Random Hacks

Moving a blog to Typo

Posted by Eric Kidd Tue, 15 Nov 2005 22:13:00 GMT

This weekend, I moved Random Hacks to Typo, a nifty Rails-based blogging system. Here’s what I did:

• Set up my Mac for Rails development
• Pointed Typo at MySQL
• Created a custom theme
• Wrote an article importer
• Routed my old URLs to new locations
• Wrote some custom sidebars
• Configured Debian’s mod_fcgid

Now for the gruesome details.

Tags Rails, Ruby, Typo

Random Hacks is back online

Posted by Eric Tue, 11 Oct 2005 00:00:00 GMT

I just recovered the contents of this site after a two-year hiatus. I'm going to try to dig up some other old stuff, too.

I should really rebuild this whole site using Ruby on Rails and some Ajax goodness. But that's going to have to wait until I ship some software at work and take care of other personal projects.

Tags Rails, Ruby

McCarthy's Ambiguous Operator

Posted by Eric Tue, 11 Oct 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Back in 1961, John McCarthy (the inventor of LISP) described an interesting mathematical operator called amb. Essentially, amb hates to be called with no arguments, and can look into the future to keep that from happening. Here's how it might look in Ruby.

Tags Continuations, Hacks, Recommended, Ruby