Kerry Buckley » General nonsense

My (very!) small part in the Array#forty_two controversy

Kerry — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 12:52:11 +0000

For those outside the Rails community who have no idea what I’m on about, some people got a bit upset about Rails 2.2 defining Array#second up to Array#tenth, so for example you can call foo.fifth instead of foo[4] (you can already call foo.first instead of foo[0]). One of the last changes to be committed before 2.2 was released was to slim the list down to just second, third, fourth and fifth, but adding Array#forty_two (the ultimate answer) instead.

Microsoft Ad

Kerry — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 16:32:20 +0000

"Roger that Houston, I'm a PC."

Yeah? and how's that working out for you?

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Windows, PC, Advert

What’s your command-line top ten?

Kerry — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 14:23:33 +0000

Here's mine:

~ $ history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s\n",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head
  232	git
   82	cd
   30	ls
   20	sudo
   18	rm
   13	./script/server
   12	mate
   11	rake
    7	vi
    7	ssh

Probably slightly skewed by the fact that I was doing a git demo yesterday.

Meme via Simon Brunning.

Lolwolves

Kerry — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 21:53:00 +0000

From the meme collision department...

Technorati Tags: lolcats, werewolf, lolwolf, lolwolves

Rails Envy’s take on the werewolf question

Kerry — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 10:18:24 +0000

This clip [MP3, 57s] from a Rails Envy podcast made me laugh. It's referring to Charles Nutter's recent musings on whether werewolf is killing the conference hackfest.

Incidentally, how often do you get the chance to Google for "nutter werewolf"?

Technorati Tags: rails envy, werewolf

[BarcampLondon3] 101 Uses for an Index Card

Kerry — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 09:28:31 +0000

I'd originally intended to present something about BDD, but the slides and demo never really came together so I didn't really want to inflict them on people who could have gone to a better session. I was going to risk bad karma by not presenting at all (there were plenty of empty slots, so I don't think I'd have been the only one).

At some point in the early hours of Sunday, trying to sleep in a very warm room where the lights kept randomly coming on, I thought of another idea – could a bunch of us come up with 101 uses for an index card (something I've been planning to try myself for a while)? It would be obvious from the title that it was just a bit of fun, but maybe ew might learn something along the way about the techniques that people used which used index cards in some way.

Unfortunately (I like to think purely because I posted the session on the board at lunchtime on Sunday!) only two people turned up, beating my record of four from BarcampBrighton. We did manage to get a third of the way though, coming up with 34 uses:

CRC cards
Shopping list
Werewolf
Release planning/User stories
Enumerating the uses of an index card
Taking notes
Essential use cases
Paper prototyping
Bookmark
Funnel for salt, sugar etc
"Indexing stuff" (ie whatever they were originally designed for)
Emergency business card
Barcamp/unconference scheduling
Playing 1001 Blank White Cards
Inflicting paper cuts on an enemy
Making an animation flip-book
House of cards
Making noises with bicycle spokes
Drug pouches (I have no idea what this means!)
Roaching
Paper planes (although our test model was prone to nosedives)
Cue cards
Flash cards
Postcard
Beermat
Recipes
To-do lists
Lighting fires
Setting fire to, in order to satisfy the requirement to collect "fire" in a scavenger hunt
Bulletin board advert
Very simple origami
Signage
Action Man billboards
Blocking CCTV cameras

Paul also added "toothpick", via a Flickr comment.

Technorati Tags: barcampbrighton3, indexcards, 101

Parochial Ethnicity Option

Kerry — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 19:42:09 +0000

This from the profile page on Orkut (which is, of course, an international site):

Someone really ought to tell them that African American isn't a globally-applicable synonym for Black.

LolSecretz

Kerry — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 09:23:26 +0000

Ever wondered what would happen if you mixed lolcats with PostSecret?

Of course you have.

Cool steganography trick

Kerry — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 20:47:50 +0000

Very clever.

Quoted in the Times!

Kerry — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 11:04:06 +0000

So I was reading Jon's post about Paul's SEO talk at Barcamp Brighton, and thought I'd give the tip for finding incoming links a whirl.

I searched Yahoo for linkdomain:www.kerrybuckley.com -site:www.kerrybuckley.com, and found pretty much what I expected – my blog comments, links from a couple of other blogs, links from my profiles on sites like Twitter.

Then I found this: Apple's new iMac: blogger reaction - Times Online.

Of all the blog comments about the new iMac, I'm not sure why he chose mine.

Technorati Tags: times, imac