I have been using Git a lot lately and have found a lot of things I like better in Git than in Subversion. The one major item that was really bothering me was that there wasn’t really too many Git clients that could help you visualize the repository. I mean show merges, commits, branching, blame, …
Let’s say that you have a situation that you want to have a modal window show up only once for each user. It’s actually not that difficult although lots of Googling around got me nowhere. I am choosing to use FancyBox for my modal window, but feel free to use your modal framework of choice. …
The price of commercials is especially high for engineers. And by commercials, I don’t mean an intermission between pieces of a sitcom or drama, I mean the brief 15 seconds of an interruption when someone asks an engineer in the zone a question that takes 3 seconds to answer. For the sake of argument, let’s …
Ran across this the other day and decided it required sharing. If you want to print a new line ‘\n‘ in an echo statement in bash, one would think its just as simple as: 12beacon:~ elubow$ echo "This is a test\n" This is a test\n The problem is that this doesn’t interpolate the newline character. …
A while ago I wrote about how Apple needed an external multi-touch solution and that you can use your iPhone until then. Apple did it and now released the Magic Mouse. To quote Apple, “It’s the world’s first multi-touch mouse.” It’s a wireless mouse that attaches to any computer that has a keyboard, mouse and …
I recently posted about my initial experience with Tokyo Cabinet. Now it’s time to get to work on Cassandra. Cassandra is the production database that’s in use on Facebook for handling their email system and Digg. One thing that I would like to note is that when I tested TC, I used the Perl API …
Normally when do a database migration in Rails, when adding ownership from a model to another model, you use the concept of belongs_to or references: 1234 create_table :comments do |t| t.belongs_to :user t.references :post end Interestingly enough, these methods are only available during the initial table creation. If you want …
There doesn’t seem a lot of documentation or examples about parsing ini files in Ruby. There are definitely shortcut ways to do it and I could always write my own methods, but why reinvent the wheel when there are gems? So start out by simply installing the inifile gem. 12345beacon:~ elubow$ sudo gem install inifile …
Tokyo Tyrant and Tokyo Cabinet are the components for a database used by Mixi (basically a Japanese Facebook). And for work, I got to play with these tools for some research. Installing all this stuff along with the Perl APIs is incredibly easy. Ultimately I am working on a comparison of Cassandra and Tokyo Cabinet, …
To start off, if you know me personally, then you know I recently (July 30, 2009) broke my leg skydiving. If you’re interested, you can see this video on Youtube here. To make a long story short, I had surgery that night, they put a titanium rod in my thigh and I have been on …
