Xavier Defrang

The Simple Joy of Programming

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 00:18:00 CEST

I'm usually all for readable instead of "clever" code but I can't help to find this Ruby* one-liner pretty sexy:


Hash[*text.scan(/^([^:]+):(.*)$/).flatten.map(&:strip)]

This cute piece parses the given text and extract all "Key: Value" pairs into an associative array.

This is the kind of simple joy that Ruby brings. Right in the middle of the implementation of some larger feature, you figure out you need to parse some text, you just write a single line of code and it just works.
This is worth mentioning because It does not happen that often, to say the least. :)

* this code requires Rails for the &:symbol shorthand to work.

What The Hell Is Wrong With These People?

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 21:59:00 CEST

Because directly invoking methods on objects is so 2000...

When They Were Still Bricks...

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 10:02:00 CEST

“La La La” by The Bird and the Bee

Note To Self

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 18:21:00 CEST

Tomorrow: block all incoming traffic on the firewall, lock access to versioning system and go to Brussels crying like a baby to beg this "government" of ours to let me pollute at a reasonable price.

Enough with the sarcasms. The thing that sickens me the most is that nobody dares to teach those moaners a basic lesson in world economy.
If they want to get a grip over oil prices, they should either start drilling for rotten dinosaurs in their backyard, or enlist in the USMC to wage war on more oil producing countries...

Something For Your Mind...

Sun, 6 Apr 2008 23:45:00 CEST

Awesome collection of 300+ old school house and rave tracks.

Bonus: a whole bunch of video of UK raves from the early 90ies.

Ever Meulen Retrospective

Sat, 5 Apr 2008 17:51:00 CEST

If you like the ligne claire, you only have one week left to visit the Ever Meulen exhibition in Leuven.

I'm so glad I spotted this a couple of days ago on the door of Plaizier.

Last Transmission From Lardossan Cruiser 8-203 X

Sun, 9 Mar 2008 21:44:00 CET

Awesome 27 minutes long interview with the late James Stinson of Drexciya, recorded a few months before he passed away. This was his first and last radio interview and it's like he knew it.

ActiveResource: A Ride On The Wild Side

Thu, 3 Jan 2008 23:06:00 CET

Things have been very quiet down here and hectic everywhere else. As a proof that this is no lame excuse, my first Rails patch was just committed into the trunk.

For the record, it addresses an issue in ActiveResource which could not locate resources defined in nested modules.

I've been using ARes a lot in my current project in which I've built a rich client-side API packaged into a Rails plugin. To be honest, I'm into a love-hate relationship with ARes and things were not as smooth as initially advertised.

I've experienced some severe hiccups with nested resources, inflected collection names, attributes vs prefix hashes and some nasty XML (un)marshalling oddities. If I find some time, I will document here the problems I encountered during this wild ride...

Even though it has given me some serious headaches, I still think this REST approach is better than dealing with a huge black box supposedly implementing some funky flavor of SOAP.
ARes is not totally mature in its current state but the size of its code base still allows a mere mortal to dive into it and see what's happening.

If the popularity of REST services keep on rising, ARes will need some real refactoring and internal plumbing work to bring it to the same level as ActiveRecord in the ORM field.

The bottom line is: ARes is a neat library you may want to play with but you must be warned that things are not as simple as they seem and it may require some significant tweaking on both sides of the wire...

Halcyon Days

Sun, 9 Dec 2007 12:18:00 CET

If you ever talked face to face with a computer or if you just want to take a stroll down the memory lane with some anonymous heroes, I highly recommend you to take a look at Halcyon Days, a collection of interviews with bytes counting and cycles saving übercoders from the golden age of videogaming.

Welcome to City 17

Thu, 8 Nov 2007 00:46:00 CET

This is a screenshot from a news on the BBC website

Now don't these riot police officers look strangely familiar? They surely do...

Welcome. Welcome to City 17.

Update: I'm not the only one who noticed the gasmask.