· Jerod Santo ·

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Full Stack Radio

10 Jun 2019

I had a great time chatting about building our platform with Elixir and Phoenix on Full Stack Radio.

Listen to me on SendGrid's podcast

13 Feb 2019

I did a short interview for Some Coding Required while at OSCON last Summer. Take a listen.

Our 2018 State of the "log" address

19 Dec 2018

The season finale of The Changelog

My Favorite Changelog Episodes of 2016

31 Dec 2016

We had a lot of great conversations this year. These were my favorite.

5 Answers For Coder Catchup Episode 100

22 Dec 2016

I was honored to answer 5 questions for Jaymie Jones' 100th episode of Coder Catchup

Safari does not trigger click events on anchors or buttons containing SVG elements

18 Aug 2015

This ruined my morning.

New Mac: Eventual Installs

11 Apr 2015

Which apps found their way eventually on to my brand new Mac

New Mac: Instant Installs

21 Mar 2015

Which apps found their way immediately on to my brand new Mac

What Continuity Means to Me

13 Mar 2015

What happens when the most-awaited features become the most disappointing.

Trailing Conditionals Considered Harmful Unless Used Sparingly

08 Mar 2015

The reason why I'm bearish on trailing conditionals may best be expressed by a road sign I saw on a recent road trip down Interstate 80

I Fought the RSI and the RSI (Almost) Won

26 Feb 2015

Almost

Thoughtfulness is a Secret Weapon

21 Feb 2015

I'll tell you why

Big Week

13 Feb 2015

As I teased on Monday, two things I'm quite excited about were announced this week

Bubble Boy

05 Feb 2015

Walking around in a bubble of grace.

Find Your Fiji

26 Jan 2015

You can't get any further away before you start coming back

Art-directed, data-driven image files to accompany your website

19 Jan 2015

Cody and I recently added a subtle feature to Oma/Sprout that we think is pretty neat.

How we use Trello to generate The Changelog Weekly

14 Jan 2015

I wrote a lengthy post on The Changelog all about turning Trello in to a CMS

Two Guys B.S.in'

05 Jan 2015

A conversational questions-and-answers show with two guys from Millard Community Church in Omaha, NE

GIF of the Year

30 Dec 2014

And the winner is...

Beloved Bits, 2014

21 Dec 2014

My fourth annual list-of-things-that-I-deem-notable-in-the-year-which-is-about-to-conclude.

List all Git commits that are on one branch, but aren't on the other

06 Sep 2014

This is super handy for Heroku-style deploys

Naming Things is Hard. Let's Go Shopping!

11 Aug 2014

I speak to the Omaha Coffee & Code meetup about the trials and tribulations of naming things well.

A step by step guide to bulletproof 404s on Rails

20 Jun 2014

4 Steps and an obligatory fake step

Ruby Rebus! Part Deux

07 Apr 2014

15 Ruby-based movie title Rebus puzzles. Can you guess them all?!

Out with Sprout

11 Feb 2014

Omaha's Family Event Calendar

Beloved Bits, 2013

31 Dec 2013

My third annual list-of-things-that-I-deem-notable-in-the-year-which-is-about-to-conclude.

Rails 4: let specific actions be embedded as iframes

04 Dec 2013

Rails 4 defaults the X-Frame-Options header to SAMEORIGIN for security reasons (and good ones at that). However, sometimes you want a specific action to be iframeable. Here's how.

Make ActiveAdmin and FriendlyId play nice

15 Nov 2013

Two handy tools that don't get along out of the box. Herein lies a workaround.

Your dev user should be really crazy

08 Nov 2013

Save yourself a lot of pain down the road by ensuring your system handles crazy input now.

Ruby Quick Tip: Easily Count Occurrences of Array Elements

24 Oct 2013

Have you ever needed to see how many times each element in an array occurs? Perhaps sort by those occurrences? Here's a quick and easy way to do it.

My biggest disappointment with Apple's 2013 iPhone upgrades

20 Sep 2013

Overall a good year of progress, but there's on big elephant in the room that Apple is choosing to ignore.

