Copasetic Flow

In doing research for the recent posts on Superman, Superboy, Mon-El and DaVinci , I came across three interesting blogs. They are, in no particular order: The Comic Treadmill : Great updates and commentary on new comics as well as ongoing reviews of older comic runs. Occasional Superheroine : Frequently updated with lot's of happenings day to day in the comic book world, complete with video reviews. ¿Quién Me Mandaría a mi? : Nicely done Spanish comic review site! Enjoy!

Part I Part II Last Time : In my last Superman conspiracy post, I promised more insight into the DaVinci connection. First, a review: The movie The DaVinci Code made the painting The Last Supper by Leonardo DaVinci even more famous. As I mused about the possibility that Superman could be a modern day Messianic legend, I mentioned the similarities between the color themes of Jesus and John's, (Mary Magdalene's?) clothes and those of Superboy and Mon-El. Sure, the colors are the same, but what other connections are there? Well, the original pre-Crisis version of Superboy sacrifices himself to save Earth. Because he uses his own body as a conductor between two wide spread energy terminals, he dies with arms outspread as if on a crucifix. Meanwhile, Mon-El, his best friend is left to carry on his works. For an impressive recounting of this link to: The Greatest Hero of Them All OK, we have the sacrifice of the heroic messiah figure, but what about the sacred femini...

As I continue my study of RubyOnRails using Build Your Own Ruby On Rails Web Applications by Patrick Lenz, I'm including expansions on certain topics that piqued my interest. First, here are a few useful links if you're reading the book too. book web site book errata ruby on rails docs I learned a little bit more about how rake handles automatic migrations today. I suspected that like it's similarly named counterpart rake might determine which migrations to apply based on the last change date of the migration file. I was wrong. I had created a new migration to add a column to one of my models. I ran rake and everything went without a hitch. Then, about two minutes later, I realized that I still needed to add one more column to that particular model. I didn't want to create another migration file for the second new column. "No problem," I reasoned. "I'll just add a new column to my latest migration file." I did this, ran rake, and not...

As I continue my study of RubyOnRails using Build Your Own Ruby On Rails Web Applications by Patrick Lenz, I'm including expansions on certain topics that piqued my interest. First, here are a few useful links if you're reading the book too. book web site book errata ruby on rails docs Today I diverged from the examples in the book again and encountered an issue with the word 'default'. It turns out that default is a SQL keyword depending on the context of the expression it is used in. I wanted to store a default value for a record in a table. This is illustrated in the table below: user default actual tom sleep sleep bob awake sleep susy awake awake The table tracks the 'default' or usual state of each user and their current 'actual' state. This seemed simple enough. The add_column call in my migration file had no problem with the column name 'default'. However, when I tried to add items to the table, the column name 'default' ca...

On a recent trip across New Mexico I took a few pictures of the Pecos River Valley near San Miguel. Somebody looked at this one and pointed out the rock was a bear! Here are some more pictures of the valley! The Pecos was mostly frozen over. As I was taking the pictures the ice was stretching and compressing, making crackling noises as the sun warmed it.

As I continue my study of RubyOnRails using Build Your Own Ruby On Rails Web Applications , I'm including expansions on certain topics that piqued my interest. First, here are a few useful links if you're reading the book too. bookweb site book errata ruby on rails docs As I continued my study of RubyOnRails, I noticed that the new method was being called with a params hash on page 157. The params hash picks up the user data on the example submission form. The hash is passed to the 'new' method and a new object is magically created with its fields automatically assigned the values that the user submitted on the web form. Previously in the book, I had seen 'new' called with no arguments, but I hadn't seen this hash argument version of the method. A little research into the Rails Framework documentation for 'new' shed some light on the situation. It turns out that 'new' can be called in four different ways. The first way is the no argu...

This is the first of a series of tech posts on this blog. I'm studying RubyOnRails, (RoR), using an excellent book: Build Your Own Ruby On Rails Web Applications . The book is easy to understand and flows well in a narrative fashion with plenty of humor thrown in. As I build my real-world application I'll post notes of interest here. These posts are intended for RubyOnRails beginners or others reading the book. Model class to database table naming: I understood from the book that a model class like 'Story' would be translated into a table name in a migration file of 'story'. What I was not aware of was that a name like 'MyBigStory' will be translated into a table name of 'my_big_story'. rake and rolling back database migrations: First, this feature of RoR is incredible! Essentially it's revision control for database schemas! With a minimum of work, the developer can maintain a framework that allows her to easily move back and forth b...