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New open source projects: Maid and TabCarousel
I’ve been hard at work taking some code I had originally written for myself and packaging it up as two open source projects. I’ve been very happy about the amount of interest I’ve received in both. I...
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Filter params on Rails 3.1 when calling notify_airbrake
From my recent pull request on Airbrake: We recently noticed that Airbrake doesn’t always filter our parameters. I looked into the cases, and eventually narrowed it down to this: an unhandled exception...
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Test upcoming browsers automatically via jsTestDriver
We’ve been using jsTestDriver (JSTD) along with the Jasmine BDD library via jasmine-jstd-adapter. We’re also using some glue code I wrote called jasmine-jstd-conf which writes a jsTestDriver config...
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My thoughts on GitHub for Mac
I recently wrote a comment for “GitHub for Mac: Easier Updates”. Since it sums up my feelings on several subjects (including my feelings about the future of OS X), I thought I should repost it here....
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Why can’t I connect to Heroku Postgres in production?
Summary: Switching to Heroku Postgres? If you use a Crane or Kappa database instance, you might run into problems with using a non-standard port when connecting to PostgreSQL in production. (The...
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WindyCityRails 2012
South Shore Cultural Center, Chicago(Photo: Jeff Zoline CC BY-NC 2.0) WindyCityRails was a lot of fun. As I’ve done in the past, I took notes and put them into an open wiki on GitHub. Some quick stats:...
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Filtering output when logging
I needed to filter some output when logging. Unfortunately, the filtering built into Rails was no help because the logging wasn’t coming from parameters. It also wasn’t coming from a Hash. (To filter a...
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UGtastic Interview
I did an interview with UGtastic at WindyCityRails. They just tweeted the video so I thought I’d embed it here. From their description: Midwestern and East Coast Ruby Community Benjamin Oakes helped...
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How the Internet will (one day) transform government
I’ve seen some of the experimenting that people have done with bringing legal code (i.e., laws) to GitHub. As an open source developer, I think Clay has it right when he says that transparency is only...
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Sharing is Caring
I’m what you might call an “Iowa City enthusiast”. As residents, we are extremely fortunate to be surrounded by an incredible number of people who work every day to make this a better place to live....
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Maid presentation
Since I wasn’t able to make it to the newhaven.rb meetup, I ended up presenting about Maid at ICRuby today. I was happy there was quite a bit of interest. I thought I’d share my (quick and dirty)...
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database configuration does not specify adapter
From an answer I wrote for StackOverflow: Another possible cause: In Rails 3.2.x, establish_connection has a default argument set from the environment: From connection_specification.rb: def...
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Is an iPad Mini or a Nexus 7 Better for a Geek?
Some people have recently asked me about switching from an iPad to a Nexus 7. Did I have to give anything up? Am I still happy with the choice? My conclusion: Nexus 7 is the better choice for geeks...
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All about to_h in Ruby 2.0
I gave a talk at ICRuby today about Ruby 2.0, partially as a learning experience for myself. I hadn’t done much with Ruby 2.0 before, and I had fun learning more about what to expect. If you’d like to...
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Maid v0.3.0 Beta
I’ve released a beta of Maid v0.3.0. It contains a bugfix which required an additional DSL method to be added. The move method now only moves to pre-existing directories, and the new rename method...
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Best new word of the day: “cram” (cron spam)
I’ve been battling automated emails from cron for years, but I never knew there was a word for cron spam. It’s “cram”, which also happens to be my new favorite word. Truly, cron‘s best feature...
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Calculating the next leap year in Ruby
I needed to calculate the next leap year today, and was happy to find out about Date.leap? via this StackOverflow question. However, there wasn’t a built-in way that I could find to get the next leap...
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Fast Specs
I gave a talk on “Fast Specs” at our first round of lightning talks for ICRuby. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. Summary: techniques for speeding up the test suite in your Rails app (subsecond...
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Maid v0.3.0 release!
I released Maid v0.3.0 yesterday, after using Maid v0.3.0 Beta 1 for over a week myself. It was also downloaded 36 times, without any known bugs reported by beta test team. From the change log: Only...
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SSH Agent Forwarding with Vagrant AWS
The in-progress Vagrant AWS has a lot of promise, especially for devops. The ability to test your Puppet or Chef scripts on an EC2 instance using Vagrant is very tempting. Unfortunately, it’s not yet...
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