"Software Engineer, Game Developer, Creator of Things".
For decades, programmers have kept rubber ducks on their desks as debugging partners. Today, we’ve crossed a threshold. The rubber duck has learned to quack back – and it’s better at debugging than you are. But here’s the thing: the rubber duck never actually helped. It just sat there while you did all the work. Today, we’ve crossed a threshold. The rubber duck has learned to quack back – and it’s…
Dealing with an arbitrary text file encoded in an unknown way and trying to normalize to UTF-8 (with minimal data loss) is a tricky thing.
After updating my mysql install on I got the following error: "Incorrect MySQL client library version! This gem was compiled for 5.5.15 but the client library is 5.6.10."
You might have heard about the recent AWS outage. Needless to say this outage affected many websites and also many services that piggybacks on AWS cheap cloudy goodness. Heroku is one such service. Heroku also happens to be the service of choice for the startup I work for. While I applaud the herculean effort both by Amazon and by Heroku to manage and mitigate the disaster, the whole thing caught…
With the release of Rails 2.0 came some very nice security enhancements. Among those was CSRF protection (cross site request forgery) which is implemented by putting a server side generated token into a hidden field inside of forms with POST, PUT, or DELETE as the action/method. When Rails is asked to render a page that contains a form with any of these methods it generates an authenticity token.…
Learning Git can be a pain in the ass sometimes (OFTEN). One feature that has continually caused me to pull hair while I was climbing the learning curve is git-rebase. Rebase is a very useful tool, but also gives you more than enough rope to hang yourself with. Several questions need to be answered to fully understand a rebase:
At the start of the fall semester I began a continuing education class at the New York School of Visual Arts Advanced Metalworking. The goal for taking this class is to construct a 11-12th century Norman helmet for use in full contact western martial arts in the SCA. I am beginning this post over a month into the class as much of the initial class time was spent honing skills and techniques needed…
Last week a ran into a bit of an issue trying to write Rspec Stories for the app I am working on. The app in question depends on a remote service based authentication system. Creating “test” users on a remote user authentication service already running as production for other apps was not really an option. Getting around this proved to be problematic as Rspec Stories entire point is to test the…
By now most Rails developers have come to know and love (or not?) RESTful resources and the controller code that implements them. For the most part Merb’s implementation of resources will be familiar and adheres to the same convention - GET safe creates, updates, destroys, a single base URI for a single resource, etc.
So its finally official… I am headed out to RailsConf in Portland, OR next week!