You don't have to annotate your AngularJS injections anymore

02 Aug 2013

So please stop

CoffeeScript Classes Play Nicely with AngularJS Factories

28 Jul 2013

In case you were wondering

So I gave a talk for NebraskaJS about AngularJS

13 Jul 2013

It seemed to go not too bad. Here are the video and slides if you're interested.

Jekyll with Footnotes

06 May 2013

None of Jekyll's Markdown renderers support footnotes out of the box, but a RedCarpet fork has the feature.

Tips for a successful switch to a standing desk

02 May 2013

I've been standing while I work for over two years now, but the transition wasn't easy. Here are some tips on how to transition successfully.

Changeloggin'

22 Apr 2013

It's been quieter around these parts lately, but that's not because I haven't been writing.

Be Careful When You Create a Unified SSL Certificate for Nginx

08 Apr 2013

If one of the files doesn't have a newline at the end then you will run into an error.

Name That Trend - Nose Dive Edition

07 Mar 2013

Fall, baby, fall

Easy 'Share-Nothing' WordPress Blog Syndication on Rails

01 Mar 2013

There are many ways to skin the syndicate-a-wordpress-blog-content-in-your-rails-based-app cat. This is an easy one.

The Curious Case of ActiveRecord Matching Yesterday's Events Even Though I Told it Not To

19 Feb 2013

We uncovered a Strange Thing when working on Omahype's event listings.

CLOC Counts Lines of Code

12 Feb 2013

If you ever find yourself in a foreign code base and want to get a quick overview of how much code is in it, cloc is just the tool for the job.

A Casual Stroll Through Discourse's Source Code

11 Feb 2013

Any time I see an open source app which has technically intriguing bits, I take some time to clone it and give it a quick read-through. Let's do that!

Rate Limit POST Requests with Rack::Throttle

03 Feb 2013

Rack::Throttle is an awesome piece of middleware for rate limiting your app's clients. You can easily extend it to apply any rules you need, such as only limiting certain request types.

Fix Rails-API Oauth2 CSRF Errors On Rails 3.2.9+

01 Feb 2013

The fix to this obscure and nuanced bug after upgrading my Rails-API app to 3.2.11 is worth noting for others.

Configuring redis-store / redis-rails on Heroku

23 Jan 2013

redis-store's redis-rails is awesome, but it can be a pain in the buttox to get configured on Heroku. Herein lies buttox relief.

Dynamic Routes to Static Pages on Rails

07 Jan 2013

There's one thing that almost every web app and web site needs: static pages

Top Hacker News Content of 2012

31 Dec 2012

Judofyr's excellent collection of Hacker News threads with book recommendations made me want to see all of the best HN threads this year.

Beloved Bits, 2012

27 Dec 2012

My second annual list-of-things-that-I-deem-notable-in-the-year-which-is-about-to-conclude.

A Handy Method to Share Data From Rails Controllers to Views Without Requiring Direct Instance Variable Access

18 Dec 2012

Rails' method of sharing data between controllers and views via instance variables bothers many developers, myself included. Here's a handy method you can use to avoid this in your apps.

Capybara and Poltergeist: Snap!

11 Dec 2012

Poltergeist is a great JavaScript driver for Capybara. Use this helper method to get quick page snapshots to debug your tests.

The One Thing You Should Not Bring to Your Next Conference

04 Dec 2012

While packing for an upcoming conference, you think to yourself, 'I know what I'll do. I'll bring my laptop!' Now you've got problems.

Creating an SSH Tunnel to a Remote Service

28 Nov 2012

File this under just-blog-it-already-so-you-can-stop-googling-it

A Domainr CLI in Less Than 15 Lines of Ruby

27 Nov 2012

The arbitrary less-than-15-lines constraint is back, baby! This time, a Domainr CLI

Thankful

23 Nov 2012

You may not know this about me, but I used to be a pretty wretched guy. I'm still a pretty wretched guy, but I used to be, too.

