markdown to textile with vim regex
So, I needed to change markdown to textile and google didn’t yield any handy scripts, so I sharpened my vim fu with Rubular, my favorite regular expression tester and came up with a few substitutions...
View Articlerails security review checklist
I’m reviewing the security of a web app built with Ruby on Rails, so I put together a checklist for a security audit. This isn’t a bank or high security situation, but there were a number of engineers...
View Articlerails 3 vs. rails 2 validation errors
Not sure if this is a bug or a feature. I’d guess it is here for a reason, and maybe I’m late for noticing, but Rails 3 errors now provides an array for each attribute, whereas in Rails 2.3 it was just...
View Articlerepl rspec mocks
REPL (Read-Eval-Print-Loop) is a great way to learn. With Ruby, the experience is enabled with irb. Sometimes, to do this we need to peek into the innards of things, which I find to be an extremely...
View Articlewhat exactly does rake spec do?
$ rake spec (in /Users/sarah/src/../my_app) You have 1 pending migrations: 20110416135407 CreateCourses The rake spec command reminds us that we need to run our migration before running our tests. In...
View Articlerails 3.0 and rake 0.9.2
I really want to upgrade a Rails 3.0 project to Rails 3.1, but I’ve done a few spikes and it lacks test coverage, so I decided to pull in cucumber and write some features before moving forward. I added...
View Articleffmpeg on osx lion
I found that I needed to convert an m4a audio file (which is what QuickTime saves when I record audio) to a wav file, so I decided to use my favorite “can opener.” The versatile open source ffmpeg tool...
View Articlecucumber and custom rspec matchers with rails 3.1
I’m working my way through an epic Rails 3.1 upgrade and some of my cucumber features were failing because I was using a custom RSpec matcher and the method wasn’t found. My custom matcher looks...
View Articlefixing brew install opencv on osx
This is more about fixing my brew install, than about opencv. As with many install issues the root cause was actually pretty simple, but finding it was challenging. Along the way, I fixed a number of...
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d3.js experiments in the console
d3 (aka Data-Driven Documents) is a great little JavaScript framework for data visualization. It’s got a nice declarative syntax for DOM manipulation that’s quite readable, but takes a bit of effort to...
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getting started with minecraft modding
I started learning about creating a Minecraft mod today, using this excellent tutorial (thanks @0×17h and @adudney). Background: Minecraft is a very popular world-building game. They announced last...
View Articleffmpeg for ogg and webm
I wanted to experiment with Ogg and WebM and the <video> tag, and I thought the easiest way would be with my favorite command-line transcoder, ffmpeg. It’s fabulous support for just about every...
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getting started with drupal 7 and openshift
When learning a new web technology, I believe it is important to have hands-on experience from development to deployment. I chose Open Shift, one of the recommended cloud deployment options for Drupal...
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easy drupal install on mac osx lion
Lion comes with Apache and PHP installed. We just need to enable PHP, install MySql and create a database, then download drupal. Enable PHP My new laptop which came with Lion has PHP 5.3.15, using the...
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tesseract html page with text overlay
I’m learning a bit about OCR, and wanted to get some hands on experience using the open source Tesseract to get a feel for how it works. I’m a long way from any reasonable visual or interaction design,...
View Articlebuilding unix package with autotools
ever wonder what all those random files are at the root of some package source that you are playing with? and how exactly does the mystical configure command actually do? Alexandre Duret-Lutz has...
View Articlebuilding tesseract from source
Thanks to the prior work of Matt Christy at eMOP, I got started building Tesseract from source (on Mac OSX 10.8.4). Here’s my slightly modified workflow: svn checkout...
View Articlegetting started with drupal
Emeline Glynn and Anthony Glynn gave a helpful talk called “How to teach anyone Drupal in 7 months.” The timeline was based on their experience where Anthony, an experience Drupal developer, taught...
View Articleempowering content creators with drupal
Bryan Braun (@bryanebraun) gave a refreshingly opinionated talk Empowering Content Creators with Drupal. Coming directly from the Ruby and Rails communities where a core value is to articulate best...
View Articlerails 4 with mongodb on osx
This post covers getting started with Rails 4 and Mongodb, using the Mongoid gem. As part of getting up to speed, I enjoyed reading Rails + Mongo take on the object-relational mismatch by Emily Stolfo...
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