Articles

Surviving the Journey from Coder to Manager Video Online

We’ve just released the video for Surviving the Journey from Coder to Manager from Aloha on Rails, in which Chris Selmer explains how to make the transition to manager without losing your coding edge.

Enjoy the video, and mahalo to Panopto and ThinkTech Hawaii for making the videos possible!

Amp: A Revolution in Source Version Control (in Ruby!)

amp.png Amp is a new Ruby based project that aims to "change the way we approach VCS" (version control systems).

XSS Weakness in strip_tags and some notes on parsing HTML/XML

There is another Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) Weakness in the Rails method strip_tag(). The problem was found in the HTML::Tokenizer which has bugs when parsing non-printable ASCII characters.

A look at themes with Compass (Part 1)

As you may of heard, I'm working on a new project (meetee), which will allow a more collaborative approach to meetings.

Over the last few days I've concentrating my efforts on getting the website design implemented using the following technologies:-

  • Ruby on Rails
  • MongoDB
  • Compass CSS Framework

I've written about Compass before, and in this article (and the next) I want to concentrate on how I dealt with setting up themes.

Holiday Projects

For some reason I find myself starting new projects on holidays. Perhaps it’s mental decompression, or just an excuse to have some fun. Either way, today’s holiday project was a little smaller than usual—I’m already done!

It’s a tiny Sinatra app for allowing people to anonymously submit tickets to your Unfuddle account. You could use this for letting clients submit work requests, beta testers to submit bugs, or whatever.

Convert from config.gem to gem bundler

Why gem bundler?
Our sysadmin hates rake gems:install

It seems to work for me, but all sorts of mayhem ensues when he tries to run it on production... of course I have a sneaking suspicion it's really our fault. After all - we tend to forget that we already happened to globally-install some gem while we were just playing around with it...

Structuring your background jobs

This morning while dealing with a support issue, I asked this question on the twitters:

Do you create a single (background) job for an event (AfterPostUpdated), or multiple jobs for tasks (SendPostEmails, UpdatePostCounts)?

In Tender Support, updating a discussion spawned a job that looked something like this:

Firefox quick tip: view images in a new tab quickly

A mini-tip on viewing images quickly in a new tab in Firefox. Useful for web devs who want to look at the URL of an image quickly.

As an example, here’s the Youtube webpage of the owner of Maru the Cat:

ff3-middle-click-step-1

RubyConf 2009 Lightning Talks

Last night it was my great pleasure to host the Lightning Talks session at RubyConf 2009. We had an amazing series of 20 talks that took just over 2 hours. The tech gremlins seemed to be off drinking somewhere and none of the presentations failed.

Here's a list of all the speakers and links to their stuff.

#349 | “Gemcutter - Gem Hosting” in Category: Plugins/Gems/Code Snippets

»Synchronizing Core Data With Rails 3.0.0.pre«

Railsconf 2009 – Wednesday | Rails Fire

Railsconf 2009 – Wednesday

Finally, here’s the last video I put together for Railsconf, summarizing the event. I’ll be working on my speaker video and hopefully have that posted sometime next week.

View on Blip.tv

Thanks for Watching!