http://www.drelmo.net Hacking away with Linux, Ruby, Rails, and so on and so forth Wed, 05 Nov 2008 21:53:26 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en A few weeks ago, I got to attend Merb Camp on the UCSD campus.  For those of you that haven't heard yet, Merb is a new web framework written in Ruby, which many consider to be the spiritual successor to Rails.  Essentially where DHH (creator of Rails) professes that "the ... http://www.drelmo.net/2008/11/05/merb-camp-2008/ After 10 weeks, I've now been able to watch all of the final presentations from the different groups. Considering that my group was the only "experienced programmer" team, I really didn't know what to expect from the others. All in all, I've been incredibly impressed by the various ... http://www.drelmo.net/2008/03/13/final-impressions-of-cogs-121/ It's been too long since the last update, especially since we've overcome a lot of hurdles in building this system. I'll talk about each in its own right. Hours of Operation The primary quandary we faced was in how to represent a store's hours of operation in the database. The obvious ... http://www.drelmo.net/2008/03/03/open-past-what-day/ For those of you that have not heard, my grandfather is very ill and in the hospital.  I've been back and forth to LA several times this last week to try and help out the family as much as I can.  Even better, I picked up a really nasty cold ... http://www.drelmo.net/2008/02/19/delays-to-being-open-past-midnight/ Due to some slight difficulties in acquiring the needed domain name, our COGS group has changed its name to Open Past Midnight.  We've been working on some paper-prototypes for the site layout.  Vivien found a very cool possible technology for generating heatmaps called gheat.  Given the implementation, I don't think ... http://www.drelmo.net/2008/02/03/midnight-munchies-is-now-open-past-midnight/ So our COGS group has decided to do a Google-maps based site that allows the visitor to find nearby restaurants (maybe stores, etc) that are open at different times of the day.  We've set up some framework stuff (SVN, domain, etc) and need to start getting things together. By Thursday (1/31/08) ... http://www.drelmo.net/2008/01/27/midnight-munchies-prologue/ The first assignment for COGS 121 was due last week.  I worked up a simple site on Practical Chinese for Nerds.  The content leaves a lot to be desired, but that was essentially filler for me.  I was focusing on two things while I built this site. Building a completely image-free ... http://www.drelmo.net/2008/01/22/practical-chinese-for-nerds-hwk-1/ Finally! After very popular demand, I've managed to post starcupsdrv_2.3.0-0ubuntu1_i386.deb just for you! Since WordPress is not nice about uploading .deb files, I've put it on a separate sub domain with a direct download link. No special scripts or sign-in required. If you download and use the ... http://www.drelmo.net/2008/01/17/star-micronics-tsp600-receipt-printer-driver-released/ So in my 5th and final year at UCSD, I'm finally getting to take a class that I've had my eye on for years: Human Computer Interaction Programming. Part of the class assignments are to maintain a blog of what we do in (or related to) class. Since ... http://www.drelmo.net/2008/01/09/cogs-121-human-computer-interaction-programming/ One of my philosophies in life is to set personal goals that seem almost impossible to reach. Then reach them. Yes, it sounds ridiculously cliche, but it moves me forward. One such goal of mine was to break 8 bricks. While I didn't quite nail it ... http://www.drelmo.net/2007/09/18/personal-goal-837-brick-breaking/