there are easier ways to do this now.

Re: Tired of Ads and Shitty Content? Click Everything

philcrissman — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 15:47:23 -0000

Highlighting the absurdity is that something much like this was actually a recent article in the Onion... http://www.theonion.com/art... :-)

Re: By Land and By Sea and By Reference

philcrissman — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 11:31:22 -0000

If anything in my summation of binding & scope is unclear or (gasp!) incorrect, feel free to augment or correct my explanation in the comments...

Re: How Not To Write Sorting Algorithms in Ruby

philcrissman — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 10:17:32 -0000

The short answer to the question is, a quicksort in ruby will still be slower than Array#sort, because the built-in quicksort is written in C.

That said, I don't think I've really looked at quicksort since college, so I think that would be a fun exercise; now that you've mentioned it I'll probably give it a go and post it in a little bit.

Re: Why I don't like location based services

philcrissman — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 20:43:49 -0000

Well, there are always exceptions. In any of these systems, I guess restrained use, or use for a specific purpose (like you mention) is functionally equivalent to the selective "occasionally tweeting my location" that I admittedly do myself.

But yeah, absolutely; there are a lot of people who use these systems who I don't automatically unfollow; either because they don't use them _that_ much, or I know them well enough that I'm willing to put up with it, or whatever many other reasons there could be.

But I think I'll continue to avoid "checking-in" with anything for the foreseeable future. :-)

Re: Clearing Form Fields with JQuery

philcrissman — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 23:56:57 -0000

I guess it would depend how you want it to work. You could have the default text reappear after leaving the field, if it's blank at the time (assuming that blank is not a valid value).

If the important thing is what information get submitted by the form, a better way would be to do it server side, after the form is submitted, and just check if a given field is blank; if it is, supply a default value.

Re: Roll Your Own Computer Science Masters Program

philcrissman — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 18:37:57 -0000

Well, it would probably cover the same/similar topics as I laid out above, but starting more from scratch.

One way to do it would be to do what I did for the above list: go to a college website, check out the courses that they require for a Computer Science or Software Engineering undergrad degree, and look up the textbooks they use; then find those books, or similar, and work your way through them.

College can be useful, maybe essential depending what you want to do; but you can definitely learn software development on your own if you're willing to work at it. I may have to write another post about this, it's an interesting topic, and I think a lot of us are interested in continuing self-education.

Re: All Your Webs

philcrissman — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 10:31:57 -0000

I think there have been several such sites/extensions/add-ons... none have seemed to really catch on.

I still think http://www.shiftspace.org/ has some neat potential, but the web at large doesn't seem to be open to this sort of thing quite yet. Seems like just a matter of time, though.

Re: Roll Your Own Computer Science Masters Program

philcrissman — Mon, 03 May 2010 11:39:15 -0000

Re: tips for self-motivating; I might, I'm thinking about that now. Maybe it will become a blog post or an essay or something. I'm not a psychology expert or a motivational buff, but if we do want to self-motivate, we need to have at least a few tricks up our sleeves to accomplish that. I'll see what I can come up with, for what it's worth. :-)

Re: Roll Your Own Computer Science Masters Program

philcrissman — Mon, 03 May 2010 11:36:56 -0000

I think that's a good point; I'm not sure a master's degree is the _only_ way to find out the "things you don't know you don't know" however.

Sometimes you find them out along the way. Regular Expressions stand out in that way, for me. I never set out at the beginning of my programming career thinking, "I should really master a concise pattern-matching syntax for text," but along the way of learning, I naturally stumbled across regular expressions and realized that I needed to learn them (at least the basics).

Other things you might not just "stumble across", you can learn from colleagues, looking at other code, talking about projects/methodologies, and so forth. If you're ever really convinced you have nothing else to learn you could always pick up TAOCP. ;)

Not knowing what you don't know is a valid point, but I don't think University is the only place you can discover those things.

Re: Roll Your Own Computer Science Masters Program

philcrissman — Sun, 02 May 2010 22:28:17 -0000

You're assuming that people can't hold themselves to a deadline if they are attempting autodidact-ism... that's a pretty big assumption. I meet self imposed deadlines all the time and I don't think I'm the only one who does.

Re: Roll Your Own Computer Science Masters Program

philcrissman — Sun, 02 May 2010 22:26:40 -0000

Compilers sounds like a great topic. I was disappointed my undergrad degree didn't touch the topic at all (or even parsers, other than a little bit of theory).

Re: Roll Your Own Computer Science Masters Program

philcrissman — Sun, 02 May 2010 09:26:18 -0000

Thanks to all who commented...

Re: Computer Science vs. Software Engineering... yes, I'll quickly concede there's can be a large gap between the two. The main reason that I didn't make a distinction is that so many schools don't seem to make much distinction. This is not a degree program, it's a blog post. If you want to initiate a program of self-study you can call it Advanced Bit-Twiddling, if that suits you better than Computer Science or Software Engineering.

Thesis: yep, glaring omission, and a clear sign that I haven't _actually_ completed a Masters. So if you don't feel your education is complete without one, I guess you need to start researching and writing. Have a ball.

Lots of other great points below; thanks again for reading and taking the time to comment.