An Algorithm to Reliably Identify Nested Substrings

12 Nov 2012

Regular expressions are great for matching many patterns, but they often fall down when dealing with recursive matching. In these cases, there is a simple algorithm that you can use which is more reliable than regular expressions.

Ruby Rebus Answers

09 Nov 2012

These are the Ruby Rebus answers you're looking for.

Ruby Rebus

31 Oct 2012

20 Ruby-based movie title Rebus puzzles. Can you guess them all?!

How Atebits' Letterpress Could Really Shine (and Make a Lot of Money)

28 Oct 2012

Letterpess is already a success by almost any measure. It reached #16 in the App Store's free apps chart and managed to bring Game Center to its knees over the app's first week of availability. But I think Letterpress has an opportunity to really shine.

A Common Gotcha When Using Ruby Regexps For Input Validation

19 Oct 2012

Ruby's regular expressions have an idiosyncrasy that can get you in trouble when doing input validation. Find out how to avoid this common gotcha in this post.

Skype Tip: Roll Your Own Mentions System

09 Oct 2012

Mentions are a great way to keep the signal-to-noise ratio high in group chats. Unfortunately, Skype has no such feature. Fortunately, you can roll your own pretty easily. Here's how.

And Now For Something So Niche That Perhaps Only I Will Use It

20 Sep 2012

It's called Push Pop and I love it. Maybe you will too. Probably not, though.

Announcing Object Lateral

04 Sep 2012

This is my company. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

Adding Your Own Bookmarks and Bookmarklets to the iOS Simulator's Mobile Safari

29 Aug 2012

The process is only a little longer than its title

7 Ways to Level Up Your Sublime Text Editing

17 Aug 2012

How to get quick access to technical symbols and other special characters in OS X

08 Aug 2012

If you find yourself typing out "command", "option", or "control" often and want to take a principled stand against verbosity, I have good news for you!

Get Sinatra Up and Running with Zurb's Foundation 3 Framework

07 Aug 2012

Sinatra and Zurb's Foundation are a great one-two punch, but getting them to play nice is not exactly straight forward. I created a skeleton project you can use to get up and running quickly.

Some White Spaces are More Equal Than Others

23 Jul 2012

Let's not argue about tabs vs. spaces. Let's argue about spaces vs. spaces!

You Might be a Unix Geek

14 Jul 2012

Jeff Foxworthy's PC is probably rolling in its grave.

My Favorite Bundler Feature

03 Jul 2012

Ruby's popular gem bundling library made dependency management headaches a thing of the past, but it also bundles another feature that has changed my day-to-day life for the better: open

Wrangle Your iOS Apps

28 Jun 2012

Digital clutter can be as bad as its analog equivalent. I find that I enjoy my iOS devices more when they're populated by a handful of super high quality apps instead of a boatload of apps of varying quality. But maintaining such a state can be slightly overwhelming if you don't have a system. I have a system. Oh, I have a system...

3 Tools I Install on Every Server

14 Jun 2012

htop, ack, and tree

A Brief Message to Web Designers

07 Jun 2012

If you're not designing websites that adapt to mobile browser sizes, you need to be.

the birth, life, and death of sant0sk1

05 Jun 2012

The storied history of my Internet handle and why I've decided to put it to rest.

Back That Gmail Up

26 May 2012

Girl, you looks good, won't you back that Gmail up

Enumerable's *ect Methods Reimplemented Using `each_with_object`

20 May 2012

On episode 54 of the Ruby Rogues podcast, Josh Susser mentioned an interview question he used to use where he would ask the interviewee to reimplement Enumerable's *ect methods (collect, select, reject, and detect) using inject. In this post I attempt the same thing, but using each_with_object

Tee for Two

16 May 2012

Tee is one of those commands so simple, so basic that you've either been using it for years or you'll wish you had been.

Confessions of a Meteor Newb

23 Apr 2012

I spent a weekend building a game with the brand new Meteor JavaScript Framework. Lessons learned and all that.

Dead Simple Rails Config

04 Apr 2012

Adding custom configuration to a Rails app used to be a chore, but now it's dead simple. Here's how.

