Ben Wendt's blog

Last month a workmate and I flew down to San Francisco to go to elasticon.

I attended an interesting talk given two employees of Giant Oak. Giant Oak does contracting for government agencies to try to solve social problems. I am not sure if this is their motto but one of the speakers say that they “see the people behind the data,” which sounds really cool.

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In irb,

fork

Now typing exit will not work because your keystrokes might go to either the parent process or the forked child process. I found it to be impossible to get the characters exit to coherently all go to the same process.

For my “I had trouble finding this on google” series, here’s a solution I found to getting a total duration from a collection of objects with durations stored as Time objects.

total_duration = durations.reduce(Time.gm(2000)) do |total, time|
  total += time.to_i
end

There are two little tricks happening here. The first is that durations are stored as a time of day on January 1st, 2000, so we use that as the reduce seed. The second thing is that the Time class defines addition for integer objects, but not for other times, so you have to convert your duration to an integer first.

No rocket science here, but a couple little quirks that made it a little harder to add two times together than I expected.