TextMate was my trusty Mac code editor for many years. It seemed everyone who was anyone was using TextMate, especially if they were living in the Ruby on Rails world. Unfortunately, this great editor did have some shortcomings, and improvements were few and far between, with an uncertain future. As many developers began migrating to […]
With Mac OSX Lion being released recently, I decided to do a clean re-install my development iMac from scratch, rather than doing an upgrade. This offered me the opportunity to fine tune and document my development environment setup. Without further ado, here’s how I set up my environment. I hope it helps any new Lion […]
As my department at work has grown over time, I’ve thought a few times about the tradition of maintaining organization charts in Visio. These charts typically display an increasingly awkward and messy collection of boxes and lines, showing which employees report to which manager. Apart from being difficult to effectively automate the layout once a […]
A few weeks ago I migrated the Labrador Retriever Rescue web site from a shared hosting service at Bluehost to a virtual private server at Linode. My main motivation was to gain an element of control, including managing my Apache configuration, but I was also hoping to gain some performance improvements by getting away from […]
When Mac OSX Leopard was released in 2007, one of the clever new features was “stacks”. These were essentially a way to quickly access a folder of files by putting it in the dock. The stacks don’t look particularly nice though, simply showing the icons of all the items in the folder stacked on top […]
For a long time I’ve been disappointed with the “out of the box” look and feel of a new Rails app: no useful stylesheets whatsoever, just plain unformatted text on a white background. I often like to throw together quick apps to prototype a concept, or even create a long-term app that just doesn’t need […]
Qnotifier is a combination of a daemon that runs on your Unix system (Linux or OSX), and an iPhone/iPad app to provide a dashboard-like view of data collected from your system. It can report text-based information, time-based graphs, or alerts which can be delivered to you in a variety of ways—for example, when your CPU […]
At work, we use the most excellent Confluence wiki system by Atlassian for all of our shared documentation. We also use it for weekly status reports, which are based on a template that needs some minor changes each week before being created. Creating these weekly pages for people to fill in used to be a […]
Many projects I work on require a user to select dates while entering information into a form. Rails makes it trivial to create date selectors and save the results into models via the date_select form helper. Here’s what it looks like by default: Functional, but hardly friendly to require the user to manipulate three different […]
When we had our house built a little over 10 years ago, we had a home automation system installed, which included a Lutron Homeworks lighting control system. This meant every light circuit in the house was wired to Lutron’s controller, which could be programmed with their custom Windows application. The installation company distributed multi-button keypads […]
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