Get FireHOL off of RSyslog's lawn

27 Mar 2012

FireHOL is the best tool I've used for configuring Linux firewalls. But it can really spew its logs all over your kern.log and syslog. Getting it to stop this is non-obvious so hopefully this saves you some time.

Naming Schemes

22 Mar 2012

Naming things is hard. This website helps.

Best Buy Considered Harmful

05 Mar 2012

In which I rant on the terrible user experience at a run-of-the-mill Best Buy retail store.

ip2loc lives

25 Feb 2012

So many folks reached out to say thanks, offer assistance, and tell me how often they use ip2loc that I decided to bring it back to life.

A Simple Pattern to Namespace and Selectively Execute Certain Bits of JavaScript Depending on Which Rails Controller and Action are Active

08 Feb 2012

The title says it all

Sublime Text 2 Icon Replacement Roundup

12 Jan 2012

Sublime Text 2 may be the best text editor on the planet, but its icon is an abomination. Thankfully, replacements abound.

Beloved Bits, 2011

31 Dec 2011

My first ever list-of-things-that-I-deem-notable-in-the-year-which-is-about-to-conclude.

A Photo Stream Problem, Workaround, & Bonus

11 Dec 2011

One major problem with Photo Stream is that it uploads everything that hits your device's Camera Roll. That'd be great if all we ever took were amazing photographs. But alas, many of the images captured by our phones just aren't worth the effort

A Kindle Cloud Reader Bookmarklet to Enable Text Selection, Copy/Paste, Et Cetera

10 Aug 2011

Amazon's new Kindle Cloud Reader is an awesome web-based reader. However, they won't let you select text to copy/paste, look up in dictionary, or do any of the other cool stuff that we can do on the web. This post provides a bookmarklet that unlocks those features.

Brew Install Vim

04 Aug 2011

Apple ships vim with OS X, but it's lacking a few nice features. Homebrew proper doesn't have a Vim formula because it violates the 'no-duplicates' policy. Thankfully, there's an alternative repo of nice Homebrew formulae, including Vim!

A Better Way to Get Recency-based Google Searches in Chrome

02 Aug 2011

Last week I shared my Dotjs hack which forces Chrome's Omnibar searches to use Google's "past year" parameter. Since then I've learned a couple of things and found a better way of handling it.

My Dotjs Hack to Default Google Searches to Past Year

26 Jul 2011

Sick of clicking on 'More tools' and 'Past year' after almost all of your Google searches? I was, so I hacked together a dotjs quickie which adds the necessary params if they aren't already provided.

The Coldplay Effect

25 Jul 2011

In the context of music recommendation engines, The Coldplay Effect is an unfortunate phenomenon that arises when certain artists' music (like Coldplay's) ranks high for likeness across diverse genres.

Building Multi-tenant Rails Apps with PostgreSQL Schemas

18 Jul 2011

There are a few different ways to go about building a multi-tenant Rails application. One way that works really well for certain apps is to use PostgreSQL's 'schemas' feature to partition each tenant's data. This article lays out why you might want to build your multi-tenant app this way and how to go about it.

cap db:pull

29 Jun 2011

A quick and dirty capistrano task to pull a snapshot of your (PostgreSQL) production database into your development environment.

Connecting Node.js to Redis To Go on Heroku

17 Jun 2011

Heroku's new Cedar stack is awesome for many reasons, one of which is first-class Node.js hosting. I'm giving it a test run with an app that uses Redis for data caching and I couldn't find any documentation on how to connect a Node app to the Redis To Go add-on. Here's how I did it

Reasons Your Dev Team Might Choose Talker Over Campfire for Group Chat

14 Jun 2011

Talker is a great tool for group chat, especially for development teams. Herein I enumerate 3 reasons why it's better suited than Campfire.

Benchmarketing

16 Apr 2011

(pejorative) The misleading use of unrepresentative benchmark software results in marketing a computer system.

Pow and Apache Side-by-Side

12 Apr 2011

Pow is the new hotness for serving up Ruby apps in development. Apache is the old standby for serving up PHP (and other) apps in development. Pow and Apache don't play nice, but we can change that.

