MATTly

I recently had a need (or, probably more appropriately, a desire), to obfuscate some data which would be passed to a server in a URL. Of course, it’s impossible to encrypt anything using JavaScript since it executes client-side, but you can certainly obfuscate data enough to ward off most tinkering attempts. I decided base64 would [...]

It is with great sorrow and a heavy heart that I share with you the passing of Jasmine, a small, black cat who lived a full and pampered life of nearly 16 years. She and Chantel (the himalayan/ragdoll mix pictured here with Jasmine) were the last family pets my brother and I had at home [...]

We all do it from time-to-time, and some more often than others: allow our emotions to control how we react instead of using logic to properly deal with a situation. As a person who frequently turns to the Internet for information, I often stumble into forums and blog comments where one person says a little [...]

It will forever be a huge source of amusement for geeks that they are now officially deemed cool. It’s true. There have been surveys and everything. ‘Experts’ have been saying so since the early 2000s, but I don’t think anyone truly believed it until technology began to get ultra cool. Who was behind it? Geeks [...]

If you use ActiveRecord for session storage, you’ll find that the sessions table fills up quickly. reset_session deletes the current session (say, when implemented in a logout action), but stale sessions can still build up when a user simply closes their browser. To combat this, here’s a simple solution using a class and a cron [...]

In a major Ruby on Rails project, I recently had to generate a table of data which had to be organized with data flowing from top-to-bottom in each column before moving on to the next column, instead of left-to-right. This seems simple, but I had trouble getting my head around it for some reason (maybe [...]

While working with a complex AJAX script today, I discovered a long-standing problem with an interval timer duplicating itself. I spent most of the morning trying to figure out ways to prevent more than one instance of the timer from firing, but since the timer could be stopped and restarted based on user interaction, there [...]

Did you see the movie Social Network (a.k.a. the Facebook movie)? It was about the founding of the most popular social networking site, and in it was a term used many times: “plugged in”. Well, I’m under no illusion that I am or can be among the elite when it comes to software programming, but [...]

I still can’t believe it. He’s gone — a legendary business man who created a market for people who were more interested in a product that worked, rather than how it worked. He stepped down from Apple as the CEO only a few weeks ago, and I knew it was because of his un-winnable battle [...]

Here’s a quickie for ya. I recently found that using the rmagick gem causes a nasty segmentation fault on my Rails 3.1 development machine, which happens to be a Mac running OS X 10.7 (Lion). I use ImageMagick from MacPorts with Ruby 1.9.2, and here’s what I had to do to get rmagick working: gem [...]