I cur­rently develop on a Win­dows machine. (You can cut the snick­er­ing.) There­fore, I don’t have the plea­sure of using Text­Mate. I’m also avoid­ing IDEs as a mat­ter of course when an edi­tor and CLI often avoids the bloat and sub­se­quently works faster. I first used Scite which shipped with InstantRails. I quickly moved over to jEdit when I switched to Rails on Cyg­win. With the right set of plu­g­ins you can quickly and eas­ily get a TextMate-like edi­tor. I decided to give Vim/GVim a try when I saw it in action. As much as I liked the raw power, things just didn’t make sense to me. When you learn to use edi­tors a cer­tain way, it’s hard to break old habits. Enter Cream.

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Novem­ber is rolling around once again for midterm elec­tions. 6 years of Repub­li­can “lead­er­ship” has really grated on my nerves. Is it too early to say, “I told you so?”

If there’s any­thing the last two pres­i­den­tial elec­tions have shown me, is that there’s a need for elec­tion reform because the cur­rent sys­tem does not result in a gov­ern­ment rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the vot­ing pub­lic. Crit­ics of alter­na­tive elec­toral sys­tems have stated that they’re too com­pli­cated to under­stand. They must really think peo­ple are stu­pid. Granted that may well be but not so much that they can’t under­stand other elec­toral sys­tems. So let me shed a lit­tle light.

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The UI on a project of mine had to be resiz­able. The UI included a script.aculo.us slider which unfor­tu­nately did not have a resize method nor was it smart enough to update itself should the under­ly­ing ele­ment be resized. So I cre­ated the fol­low­ing extension:

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I’ve sub­mit­ted a patch to the Rails devel­op­ers that adds a Touch­pad con­trol to script.aculo.us. It is a 2D con­trol based heav­ily off of Slider and so shares some of the same options and behav­ior. The Touch­pad call­backs out­put an array [x, y] rather than a sin­gle value v which is what Slider does. Touch­pad also has no han­dles so the last value is not preserved.

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