ActiveRecord Association Caching Gotcha

07 Apr 2011

Updating a related object in an ActiveRecord callback can be tricky due to association caching. It tripped me up for too long and Google was not helpful. Hopefully this post will at least solve the unhelpful Googling problem.

Install Firefox 4 and Firefox 3 Side by Side on Mac OS X

23 Mar 2011

Want to upgrade to the newly released Firefox 4 while maintaining your Firefox 3 install for browser testing purposes? So did I. Here's how to get 'er done

The Two Character Config Hack That Changed my Bashing Life

20 Mar 2011

Little conveniences can make big differences. I recently added two characters to my Bash configuration that made a profound affect on my everyday computer use.

The Perfect Setup: Rails on Screen

25 Feb 2011

This post isn't trying to sell you on screen. There are umpteen sites out there which do that. Instead, I'd like to share with you how I've engineered my setup such that it's a joy to use.

jQuery: isInArray Boolean Sugar

31 Jan 2011

Sprinkle this sugary function on top of your jQuery for a little syntactic delight.

Tech Podcasts You Should Know About

30 Jan 2011

I've been listening to tech-related podcasts since the birth of the medium. I recently realized that I've never shared the shows that I think are great. So, here they are (in no particular order).

Quickly Determine Your Current Heroku Database Size

26 Jan 2011

Heroku does not expose the current database size of your application via their web interface or command-line tool, but its pretty easy to get at.

Three Ways to Retain Your Dev Flow

14 Jan 2011

Context switching: computers are great at it, humans suck at it. Every time we developers lose the context of our current task we are forced to waste precious time getting back...

Bridging the Gap Between JavaScript's console.log and Cocoa's NSLog

27 Dec 2010

Working with JavaScript inside of a WebKit WebView can be tricky because bare-bone WebViews don't ship with the handy, dandy developer console that is available in Safari and Chrome. In this post, I outline how to get your JavaScript console.logs to show up in Xcode's Debugger Console using NSLog.

The Tech Behind the New Grooveshark

15 Dec 2010

In which I pay respect to the many open source libraries we used as foundation for Grooveshark's new web-based player.

Making Rails 3's Mail Gem and Paperclip Play Nice

09 Dec 2010

The old TMail gem used in Rails allowed directly importing parsed attachments into Paperclip. The new Mail gem works differently, but we can make them play nice.

Minimally Awesome Todos

01 Dec 2010

I've wasted many hours of my life trying different task management applications and have never found anything effective enough to stick with. Finally, I've found a solution that is simple and effective. It Just Works®. I think it's awesome. Maybe you will too.

Took a Detour

01 Nov 2010

Professionally I've been writing a ton of JavaScript lately, but in my free time I took a detour into the land of Cocoa to develop a tiny little Mac app. It only does one thing, but hopefully it does it well enough to get some use.

LazerCatz!

30 Aug 2010

I competed in the first ever Node Knockout over the weekend with a couple of friends and the fruit of our labor is an 8-bit multiplayer shooter called LazerCatz!

Extract & Edit a Safari Extension

21 Aug 2010

Turns out it's pretty easy to edit a Safari extension that you've downloaded. Here's how.

Some Great iOS Apps

19 Jun 2010

I'd like to give props to a handful of iOS apps that I think are exceptional. If you haven't used any of the following, I highly suggest you check them out.

Rack, and Firebug, and Fuel. Oh Hai!

20 Mar 2010

I'm very happy to announce that I've joined the Fuel Network as co-editor of FYC!

Exciting Projects I Watched in February

06 Mar 2010

Another month, another handful of great open-source projects I found on GitHub.

Exciting Projects I Watched In January

02 Feb 2010

One of my favorite GitHub features is the ability to find and track the progress of projects that interest me. I've decided to post the new projects I find each month on this blog since there is a high likelihood that you and I have common interests

Cappuccino On Rails

12 Jan 2010

I'm happy to announce the release of CappuccinoResource (CR), a library dedicated to interfacing between a Cappuccino front-end and a Rails back-end.

