In an interesting twist, Saddam Hussein is trying to sue George Bush and Tony Blair for a range of offences related to the invasion of Iraq.

Some of the points seem valid, some are rather silly. To read more detail, check out the Washington Post.

This is becoming a trend - another built-in feature of Rails that will seriously help Galaxia development.

You can use acts_as_tree in a model to make it, well, act as a tree.

What this means is you add an extra field to the database called parent_id that tracks object’s parents. Rails automatically manages this for you and adds extra methods for dealing with trees (things for accessing parent, ancestors, children etc.). Just like the post on type, this is something I was already doing with Galaxia but managing myself.

By default Rails applies special meaning to certain fields in a database table. One of these fields is “type”.

The type fields is used by Rails to create a “single table inheritance model”. This sounds fairly complicated and is best explained with an example:

Imagine a forum system. A forum will have threads and replies. Threads and replies are different and have different functionality, but certainly share a lot of characteristics. So you might create a class message with two sub classes: replies and threads. In Rails you can store all these in one messages table with a type field set to either reply" or thread. When you load a message it will actually create either a reply or thread object (in stead of a message object). When you create a new object it stores it in the messages table with the correct type.

This is ideal for Galaxia. In fact it’s the model I used all along - I just had to write the functionality myself.

Ooooh. We’ve just set up an ad-hoc wireless network and are now sharing a 56k dial-up connection between three computers… Clever but not that useful.

Just thought I’d randomly point out that it’s my birthday soon :) Birthday

Interesting crossover - female wrestler Stacy Keibler is apparently doing well on Dancing with Stars, the American version of Strictly Come Dancing.

Okay, Galaxia on Rails would my be a more apt name for a version of Galaxia in Ruby on Rails. But Galaxia Ruby sounds better to non-programmers.

This follows the tradition I’ve been recently following of learning new languages by writing bits of Galaxia in them. There is a real possibility I might get a version out this time :P

This version may even have AJAXy goodness and things. But don’t hold your breath…

I’ve been vaguely aware of Ruby for a while but never really gave it more than a cursory glance. If you didn’t know Ruby is a language that has been around for a while that got far more interesting when Rails, a framework for it was released.

After reading around I don’t think I’m really a fan of Ruby syntax per se (I’m definitely a fan of the punctuation heavy C-style syntax as opposed to the keyword heavy Basic-style syntax) but Rails seems to be an amazing framework.

Since I might be starting a job soon (and if not soon at least eventually) that will focus on PHP, starting to learn something new might not be ideal. But if it really as good as it’s fans say then things might be fine.

I suggest anyone involved in web development who hasn’t checked it out yet do so. There is a good introductory article on ONLamp.com.

The advantage of having an imminent interview (and ultimately of having a job) is I can buy computer books without worrying so much about not having much money. They’re an investment you see…

A post on the WSJ blog (which is running on Wordpress incidentally) actually references an article on the Onion. The Onion by the way is a satirical online newspaper type thingy that I never thought a serious journalistic endeavour would talk about.

The WSJ points out that it’s “hard to write satire, but it’s even harder to write satire about corporate taxes”. In fact it’s so good that I might even read it despite the fact that I understand alarmingly little about what it’s talking about.

Another post talks about some bankrupty meeting in New York: “The California utility, which filed for bankruptcy at the end of December, only served ice water; last year’s Delta meeting featured coffee and soda (did Delta borrow from its airplane beverage carts?).”