Three till Seven

Working with matrices and vectors in Ruby before has been annoying because methods I expected to find were not there, and there wasn’t much documentation. Here, I present some simple additions to the Matrix and Vector classes that I found helpful.

Two web-scraper Ruby scripts for use in generating test cases for Ruby on Rails web applications. This was my Master’s project at the University of Kentucky. See also my defense presentation for a better explanation of the project.

Recently, I noticed that my battery for my aging Macbook was starting to bulge in the middle, along its length¹. I Googled around and saw other folks complaining of the same thing, and that there was some recall program that ended in 2009 where Apple would replace your battery for free. My Macbook was bought in 2007 by someone else, and I bought it off them used a couple years ago, so it was definitely made in the time frame where the recall program would include it.

For my Linux kernel class, I often know that some struct exists somewhere, or remember seeing a macro defined in some file and it might be useful, but I can’t remember where I saw something. I also end up trying to track down all the places a particular function is called, and don’t want grep to go digging through every… single… file in the entire kernel directory structure when I only care about .c files. So, I dug up a lengthy combination of file and grep that limits grep’s searching to particular files. I’m lazy about remembering this and retyping it on different computers, too, though, so I wrote a quick Ruby script to do it for me:

I’m so tickled to have completed an assignment for my Linux kernel class. The specification was as follows:

For my graduate-level programming languages class, I wrote this class that represents a rational number in Smalltalk. I figured I would share my source code with the interwebs for anyone else trying to learn the language. I release the code under the GNU General Public License v3.

For the past few days, I’ve been trying to create a Facebook application for interacting with Github. I hoped to spend my time mainly on the Github portion, figuring out how to post wall posts on Facebook about recent Github activity, etc. However, I’ve instead argued with the various Facebook APIs. I started out using PHP with no framework but quickly switched to CakePHP after I realized things were going to get hairy. CakePHP was okay for a while until I hit the roadblock of not being able to load any page but the index… Every sub-page I tried to create produced 404 errors, which no one else seemed to have (or at least document), so I said ‘screw it’ and switched to Rails.