Testing Cappuccino Notifications

07 Jan 2010

Writing a web app using Cappuccino has a lot of benefits, one of which is a really nice message passing system wherein certain objects can register to observe events and take action when other objects post notifications of those events.

Rubular

02 Dec 2009

Most of the online regular expression testers I've used just aren't that useful, but Rubular is the exception.

280 Atlas Introductory Screencast

16 Nov 2009

The much anticipated 280 Atlas developer beta is under way and I recorded a brief screencast introducing the basic concepts of creating applications with Atlas.

Ad Hoc Command-Line Notifications with Twitter

14 Nov 2009

Have you ever spent way too much time babysitting a long-running command? Code compilation, large file transfers, software upgrades and other time consuming tasks can trash productivity by requiring intermittent attention. Here is a way to avoid the predicament.

Managing Broken Symlinks

05 Nov 2009

I just added two new functions to my bashrc which make it super-simple to find & remove broken symbolic links on your system.

Learning Cappuccino: A Linked List

01 Nov 2009

A list of valuable resources for learning Objective-J and the Cappuccino web framework.

A WordPress Skeleton Key

29 Oct 2009

I often use WordPress as a CMS and have a couple of sites with many users contributing. I rarely go a week without an email or phone call from a user who needs help posting. When it comes to remote support there is no substitute for seeing what they're seeing.

Cheating on Rails

20 Oct 2009

Fellow command-line junkies either love the cheat gem by Chris Wanstrath or they've never heard of it.

CappuccinoFlow

14 Oct 2009

It has been a little quiet around these parts lately. I blame Cappuccino.

Run OS X System Profiler From Terminal

09 Sep 2009

OS X's built-in `System Profiler` provides a great graphical display of pretty much anything you'll want to know about your Mac.

cd up, up, and a-up

07 Sep 2009

We all know that . represents the current working directory and .. represents the current working directory's parent directory. If we follow this pattern to its logical conclusion, then ... would represent the current working directory's parent's parent, etc. Unfortunately, cd doesn't work that way.

Kill Snow Leopard's Blue Ring of Exposé

01 Sep 2009

Looks like I'm not the only one who hates Snow Leopard's blue ring around selected windows in Exposé.

Just Abort It

24 Aug 2009

Ruby's `abort` method may be just what you need to print a message and exit.

AppStore Ruby Module

22 Aug 2009

I open-sourced a module to fetch app information out of Apple's App Store.

Self-Scheduling Ruby Scripts

20 Aug 2009

I have a lot of Ruby scripts running on different servers all scheduled via cron and it's quite easy to forget what script is scheduled when and how often. This can be worked around with `Whenever`.

Amending Git Commits

16 Aug 2009

I recently learned that you can fix you're previous commit (modify commit message, add more files, etc.) quite easily with git.

Mini Book Review: Ruby Best Practices

01 Aug 2009

I just finished reading Gregory Brown's **Ruby Best Practices** (RBP). I could probably write a book about this book, but I hate long book reviews so I'll try to keep this short.

WordPress Console Update

23 Jul 2009

It's been awhile since I posted about my open-source WordPress Console (WPC) plugin, and enough has happened since I released it that I thought it deserved a little mention.

Ad Hoc Rails Console Logging

18 Jul 2009

If you want to be able to toggle your development log between the default Rails logger and the console, just add this method to your `~/.irbrc`

Sass Never Forgets

09 Jul 2009

A Sass mixin for centering a div on a page horizontally and vertically.

On WordPress Plugin Release Notes

03 Jul 2009

Plugin upgrade notifications and one-click installs are great for both developers and users alike, but there is one thing about them that I find irritating as a user, and easily avoidable as a developer: **displaying reasons to upgrade**.

jQuery Tools 101: Nested Tabs

01 Jul 2009

If you want to nest tabs inside one another you'll need to change things slightly. I demonstrate in this post.

Introducing the WordPress Console

23 Jun 2009

I enjoy developing for WordPress, but I've been spoiled by Rails and I often long for an interactive console for WordPress.

