wilfblog

Greetings, dear reader, and welcome to my new Typo-based blog. My name is James Wilford, and I live in Brighton (thats in England) where by day I do technical support at an ISP, and in my spare time develop websites, play with Linux, read books, and sometimes dabble with the cello. You may notice the two older stories below, these were copied from my long-defunct old site.

For those who don't know, Typo is a blogging app written in Ruby on Rails, the fantastic (relatively) new web development framework that is taking the web development world by storm.

On this site I'll be blogging about my own experiences with Ruby on Rails (or RoR for short), as I use it to develop a website...

What's the website I'm working on? Well I'm glad you asked... its basically an online mail-order record shop, specialising in selling independently released CDs and vinyl, direct from the artists. Yes, its been done before, but not based in the UK, as far as I can tell.

So join me in an adventure on Rails!

Contributed by Dan Eastwell

You'd think that often people would need to sort lists ignoring the definite article 'the'. Film titles, band names, Sherlock Holmes cases. But a search of the web brings precious little, especially as you're searching for 'the'. Which is practically everywhere.

How do you order a list, e.g. of bands, whilst ignoring 'The': The Hives, The Strokes, etc, whilst keeping order with other bands such as Pram and Blur. I searched high and low for it, but with special thanks to James, we've come up with an answer.

I recently had an interesting challenge - how to find information that is not in a database? That is the problem I faced when I sat down to write a script that would find assignable blocks, i.e. the gaps, in a database of IP networks. And here it is, in the hope that it will be useful someone.