a t e v a n s . c o m

    irb(main):001:0> 1278369127863986128.to_s(26)
    => "da7ig0e87ja9m"
    irb(main):002:0> "da7ig0e87ja9m".to_i(26)
    => 1278369127863986128

Yeah. Ruby’s like that.

rails-bootstrap

My personal starter project with Rails — Read more

via Github

Borderlands 2 is the first game where I regularly play girl characters. I found myself dying all the time with any of the male characters - the Commando, the Gunzerker and Assassin. My solo-play run-in-and-gun playstyle wasn’t working with them. But I’m finding my playstyle matches really well with the girl characters - the Mechromancer and Siren.

Normally, I play guy characters because that’s what I connect with. I’m a guy, I like being a guy, and I want my in-game avatar to be a guy. But because the mechanics are gender-separated in BL2 due to classes, I’m experiencing playing as a girl. I’m trying on a new avatar, a new persona, a new identity. When I wreck an area and run through the littered corpses of my enemies, I find myself saying “Yeeeahhh, guurrrrlll!” When I got hit with a grenade while selling some excess guns, I thought to myself “Can’t a girl get some shoe shopping done in peace around here?!” I also notice and appreciate that the enemies don’t call me a bitch constantly - right, Batman?

So it’s a ludology hack. Make certain gameplay styles or mechanics only compatible with the kinds of avatars users normally wouldn’t pick. Make certain options available only to the gay character, the hispanic or black character. Have a male/female magic system like the Wheel of Time, and have a transgender “Red Mage” character.

You could even adjust the difficulty for certain archetypes - make the game harder if you’re the gay character or a woman, since certain sexist characters in game won’t help you. Skyrim did this with the Khajit - it was really hard to persuade anyone as a cat. That way the ‘hardcore’ players will choose that identity to get a tougher experience. Or go the other way - make the game easier for a female character because all the NPC’s are aching to give you loot and hit on you. It’s easier, but… kinda creepy. And then male gamers get to see how it feels.

Get your players to try something new.

How to set up WordPress to use SQLite via PDO. The long & short is, you have to start with an old version of WordPress then upgrade to the latest, and make one or two changes.

here’s a later update from the same source.

Thanks Eric!

I attended the Compute Midwest Hackathon last weekend, and worked with two other fine folks: Albert Tong and Chris Lewman. In 24 hours, we made a mobile and web app that matches your friends up with companies you want to work for; or it matches up your friends with skills that might be relevant to your company.

It’s hiring, disrupted.

We called it Friendly Hires and it won the Best Mobile App award, the Singly award for best use of their API, and the Iron.io award for best use of their API.

All in all it was a great experience - you REALLY get to know people by working with them on a hardcore crunch project like this. And seeing our team come together and produce award-winning apps was an amazing and gratifying experience for me.

Next weekend I’ll be at Startup Weekend - this will be the fourth Startup Weekend I’ve attended, and the one I’ll be taking most seriously. My options are open right now, and I can’t wait to see what crazy ideas we throw together!

Question:

I am running a rails3 app on Dreamhost: not the best call but I need it operational before I can pitch migrating to Heroku.

I am using rails 3.2.1, and ruby 1.8.7 with

gem ‘mysql2’, ‘~> 0.2.7’

in my Gemfile…

I get the following error when I deploy and reload:

Please install the mysql adapter: gem install activerecord-mysql-adapter (mysql is not part of the bundle. Add it to Gemfile.)

I have tried gem ‘mysql2’, gem ‘mysql2’, ‘< 0.3’ and get the exact same issue.

Any other ideas?

Answer:

In general when rails is trying to be helpful it will try to generate the name of an adapter gem based on whatever you have in your database.yml. If that gem doesn’t exist it’s a good indication that something with the adapter line is wrong

for mysql2 the adapter type needs to be mysql2 as well

database.yml

adapter: mysql2

via StackOverFlow

If you’re coding a little too fast, it’s easy to miss the simple things.

Problem: my assets:precompile was overloading memory and being killed. This caused my deploy process to fail. More than half of my memory is free on my production machine, so what the hell? Turns out assets:precompile starts up 3 instances of your app just to precompile assets! What is absurd, Trebek?

Solution: precompile assets locally, then deploy them. I wrote a quickie capistrano script to do that:

    namespace :deploy do
        task :upload_assets do
            `bundle exec rake assets:precompile`
            `tar -czf assets.tar.gz public/assets`
            top.upload(File.join(Dir.pwd, "assets.tar.gz"), "#{release_path}/assets.tar.gz")
            run "cd #{release_path} && tar -xzf assets.tar.gz"
        end
    end

Then, just drop this guy in at the end of your deploy file: before 'deploy:finalize_update', 'deploy:upload_assets'

Fastest, easiest way to pre-compile and deploy assets.

I read through Eric Reis’ “The Lean Startup” yesterday. It was a good read, and provided a good framework for how to think of your startup’s business. The idea that your business is based on assumptions and you should find ways to test those assumptions before moving forward wasn’t exactly earth-shattering to me, but it certainly gave me a kick in the butt to start testing my business assumptions.

The writing could have been better. Many paragraphs lie below headings that have little to do with them. Some of the examples didn’t demonstrate what Eric was talking about, and some of the *cough*groupon*cough* were a little embarressing to read.

Eric admits the book is about theory and is short on practicum, but some practical steps or questions for the reader at the end of each chapter would have made it a lot more clear what he was talking about. I’m trying to apply it to my own business, but there’s not a good way to know if I’m doing it correctly without getting some kind of mentor or group. And if that’s where the real learning is, why read the book?

tl;dr it was a good book for me, and didn’t take too long to read. Not sure if I would recommend it to others.