Matt Garrett

This assumes you have basic knowledge of Subversion.

1. Install a Subversion client. (Windows users should get Tortoise SVN).


2. Install Ruby 1.8.2 or higher (http://www.ruby-lang.org/) and Rake —Ruby Make (http://rake.rubyforge.org/).


3. Make a new folder and title it “Prototype“.


4. Inside of that folder, checkout the latest trunk of Prototype from “http://dev.rubyonrails.org/svn/rails/spinoffs/prototype“.


5. Open the README and follow the instructions under “Building Prototype from source”. (Or just view it from Ruby on Rail’s Trac here: “http://dev.rubyonrails.org/browser/spinoffs/prototype/README“). I may have missed something.


6. It will have you navigate to the “Prototype” directory from a command prompt, and type “rake dist” which runs the Rake command to build Prototype from the various javascript files.

Now, whenever you see that there are some new changes in Prototype that you’d like, you can do an “svn up” and then do “rake dist” to make prototype.js again.

The navigating to the directory and “rake dist” bit can be automated with a Windows .bat file with these two lines in it.

1. cd /d e:workprototype


2. rake dist

Jay’s wife clipped this from the paper. They thought I’d get a kick out of this. I did.

Finicky eater and a graphic designer. Sounds like me.

It seems that I can’t go a week without seeing some write-up at wired.com about something cool (read: stupid) Second Life is doing. I admit that I’ve never played Second Life, so I may have some inaccurate ideas about the thing, but it just seems like it’s another one of those failed virtual environments that started popping up eight to ten years ago.

I’m not making this shit up.

Since when is a magazine supposed to repeatedly popularize a specific game or piece of software? Evangelism over something one has dismissed is just an annoyance and a waste of time.

Hey Wired, I have a few good article titles you could elaborate on:

• “The Second Coming in Second Life”


• “Second Life Changes Baby’s Diapers”


• and “Top 10 Things About Second Life You Don’t Give a Shit About”

I wonder how long it will be before I can add filters to my RSS subscriptions in Google Reader.

From Austin

This is a statue of a giraffe on some highway through Austin Dallas that marks the proximity of a zoo. It’s chest resembles a vagina.