Currently Browsing: Uncategorized
Disclaimer: this article has nothing to do with Scientology other than the picture of Tom Cruise.
Xenu is a Windows program which allows you to quickly crawl a website and list all known URL’s, broken links, and outbound links. This is massively helpful for SEO folks, web content creators, and other people who need a quick tool and are too lazy to program it...
Quite often in Rails projects, I need some way to backup the contents of database quickly. The script below is an easy way to backup the database of your current environment using the database.yml file already set up in your Rails project. Feel free to modify the below script to do your bidding.
/script/backup_db:
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../config/boot'
require 'erb'
require 'yaml'
unless config = YAML::load(ERB.new(IO.read(RAILS_ROOT +
"/config/database.yml")).result)[RAILS_ENV]
abort "No database found...
My blog, music server, linux playground, etc…, was down for a period of several months due to some hardware that finally gave up the fight. I’m proud to be back online with a new, and much more powerful, server that I received from my good friends at Metro Hi Speed. Having nothing bad to say about Ubuntu or other linux based alternatives out there, I decided to rebuild on top of CentOS 5- if for nor other reason than boredom and my need to tinker. In the process of becoming better accustomed with the frustration charm of the world outside of debian, I’ve come to love my new machine....
One axiom overheard constantly throughout the blogs and forums of the internet’s technorati, is “use the right tool for the job.” Generally this nugget is brought up in conversations questioning whether one should use framework A or framework B, language C or language D, etc… Invariably, people get pissed, comments get ridiculous, and “that guy”:http://www.geekitude.com/Pictures/Linucon2004/Ex45TronUpCloseRot.jpg eventually shows up to tell everyone that they’re retards for not using Lisp. This is not one of those articles. Having spent too much of my life...
A little while ago I had an extra computer who’d been put out to pasture. This machine, while great in its time, felt the inevitable constraints of Moore’s Law and was forced to be removed from even semi-serious use. So instead of taking old Betty out to the glue factory, I turned it into a custom music server which allows me to stream my music library from anywhere with an internet connection.
Slimserver is an open source music server which allows you to do this with very little fuss or configuration. Now I can stream music from natemiller.org in my neighborhood coffee shop or at...
One of the things that has always bugged me about developing full-flash websites, is the way that Flash sometimes makes it difficult to implement behavior that users rely upon for a good experience. Things like deeplinking, context menus, mouse-wheel scrolling, are all possible – but at a cost to developer time. One such issue which I found particular irritating was the fact that Flash websites set at 100% width and height suffer from visibility issues when the end user’s monitor or window is set at a smaller setting. The easy solution is to set your containing html element at a fixed...
Link Checking Made Easy with Xenu
Posted by admin in Uncategorized on October 18, 2009 | No Comments
Disclaimer: this article has nothing to do with Scientology other than the picture of Tom Cruise.
Xenu is a Windows program which allows you to quickly crawl a website and list all known URL’s, broken links, and outbound links. This is massively helpful for SEO folks, web content creators, and other people who need a quick tool and are too lazy to program it...Painless db backups in Rails
Posted by admin in Featured Articles, Ruby on Rails, Technology, Uncategorized on October 10, 2009 | No Comments
Quite often in Rails projects, I need some way to backup the contents of database quickly. The script below is an easy way to backup the database of your current environment using the database.yml file already set up in your Rails project. Feel free to modify the below script to do your bidding.
/script/backup_db:
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../config/boot'
require 'erb'
require 'yaml'
unless config = YAML::load(ERB.new(IO.read(RAILS_ROOT +
"/config/database.yml")).result)[RAILS_ENV]
abort "No database found...New Server
Posted by admin in Technology, Uncategorized on February 23, 2009 | No Comments
My blog, music server, linux playground, etc…, was down for a period of several months due to some hardware that finally gave up the fight. I’m proud to be back online with a new, and much more powerful, server that I received from my good friends at Metro Hi Speed. Having nothing bad to say about Ubuntu or other linux based alternatives out there, I decided to rebuild on top of CentOS 5- if for nor other reason than boredom and my need to tinker. In the process of becoming better accustomed with the frustration charm of the world outside of debian, I’ve come to love my new machine....5 Reasons to Use Rails
Posted by admin in Ruby on Rails, Technology, Uncategorized on February 22, 2009 | No Comments
One axiom overheard constantly throughout the blogs and forums of the internet’s technorati, is “use the right tool for the job.” Generally this nugget is brought up in conversations questioning whether one should use framework A or framework B, language C or language D, etc… Invariably, people get pissed, comments get ridiculous, and “that guy”:http://www.geekitude.com/Pictures/Linucon2004/Ex45TronUpCloseRot.jpg eventually shows up to tell everyone that they’re retards for not using Lisp. This is not one of those articles. Having spent too much of my life...Creating your own streaming music server
Posted by admin in Technology, Uncategorized on September 16, 2008 | No Comments
A little while ago I had an extra computer who’d been put out to pasture. This machine, while great in its time, felt the inevitable constraints of Moore’s Law and was forced to be removed from even semi-serious use. So instead of taking old Betty out to the glue factory, I turned it into a custom music server which allows me to stream my music library from anywhere with an internet connection.
Slimserver is an open source music server which allows you to do this with very little fuss or configuration. Now I can stream music from natemiller.org in my neighborhood coffee shop or at...Making Flash sites scroll vertically
Posted by admin in Technology, Uncategorized on September 10, 2008 | 1 Comment
One of the things that has always bugged me about developing full-flash websites, is the way that Flash sometimes makes it difficult to implement behavior that users rely upon for a good experience. Things like deeplinking, context menus, mouse-wheel scrolling, are all possible – but at a cost to developer time. One such issue which I found particular irritating was the fact that Flash websites set at 100% width and height suffer from visibility issues when the end user’s monitor or window is set at a smaller setting. The easy solution is to set your containing html element at a fixed...