Converting Oddmuse Wiki to Edgewall Trac
Posted by Michael on October 2, 2008 in Macs, Programming, Python Language, Ruby Language, SQL
Our company began long ago with wiki’s, but we chose the Oddmuse wiki way back when. These days, we’re heavy users of Trac wiki because of its integrated ticket support system. So what to do with all those old wiki’s that folks have stopped using and reading. The Oddmuse wikis still hold [...]
Changing ANSI colors in Terminal on Macs
Posted by Michael on September 9, 2008 in General, Servers, Systems
Probably the most frustrating experience I have had with Macs so far is figuring out how to change the ANSI colors in Terminal (Terminal.app) so that I can read the outputs of man and most especially ls and comments in vi when colorization is activated and I have chosen a dark background theme.
I am using [...]
Configuring ntpd to hand out time to local servers
Posted by Michael on August 11, 2008 in General, Servers, Systems
Syncing your servers to public time servers is one of the most common ways of keeping server times in sync. Apparently the less common approach of configuring one server to sync with public servers and it in turn becomes the authoritative time keeper for the rest of your servers is less well-known. Digging [...]
Pradipta’s Rolodex
Posted by Michael on July 18, 2008 in General
Something funny happened last night. A one, Max Archie from Indiana hired an India-based Call Center to find a couple of Ruby developers. Well, by and by, the recruiter mass-mails some 400 developers asking if they’re interested. Within about 10 mins, I had to 10 emails of somewhat ticked off developers begging [...]
Geocoded Zipcodes
Posted by Michael on July 7, 2008 in Ruby Language, SQL
You would think that loading up a database of zip codes would be an extremely simple case of finding a public database on www.usps.gov, and then loading up with a database bulk load. It turns out that, while the USPS does offer products for you to purchase, and a rather nice lookup interface for [...]
DRYing your Views
Posted by Michael on July 5, 2008 in General, Ruby Language, SQL
Let me start out by saying that I am finally beginning to understand a bit about that magical Ruby block notion and how implementing methods through block passing can really empower you as a Ruby developer. Thanks to, a most excellent Ruby tutorial, I am definitely feeling a good bit more empowered about getting [...]
Cross-browser AJAX updates to table elements
Posted by Michael on June 29, 2008 in JavaScript
It seems that one of the toughest Javascript challenge is to get your AJAX code consistently behave between browsers when you’re dealing with IE’s handling of table elements vs. Gecko and other engines. It took quite a bit of finagling to figure out exactly where the issues and trappings are. Most web developers [...]
A model-free wizard
Posted by Michael on May 13, 2008 in Programming, Ruby Language
Maybe I’m taking the whole MVC thing too far, but I’ve been reading and learning both Ruby and Rails at a fairly fast clip and just when I thought I was getting the hang of what goes in models, views, and controllers respectively, along comes The Advanced Recipe for Rails book with a recipe for [...]
Handling Date Entries
Posted by Michael on May 10, 2008 in Programming, Ruby Language
Separate inputs for a single Date Entry? pop-up Calendars? Enforce one way (i.e. enter in “mm/dd/yyyy” format)? What happened to the end-user perspective?
User input parsing and validation is classic computer science and usability fodder, yet we seem to get ever more clever at making it more cumbersome to enter a date than [...]
Why Macs?
Posted by Michael on May 8, 2008 in Macs, Systems
For Years, I have used nothing but Microsoft Windows desktops and my development effort was 100% Windows based systems. Long story, short, lets just say I knew way more about the inner bowels of Windows and its various API’s than I will ever care to recall nowadays. Around 2001, I realized “The Web” [...]
Stumble It!