I’m moving up to West Yorkshire

After about a month of applications for jobs (including Apple, Google and a few others). I found a job on my first interview attempt. It means relocating to West Yorkshire (Leeds/Bradfordish). But that should be a change and my job will be Embedded C work for a DTV set top box company, which should be a nice change and more my area of specialism really.

There are a few practical issues, including what to do with my driving practical test. After quite a bit of thought, I’ve decided that it’ll be better doing it in Leicester on a saturday, as I already know the roads pretty well around here. But it means any house I rent must be usable via public transport, at least for the first month or two. I also get to buy a nice new iMac (I’m not entirely decided which model yet)

Ruby on Rails: Routing and Periods/Full Stops

One of the things about rails that I find really well designed is the routing (mapping of url’s to controller and actions). However I have noticed a little problem, by default it assumes that the routes cannot have full stops in them, which is a bit of a pain with floating point numbers or files with extensions in them.

I want

location/-15.0/-45.0

To map to controller x and action y with two arguments latitude and longitude
I added the route below and found that it’d construct the link but not recognise it


map.connect "location/:lat/:lon",:controller=>"x",:action=>"y"

After a few quick tries I found it was due to the full stop and the easiest method I’ve seen is to add conditions to the routes and set it to


map.connect "location/:lat/:lon",:controller=>"x",:action=>"y",:requirements => {:lat => /\-?[0-9]*\.[0-9]*/,:lon => /\-?[0-9]*\.[0-9]*/

Generally speaking the routing mechanism is really good, allowing simple validation using regex’s to easily screen out dodgy requests.

BJC 2008

I went to BJC 2008 between Wednesday and Sunday, had lots of fun and a really relaxing time. Met lots of new people and juggled loads. Had little sleep normally 3 hours a night, but it felt so good.

 The first night was really frozen (see this), but the other nights weren’t bad from a camping point of view, very windy on saturday morning.

The shows were fun, the renegade was either great or awful and I got tired of the Third time naked, fourth time with poi thing. I managed to peg a few people, but wasn’t pegged myself (I got close to getting Luke Barrage, next time lucky). (For those of you who don’t know what pegging is, you have to place a peg on someone without them realizing it).

A funny event in the pub happened, these chavs were playing pool, and one of the other people thought it was fun to peg them, after a little while they found out, and blamed their friends and almost started fighting. They tried to borrow one of Dan’s brand new Henry Superior balls which obviously he didn’t want to do.

As usual the standard roundup of photos

• Monkey Juggler
• Fak’s
• The Void
• Josh Turner
• j.spilsbury
• Mine (currently about 1/10th of the total photos i’ve done, need to sort through them more)