Lots of interesting things are afoot, and I try to keep track of them. Here’s what I’m watching. Rails 3 Lots of new changes are coming with Rails 3, and it’s pretty exciting. I wrote about some of the cool ones here. Rails is shaping up to be faster, more modular, and generally better and easier to work with. With all the smart people working on it, you don’t have to look very hard to realize this is going to be a big release, and is only goi...
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software development with some really amazing hairRails 3 release notes: What does it mean to you?
The Rails 3 Beta got dropped a few days ago, and the release notes for Rails were put out a bit before that. The list of changes is long; this is a big release. There’s a lot to sift through, a lot to change to upgrade your existing application, and a lot to learn whether you are upgrading or starting a new app. The big question is: WTF does all this mean to me? Don’t worry, I’m going to tell you. If you want to read the full release notes, go...
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What todo indeed
You’d think the todo list problem was solved by now. Email is solved. Google solved it. Srsly. If you aren’t using Gmail, what’s really stopping you? No, Yahoo! and Microsoft aren’t doing it better. Google wins. Spam is pretty much solved. Google once again solved it by sheer volume, you throw millions of emails at a Bayesian filter with crowd sourcing (that little button in Gmail? that’s crowd sourcing) and it gets pretty damn smart. Okay may...
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Rewrite Git History for Make Benefit of Glorious Internet Tubes of the World
Sometimes you do silly things. Like check big binary files into source control. Ones that shouldn’t be in source control. This causes problems. Okay, well not really problems, but it has some effects. Cloning the repository takes longer, of course, since there are big files, and other operations can take longer too. But fret not! If you need to purge files from Git, you can. Now, you can’t just remove the file, since it’s still technically in ...
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Heroku Backup with Single Bundle
In case you missed it, the Coding Horror, Stack Overflow and Haacked blogs died in almost a literal fire. Well I don’t think there was an actual fire, but basically they all hosted their blogs in virtual machines on the same physical server, and the backup process never backed up the virtual machine files since they were always in use. The backup process was managed by the hosting company and silently failed on these files. Oops. While I’m fai...
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swfobject, meet jQuery
I was getting sick and tired of just blindly copying and pasting embed code for videos and every other flash thing I post. Naturally, being a programmer I had to do something about it. Enter jQuery and swfobject Check this out: Some embed tags that are provided are only of one type: either object or embed. This is no good since that means some browsers are excluded and it won’t work. Lame! Swfobject solves the problem by using JavaScript to in...
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Unescape HTML with Javascript
I’m just passing this on, as I didn’t do it, I just found it. Over here is a pretty slick way to unescape HTML. I ran into the need for this when I was working on some inline-editing code. I wanted to reset the contents of the textarea to the contents of a pre tag. The contents of the tag are of course escaped, but I want them to be proper HTML in the textarea. Using this trick allowed me unescape the contents easily and stuff it back in the t...
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Author
Daniel Huckstep is a software engineer (EIT) in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
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