Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup Report April 1, 2008

With a date like April 1, right there in the title, just how serious can this be. But it wasn’t all fun and games.
This was the first meetup that Neli and I attended. Previously, I’d miss yet another meeting and I would poke around on the net looking for a writeup about what happened, what […]

Rock Star Programmers and Other Essential Ingredients

Sometimes I think maybe I am a rock star. My patron saints would be Jimi Hendrix and Jerry Garcia (Jimi for his incredible familiarity with his tools, and Jerry for his ability to go beyond his tools). The rest of the time, which is most of the time, I think that I am extraordinarily dense […]

Our blog has a new look-and-feel!

Along with merging GUI.NET with Software Federation, it was time for a new theme that wasn’t so, how shall we put it, well, it was more of an anti-theme than anything. It’s sole goal was to use as much of the screen real-estate for content as possible.
This new theme was chosen to both match Software […]

Getting rid of control-M ^M in files checked into Subversion from Windows and checked out on Linux, Solaris, Unix, Ubuntu, Whateverrrr

Ruby doesn’t like files with ^M at the end of each line. Go figure.
Here is what I did. Hopefully it’ll work for you too.
In my Subversion installation directory, ON MY WINDOWS BOX (don’t you go wasting several hours on this, too, I wasted enough for the whole kit-and-kaboodle of us on this one) I […]

Gotchyas along the road to Ruby application deployment success on Joyent

Hopefully this will be most of the difficult issues we run into, as we have several ‘S’ and ‘M’ accounts over at Joyent, and we are supposed to learn from our experiences and mistakes, right? I mean, most other mammals can do this, right, so why not coders, I ask you.
First off, the Joyent wiki […]

Ruby on Rails - ARMailer - and View Templates

While working on Zategories.com it was ‘discovered’ that…
…the default ARmailer template feature doesn’t work the way it is documented.
At least if you want to use the features where you just have to put the email templates in a directory and the mailer generates and sends a multi-part email for ya.
Why?
Because this:
ActionMailer::Base.template_root = “mailer/templates”
does not work. […]

Featuritis - Good or Evil?

Traditionally, featuritis is considered EVIL. For example see the WikiPedia write-up.
But there are benefits to featuritis - reasons it grows from nothingness and flowers repeatedly during development.
These are:
1 It is so much easier, mentally, to add a feature while one is ‘in the code’. The coder knows which just methods to modify and how. If […]

Of Mice and Pads

[More on google checkout later as we finish up work on version 1.0 of The Splash Pages]
The Optical Mouse and Mouse Pad have very complicated and rich relationships with their user.
The Mouse

The mouse must fit the hand.
Because the mouse is lifted up, sometimes several times per move, it must be both light, and shaped such […]

Interfacing to Google Checkout - Java 1.4, Linux (CentOS) - using the XML, Level 2, Alternative Method (programmatic) API - Part 1

I am posting this thread because I found it difficult to find some of this information and so thought it might eventually be useful to someone else in the Google Checkout trenches.Â
 The main link for information is: http://code.google.com/apis/checkout/
at that link the main page is: http://code.google.com/apis/checkout/developer/index.html
SETTING UP SANDBOX ACCOUNTSÂ
One of the first things […]

Why RPM sucks

This is obvious.
Anyone who uses it has run into the X.rpm has 226 dependencies, of which your system will have 10 unresolved, of various unknown degrees of criticality. Attempting to resolve those 10 involves serveral more rpm files, that have their own 826 dependcies, of which yet more are unresolved, of course.
Not to be pointing […]