Monthly Archives: January 2012

stir fry: great example of game dynamics

By Sarah | January 30, 2012

The hip trend these days in game dynamics is “compulsion loops,” where in one of the game activities lets us win gold or coins or some kind of virtual currency, which lets us buy stuff, which helps us play the game better, which earns more gold, and so on. (Stephanie Morgan gave a great Creative [...]

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cucumber and custom rspec matchers with rails 3.1

By Sarah | January 22, 2012

I’m working my way through an epic Rails 3.1 upgrade and some of my cucumber features were failing because I was using a custom RSpec matcher and the method wasn’t found.
My custom matcher looks something like this:

module CustomMatchers

class XmlSubsetMatcher
:
end

def be_xml_subset_of(expected)
[...]

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ffmpeg on osx lion

By Sarah | January 7, 2012

I found that I needed to convert an m4a audio file (which is what QuickTime saves when I record audio) to a wav file, so I decided to use my favorite “can opener.” The versatile open source ffmpeg tool has always seemed to be able to convert anything to anything in audio-video formats.
I decided to [...]

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become a working developer in 5 months?

By Sarah | January 3, 2012

Jeff Casimir believes he can train anyone with the passion and will to learn to be a professional software developer. He goes so far as to say if you don’t make it (and you are really working at it), he’ll consider it a personal failure if you don’t. Also, he’s partnered with LivingSocial [...]

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