Sniff Your iPhone's Network Traffic

13 Jun 2009

Ever wanted (or needed) to see your iPhone's network traffic? All you need is a wireless LAN and the cross-platform proxy application, Paros.

PHP5 with readline support on OS X

06 Jun 2009

OS X ships with PHP5 installed but it does not have `readline()` support compiled in.

Let Capistrano Compile Ruby 1.9 For You

02 Jun 2009

A Capistrano task to install Ruby 1.9.1 to `/opt/ruby-1.9.1` on Debian

Dead Simple Rails Deployment

31 May 2009

A couple of technologies have come along and made my deployment process a whole lot easier.

Rename A Gitosis Repository

28 May 2009

I recently needed to rename one of my repositories and couldn't find any info on how to do it, so here is a walk-thru.

3 Reasons Why Heroku is a Game Changer

26 May 2009

Why I think Heroku is awesome and will change the game of Ruby app deployment

Create Arbitrarily Sized Files In Less Than 15 Lines of Ruby

22 May 2009

With this little Ruby script, you can arbitrarily generate files of any size (using 1MB increments).

jQuery: Open External Links In New Window/Tab

18 May 2009

Use jQuery to add the target attribute to links so it doesn't muck up the HTML.

Expand Your Twitter Network In Less Than 15 Lines of Ruby

17 May 2009

Let's use Ruby to generate a list of people highly followed by our friends.

Avoid Sore Fingers While SSHing Around

14 May 2009

Using SSH's config settings to save you keystrokes

See Which Twitterers Don't Follow You Back In Less Than 15 Lines of Ruby

12 May 2009

See Which Twitterers Don't Follow You Back In Less Than 15 Lines of Ruby

jQuery: Set Mouse Focus On Page Load

09 May 2009

How to set the mouse's focus to an element on the page when the DOM is ready, using jQuery

Git Informed When Your Site Is Hacked

04 May 2009

How to set up git as a change notification mechanism

Dreamy: Now With 100% API Coverage

02 May 2009

The folks at DreamHost were gracious enough to provide me with a complimentary Private Server account so I could expand Dreamy's functionality.

Clean WP Dashboard

23 Apr 2009

Clean WP Dashboard is a plugin that cleans up WordPress 2.7's dashboard.

Tweetie Has Arrived

21 Apr 2009

The anointing of an OS X application

So Dreamy!

18 Apr 2009

Dreamy is a command-line tool and Ruby library for accessing DreamHost's API

New Gem: Rack-noIE6

18 Apr 2009

Many web developers are discontinuing support for IE6. I, happily, am one of them (unless a client demands it). Here is a Rack middleware to accomplish just that.

2>&1

17 Mar 2009

Ever wonder what 2>&1 means on all the cron examples out there?

Rsnapshot (Rsync) Gotcha

09 Mar 2009

How to troubleshoot a cryptic Rsnapshot error

Bash array and loops in FireHOL configuration

26 Feb 2009

One of FireHOL's strengths is that it uses standard Bash syntax inside its configuration file, so you get all the power of Bash to configure your firewall.

Extending TMail::Mail for HTML and plaintext only

21 Feb 2009

A project I'm working on required a little more from Ruby's TMail library than it offers out of the box.

A simple Ruby method to send email

17 Feb 2009

Feel free to use this simple method to send email

Great Article on Aptitude vs Apt-Get

16 Feb 2009

In case you need some convincing to start using aptitude for all your Debian/Ubuntu software management needs

Getting ready for Lenny

16 Feb 2009

You don't need to fire up an editor to switch your APT repositories from Debian 4 (Etch) to Debian 5 (Lenny)

Debian 5.0 (Lenny) Released

15 Feb 2009

Almost every software package in my favorite server operating system has been upgraded!

fix your Debian VMware image's network after offline copy

17 Sep 2008

If you copy and move a VMware virtual machine that runs Debian, you’ll find that the network adapter is no longer available, which sucks.

