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A while ago, i got addicted to RoR. Life before RoR was… well. Mundane. Don’t get me wrong. There was still a lot of exciting stuff going on, but RoR opened up a brave new world and it’s “differentness” added to its appeal. And since then, i’ve written a fair amount of Rails apps and [...]
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Optimizing code is generally an expensive process (read: time-consuming) and there are established ways of getting to the bottom of “what to optimize”. Thankfully, profilers are available to help with a lot of the guesswork, so it’s generally a good idea to make sure you work with one *most of the time*. Moving along, it [...]
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UPDATE: 3 July 2008
Updated code to reflect more recent tax tables (2009)
When I was asked to estimate PAYE on a gross monthly salary, i hauled out the calculator and started chipping away, according to the SARS Tax Tables. Not being a tax consultant or looking at various structured packages, the first stab is mostly always [...]
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We have a concept of what the learning curve represents, and unfortunately, the same thing can represent 2 opposite concepts. What makes more sense to me is looking at a learning curve from a classical labour cost perspective and more keenly towards labour productivity. In this sense, the learning curve is interpreted, broadly, as: the [...]
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This is kinda like a bumper edition, since it wasn’t intended but after hacking this for a bit, it turned out to be a pretty useful exercise, no matter the language. Why? Primarily since you get to, depending on implementation, write your own data structures and use recursion. This combination of tasks usually allows you [...]
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In the first installment, we discovered, from the eyes of a noob, a handful of basic concepts about the Ruby language. In this episode, we’ll complete the functions for mean, median, variance and hence standard deviation and discover something you might consider magic…
The mean. It’s the average and so it’s calculation is simple. Add up [...]
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If you want to learn to code, the best way is to code… lots. No getting around it, and for me, my fingers seem to remember more than my brain. So keeping that in mind, here begins a short series of code snippets and samples which i’ve used to help myself learn the Ruby language. [...]
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When Ruby/Rails is mentioned as a web development platform, the most common response is related to scalability and performance; usually with a liberal dash of skepticism. Fear, uncertainty and doubt, along with a couple of honest posts and reviews, all point to the perception that Rails has some sort of performance problem.
300 million page [...]
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A synergistic moment if there ever was one.
I love my OS. I don’t dislike my XP. It’s been good to me (and continues to be) but i *really* enjoy working on my ubuntu. And i’m still discovering things about it, which is half the fun right there. And as a result, i was introduced to [...]
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I was reading up quite a bit and getting a project on the go with Ruby and Streamlined. Perfect for an admin console and mass data capture application. But in my zeal and learning curve, i kept bumping my head against habtm relationships not really working. It was acting weird, and depending on when you [...]