Updates from October, 2008 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • Dark Liquid 10:55 am on October 31, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: csv, excel, , office 2007,   

    Simple Office 2007 Excel file to CSV hack 

    I needed to convert a very simple Office 2007 Excel file into a CSV. I don’t have Office 2007 so I hacked up some Ruby goodness to convert it.

    Hope someone finds this useful.

     
  • Dark Liquid 7:18 am on October 31, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: opinions, people,   

    Musings on Opinions 

    Disclaimer: This isn’t directed at anyone in particular, I was just inspired to share my personal attitude towards such things by a recent event.

    People amuse me sometimes. I find it immensely funny, the pathetic bitchy comments people make, especially when made behind peoples backs to other people. I don’t really understand the motivation, why would you make known such an opinion to others, what does that actually achieve other than attempting to make others feel bad? Which, I suppose is the only motivation, nothing else really makes sense.

    However, hearing about such things only makes me laugh, purely because those kind of motivations and the silliness of the actual acts are so pathetic I can’t help but laugh. It’s like watching a baby trying to pick up a ball and when they finally do they can’t quite grab it in their tiny hands and so they end up accidentally pushing it away as their fingers slip off the surface. The baby just tries again in this naive, cute way hoping it can still get the ball and you can’t help but watch and find it so cute and amusing, because while the baby is a little pathetic, it’s sheer tenacity and determination are so endearing. Another, perhaps better analogy I made is the one of the grizzly bear. If a huge grizzly bear comes up and mauls you, that quite bad, but if you shrink that grizzly bear down so it’s the size of a teddy bear and give it mittens, it’s just cute and funny, even if it is still trying to maul you.

    Generally, I despise gossip and the kind of idle speculation and judgements people tend to make about others on a whim. Personally I keep my opinions to myself and try not to judge anyone particularly unless they have slighted me specifically and on purpose. Making judgements about people and gossiping about them achieves basically nothing. No-one actually learns anything and nothing actually changes for the better. Surely if you think something about a person is wrong, it might be best to actually inform them and provides good reasons and arguments to back up your claim? Surely if you feel the need to judge in a negative light, then you have a problem with the thing you are judging and the only way to stop yourself feeling that way is to get the thing to change. You can’t do that by gossiping and making snide comments, but you can try by approaching the person in a reasonable manner and outlining your issues.

    That’s why I tend not to like talking about people with other people. What do I care if you hate so-and-so? You have an issue with them, you’re perfectly capable of attempting to sort it out and resolve matters. Telling me achieves nothing other than perhaps to make yourself feel more comfortable with your hate. That’s not something I want to be a part of or something I condone which is why when conversations turn to sniping and bitching about someone, I tend to go on autopilot and just nod and/or make non-committal grunts.

    Admittedly, I’m a hypocrite. It would be impossible not to. Everyone makes judgements, it’s human nature, but that’s no reason to accept it and all be bastards to each others. I’ve stated my opinion on various things and doing so can have real practical uses, especially when you justify the reasoning behind your opinion, because then something can actually be done to change it. What I don’t like is stating opinions for no reason and with no justification, they help no-one.

    Well, maybe they do help someone. The silliness of it all sometimes provides me with some amusement.

     
  • Dark Liquid 6:50 am on October 29, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: ,   

    Hacker Key 

    v4sw5/7CHRSUY$hw7ln7pr5/6FOPck2/4ma9u7/8LMw2TVWXm5l7ELUiOTextMate or GEdit/e5t5FGLMRSb9AGHIKLOSTen5a25s6MRr1p-5.38/-5.23g6ACGMRZ

     
  • Dark Liquid 10:04 am on October 21, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    First post on UK-Geek.net! 

    I’m one of the writers on the recently relaunched UK-Geek.net.

    I’ve made my first post, LittleBigRant, on there. Interested on seeing what kind of response (if any) we’ll see.

