Headius: Java Native Access + JRuby = True POSIX

but the result will be true POSIX functionality in JRuby…the “last mile” of compatibility will largely be solved.

This one had me going for couple of hours today. I wanted to segregate some data into “buckets”. So I initialized my array of arrays (buckets), and then proceeded to add stuff to the individual buckets. But my unit test was failing, because, for a system of 10 buckets, and me adding 1 thing, I always got back 10 things. Weird. But look at this:

WTF? So, that array that I initialized my buckets with? The same array. Add to one, add to all. Grrr.

Now, I know this is in the PickAxe book, in the RDocs for Array.new… But I never read that far, ok?

July 20, 1969: One Small Step … One Giant Leap …

Five more Apollo missions carried astronauts to the moon before the program ended in 1972. (There was to have been six, but Apollo 13’s mission ended in near disaster.) The last man to leave his footprint on the moon was Apollo 17 commander Eugene Cernan, on Dec. 14, 1972.

Considering that watching the moonwalks was one of the most exciting things I did in elementary school, I find it sad that we have a couple of generations going now, who never had that privilege. I hope that NASA, or even the private sector, can find a way to get there again soon.

Cream pie protests ‘thoroughly unacceptable,’ Calgary mayor says

The latest Alberta politician to be the target of a cream pie says he’s disappointed the dessert has become “the method of choice” of those who want to make a political statement.

See… stampeding is dangerous!

Mechanical bull knocks Calgary man unconscious

A young Calgary man is in hospital with potentially life-threatening head injuries after an accident with a mechanical bull.

For those of you reading who don’t live in Calgary, or who have never come to the Calgary Stampede… “stampeding” is a verb, which refers to all the different kinds of fun activities, usually combined with consuming too much alcohol, that you can do while attending the Calgary Stampede.

I sat down at my desk today, dreading the task ahead. The increasing shrill and threatening notices I have been receiving from the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) really had to be dealt with today. But I wasn’t looking forward to it.

You see, I made such a simple mistake almost a year ago. I have my own company, 100% owned by me, and through it I do my consulting work. I pay myself as an employee. Under the CRA rules, that makes me EI exempt (I don’t pay Employment Insurance, nor does my company, because I’m self-employed). Last year, in the summer, I was using the strange little application that the CRA puts out called TOD (for historical reasons, Tables On Diskette), which calculates the payroll withholdings (Federal and Provincial Taxes, IE deductions, Canada Pension Plan deductions, etc). And I missed the little “EI exempt” checkbox. Once. So, I ended up submitting an EI deduction to the government for one month.

At T4 time (yearly payroll tax summary/receipt) in February, I noticed all this, and submitted the T4 summary, corrected for the mistake in the EI deduction. Or so I thought. In April, the CRA started sending me these nasty notes about how I was ripping them off for the EI deductions from last year, and I now owed them about $1500.

Argh.

It’s been a VERY busy few months, so I was ignoring this, but the last round of forms started adding interest to the $1500 assessment, so I figured it was past time to get it straightened out. I pulled out all the paperwork, started up NeoOffice, and started writing a letter to the CRA, to explain all this. Then I noticed the “If you need help with this review, please call…” on the last form they sent. Hmmm. What if I could just call and fix this? It was worth a shot, wasn’t it?

After a simple two-level IVR phone system, in under a minute I was talking to a real person. She brought up my account, and I gave her the sad story. I expected a run-around. I expected to have to mail and/or FAX a bunch of supporting documents to correct this problem. What I didn’t expect was this:

She said, “Don’t worry about it. This was obviously a mistake. Don’t respond to any of the assessment notices, or fill out any of the forms. I’ll take care of it.”

... here’s me at my desk with my jaw sitting down on the floor…

I’m afraid I didn’t get your name, Ms. CRA Employee, but you made my whole day, and I thank you for it!

Since I started programming in Ruby I’ve discovered that sometimes knowing how to do something is not the same thing as knowing how to do it right.

In the process of creating a fairly complex control for multi-select, I was struggling with an Ajax callback action, in which, among other things, I was trying to update a hidden field.  In RJS, when I want to update a field, I pull out the trusty page[‘hidden_field_id’].replace, and off I go.  But, I just couldn’t make it work in my Ajax callback, because I didn’t have access to the same instance variable that I had in the view when the hidden field was originally created.  And suddenly I’m diving into some really esoteric stuff, like define_method, because there’s gotta be a define_instance, doesn’t there?  Dead-ending there, I stumble into ActionView::Base::ObjectWrapper.new.  That’s gotta work, right?  Not really, at least I couldn’t quite figure it out.  I wasted an hour or so on this, and then wrapped up for the day.  On the drive home, I remembered reading about some RJS that could update the class of a DOM element.  Hmmm.  Sounds more promising.  Some Googling from home revealed this:

#3084 ([PATCH] Change css-class to DOM-elements in rjs) – Rails Trac – Trac

page[‘my_id’].className = ‘new_class_name’

I was reading my RSS feeds this morning, and I checked the weather forecast.  This is what I saw:



So… what exactly do you do with a forecast of “Floods”?