Starting Asterisk on Boot in Debian

03 Sep 2008

You just compiled Asterisk on your Debian server and you want to make sure it starts when you reboot. Here’s how

Adhearsion TextMate Bundle

30 Aug 2008

I began hacking on Asterisk using the Adhearsion framework a few weeks ago. Despite initial setbacks, I am now having an absolute blast.

Date Range Goodies in Rails

27 Aug 2008

When it comes to dealing with dates and their formats between different databases, Ruby, time zones, etc, etc…it can get pretty nasty...

Configure Network Time Protocol (NTP) in Debian

27 Aug 2008

Here’s how to synchronize your Debian system’s time with network time servers, in a few simple steps

Introducing lil tom peep

23 Aug 2008

lil tom peep is a new web application I wrote to fix a problem I had with web surfing.

Debian Etch: Default Repositories

22 Aug 2008

In case you muck up your `/etc/apt/sources.list` and want to set it back to the defaults

Easy Configuration with Ruby and Yaml

19 Aug 2008

Even trivial apps need to be configured. Why not use Yaml?

Ruby to the Rescue

18 Aug 2008

Walking through the basic usage of Ruby's `rescue` feature

Great jQuery Reference

14 Aug 2008

I don’t usually post links on this blog unless they accompany a tutorial, but this reference is so good I can’t help but throw it up here for others.

Debian Quickie: MailUtils

12 Aug 2008

How to ensure access to the handy, dandy `/usr/bin/mail` command on your Debian box.

jQuery Wizard Redux

09 Aug 2008

I was interested in creating a step-by-step form wizard for a Rails app I’ve been working on, so naturally I began searching for a jQuery plugin or tutorial. The best thing I could find was a ‘plugin’ written back in June of 2007...

Rails + Screen = Awesome

24 Jul 2008

Unix’s `screen` utility is like pow-pow-power wheels for remote shells.

Pass Optional Arguments to Ruby Method

24 Jul 2008

Ruby makes it super-simple to pass optional arguments with default values.

Symlink Your Samba Shares

23 Jul 2008

Oftentimes a symbolic link is just the quickest/easiest solution to the task at hand.

ip2loc

19 Jul 2008

ip2loc is a simple tool which visualizes location data for a given IP address using the Google Maps API.

My Perfect OS X FTP Server

17 Jul 2008

Sometimes you need to set up a quick and dirty FTP server for one-time use. This is what I use to do it.

Traversing Directories with Ruby

15 Jul 2008

A few quick tips on traversing directories with Ruby.

New GitHub Repo: AWS Ruby Miscellany

14 Jul 2008

I decided to source out a few random Ruby scripts I use to interface with Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) from the command line.

Capify - public key deployment

11 Jul 2008

I’ve been playing with Capistrano a lot lately and loving it. Here is an example of how easy it is to write tasks and use them on multiple remote servers.

SliceHost + Debian + FireHOL gotchas

20 Jun 2008

Securing your slice with FireHOL is a really, really good move. Here are a few notes that may save you some time

Rails: Nested Layouts

20 Jun 2008

Sometimes one layout (application.html.erb) just doesn’t cut it, but you don’t want a separate layout for each controller in your app. You can use the following technique to nest your Rails app’s layouts.

htop: like top, but awesome

03 Jun 2008

If you’ve been hacking at your linux CLI for a little while, you’re probably familiar with the pic below. If not, just type `top` and your terminal will spring to life with an ever-updating process and usage display.

10.5.3 Fixes Spaces

31 May 2008

If you’re like me then one desktop just doesn’t cut it anymore. Leopard’s Spaces is Apple’s attempt at a virtual desktop management app and it has lacked one very crucial feature until the .3 release of the operating system which was pushed last week.

MySQL backup and restore

19 May 2008

A reference for how to backup and restore MySQL databases, including optional compression.

git clone & pull without changing directories

19 May 2008

If you’re trying to configure git commands in a directory that isn’t `pwd`, you’ll have to deal with `clone` and `pull` a little differently.

Debian: Disable Sytem Beep

19 May 2008

Here’s how to turn off that annoying system beep at your Debian CLI