     
  • Dark Liquid 8:06 pm on October 13, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: chat, funny   

    Beard 

    me: an mta guru must have an infinite amount of patience, they’d be like a zen master dude. they’d never mock you
    Bytey: they might
    no I must master it myself
    I will not give up

    me: besides, if they did you could strangle them with their epic guru beard which conveniently doubles as a way of disposing of them, wrap them up in it and it will eat them like an obscene cocoon

    Bytey: :D
    you scare me

    me: hehe
    it makes perfect sense, you see, guru beards are like heat sinks, but instead of heat they dissipate hate and anger, thats why the guru haven’t exploded from rage yet, it’s also why the longer the guru lives and deals with all these issues the more epic their beard gets
    when they die, they don’t produce enough hate to satisfy their epic beards dissipation quotient, so it absorbs them, like parasite eating it’s host

    Bytey: wow
    I never knew

     
    • bytey 10:07 pm on October 13, 2008 Permalink

      It’s even scarier with hindsight!

    • Dark Liquid 7:50 am on October 14, 2008 Permalink

      Yes, it makes a _disturbing_ amount of sense…

  • Dark Liquid 8:47 am on October 13, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , ,   

    Legacy Capistrano Issues 

    I have some apps deployed with older versions of capistrano but I still want to be able to use the latest capistrano on newer projects. Ideally I’d update the older apps to use the newer capistrano, but sometimes that requires a lot of work for not much benefit when I have a perfectly good copy of the old capistrano laying around to run those old deploy scripts with.

    However, by perfectly good, I mean broken. It breaks because it doesn’t specifically require the correct versions of other gems but this you can fix. This is how I fixed it for my particular use case. I’m assuming you have a recent version of rubygems where you can use the gem method for specifying require’s gem versions.

    Open up your old cap program, mine was here:
    /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/capistrano-1.4.1/bin/cap

    Before the “require ‘capistrano/cli’” line add the following:

    I also edited my lib/tasks/capistrano.rake file to have the following code in it.

    Then I created a new symlink.

    Now I can run my old stuff and I have my old cap program as well.

     
  • Dark Liquid 6:29 am on October 9, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , ,   

    LittleBigPlanet 

    I’ve been playing the beta few a few days and so far it’s pretty fun. There are some cool levels out there, some crap ones and many in-between. The controls for creating things is a bit of an arse sometimes. The specific problem I keep having is that when I create something in front of something else, it’s very hard to get at the object at the back layer. Another annoying thing is that the capture object and object selection tools sometimes get confused and decide that nearly the entire level is a single object, which even crashed the game for me once.

    It is beta though.

    Issues aside the game really is quite fun, though I can’t really say why. It’s essentially a stylised 2D physics sandbox. They style of it is part of it’s charm. Because of it’s soft, natural, playful style as a creator you don’t feel compelled to make everything perfect, you can just create things and not worry about having perfectly straight edges or aligned textures. The rough, tacked-together feel of the whole visual style of the game frees you up to actually focus on doing fun things rather than struggling to make the perfectly shaped and textured object.

    Multi-player is fun too, and it’s quite easy to construct levels in such a way that you need multiple players to complete it. Running around solving puzzles together and/or battling each other to collect the most points works surprisingly well, especially in well crafted levels.

    Currently, I’m crafting a single level. Despite what I said above, I’m still trying to get everything perfect. However, it’s more to do with game-play elements now than fiddling with brushes and textures. Hopefully I’ll finish it before the beta ends. I’m also stuck on the story levels. I’ve completed them all but I’ll be damned if I can complete them all to 100% – I have no idea where the other collectables could be and there seems to be no indication at all in the levels as to where they may be hidden. So I’m stuck creating with the few objects I have managed to collect, both online from other people and in single player.

    All in all, I’m looking forwards to playing the full game. I’m not much of a hardcore gamer per se, so something nice and casually fun like this appeals to me.

     
  • Dark Liquid 7:02 am on October 2, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: birthday,   

    Birthday Meme(me) 

    Happy Birthday to me, let’s celebrate with a meme!

    My typical indifferent/unimpressed look, it seems. You can tell just by looking at me I’m in the birthday spirit.

    So, mindless meme propagation!!!

    • Take a picture of yourself right now.
    • Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair…just take a picture.
    • Post that picture with NO editing.
    • Post these instructions with your picture.
     
    • bytey 10:46 am on October 2, 2008 Permalink

      I just want to put a Suse lizard on your shoulder, I can imagine the even more unimpressed sideways glance you would have:D

      Bon aniversare

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