In the recent months there has been some debate regarding whether or not the release of Grand Theft Auto 4 was going to affect the ticket sales for the Iron Man film during it’s opening weekend.

Adam Sessler’s take on the issue is that the companies responsible for the film are simply trying to place blame on GTA in an attempt to anticipate poor success at the box office and that if the movie is good, people will see it regardless....

The release of Grand Theft Auto 4 is only a few short days away. Personally I’m getting extremely antsy.

This morning I pre ordered the game from Best Buy for in store pickup and managed to walk away only a mere $5.32 less rich....

Recently I was given the task of integrating a (complete for all intents and purposes) PHP application with our main Ruby on Rails application. Because the PHP application needed to display a similar interface and required knowledge of the user’s account, I needed a way to access that data from the database both applications were now sharing. The only real requirement I had was that I absolutely didn’t want to make the user login to the PHP app if they were already authenticated on the Rails side of things as this seemed unnecessary and interrupted the flow things.

I did a bit of searching and, while I did find the wiki page on going from PHP -> Rails, I wasn’t able to find anything that fit my specific need, so I set out to roll my own. I read an article this morning from somebody who had ostensibly encountered the same problem as I, and was able to come up with a much different solution than what I had come up with. Therefore I thought it would be fun to share some of the details of my approach....

It’s been a very long time since I’ve used Kernel#Integer, but to my recollection it was simply coercion that raised an error if necessary, as an alternative to things like String#to_i which would simply return the first digits in a string, or 0 if the string did not contain a valid integer.

Since the program I was writing was receiving amounts in the form of strings representing cents, I figured it would be a natural fit. Leading zeros would be stripped off of anything under a buck, and I could simply rescue any ArgumentError and handle them appropriately....

I’ve finally gotten around to playing and beating Half-life 2 episode 2.

I knew before I even began playing the game that I absolutely had to snag that Gnome achievement during my first play through....

That’s really all I have to say about that....

Everyone loves writing web apps. They’re just amazing at doing everything. Ever.

One of the more interesting aspects of writing web applications is how often you see yourself doing the same thing over and over again....

People never cease to amaze me. It just blows me away that anybody can find enough time in their lives to learn such weird stuff. I suppose it’s just like any other hobby though, right? I wonder if he gets paid for those skills..

Like every other go-go 80s dollar jockey, one of my first actions on my iPhone was to setup my email accounts.

This is where I ran into a problem. I’d select GMail from the list, but for some reason POP was required, and no matter what I tried I couldn’t use IMAP....

I can’t help but feel that value of The Orange Box is far understated. I know everyone is hyped on it and each game has gotten a really high score, but it’s worth reiterating just how awesome the content in The Orange Box is.

Take Portal, for example. I found the game to be really hilarious and thought provoking. Sure it’s not the hardest game in the world, or even the longest, but compared to the quality of most current gen titles it’s well worth the full 50 bucks other games receive. There’s also apparently going to be downloadable content that lets you play on harder difficulties? This game rocks! I can’t wait for another outing....