From time to time I go back to computer gaming. Sometimes there’s nothing better than spending a Sunday afternoon blowing stuff up. So Sunday afternoon I got myself a copy of Call of Juarez. Its a first-person shooter set in the Wild West. Its a good game but at first seemed very flaky and prone to crashing. So I sent an email to the game publisher’s support department asking if there were any patches available to fix the problems I was experiencing. These days I can afford to buy the odd computer game and have no problems doing so… gone are the days in past when you would make a back up of a...

As part of the Upstart Hoopla! project I’ve started programming in Ruby, specifically using RubyOnRails(RoR). RoR an interesting programming language/framwork that is obviously the darling of the industry at the moment. Its easy to see why… RoR cuts through so much of the redtape that’s associated with frameworks such as J2EE, or even .Net. The Ruby language itself is bit tougher to get to grips with. It has some mannerism that can be currently best described as strange, compared to the stuff I’m used to, i.e. Python & Java. I say “currently” because I’m still learning these...