Wordpress is pretty much the blogging engine of choice. It’s used by so many people, and has so many plugins and an amazing following, you’d wonder why anybody would use anything else (well there are a number of reasons, but we can talk about that later). Some problems that come with Wordpress, with all that power, is sometimes it’s slow. Combine php, lots of plugins, and everything else, and your blog can come to a crawl, especially if you wr...
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software development with some really amazing hairParallel Processing in the Real World
I go to movies. Lots of movies. Usually I get popcorn or a drink. Not always, but usually. What can be counted on, however, is the movie theatre staff ensuring that instead of everybody waiting in a single line, and popping off the top like a queue, we all wait in 3 or 4 separate lines. Why is this? It’s stupid. At the Tim Horton’s in my building, they do it properly. One big line, 3 tills, and they just call the next person. The line moves so...
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The Xbox 360 Security System and its Weaknesses
Cool talk about Xbox hardware security. Games require Javascript, just like this website.
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Self Signed SSL Certificates
I don’t really care, I just want a certificate. Gimme! For my stuff, I just want the SSL for my own personal use. It’s not for a variety of random people I don’t know, just me, so I don’t care. How? openssl req -new -x509 -days 365 -nodes -out out.pem -keyout out.pem
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ruby regex for fun and profit
Regex are always fun, and since regex expressions are first class citizens in ruby, it makes it so much easier. I found this Code Golf question on Stackoverflow and threw together a quick method to do it. I can’t take all the credit, since I needed to search a bit to figure out if I could do matching parenthesis in ruby, and found that I could, but only in ruby 1.9, which ruby forum topic showed me. Then a commenter on SO pointed out another o...
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Gtk and Ruby threading issues
In one of my classes, we used Ruby and Gtk, but some issues popped up. The most obvious is using a block to do GUI update stuff and the like, from another thread. Things die. Puppies are killed. I found this post on Ruby Forum which fixed the problem. Relevant code. Basically, you call the Gtk.init_thread_protect method first when you start things up, then, whenever you need to do GUI update stuff, just wrap it in a Gtk.thread_protect {} block...
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Secure Password Generator
If you need a secure password, look no further. Security Guide for Windows – Random Password Generator
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Using ruby's eval to make cucumber bigger and greener
In case you just crawled out from under your rock just to read my blog, and haven’t the foggiest, cucumber is a ruby acceptance testing framework, and works great with rails. I was writing features for admin users in this application, and needed a step like this: Where the quoted email is the login. Later on (in fact right after…I was testing edit functionality, and after safe you end up on the view user page), I had: So I had two steps: That’...
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Google Wave Preview
Google Wave Preview. Awesome. Turn on Javascript to see this video.
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Twitter Tools with surl
I should probably actually announce surl… Anyway. I did some reading and hacked up a little plugin to make Twitter Tools use my URL shortener, surl Hopefully it works. It’s kind of unfortunate, since I have to post to test, and I really don’t want all my test posts going out to Twitter, and yet they have to… EDIT: Yay it works. Win! And here’s the code:
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Author
Daniel Huckstep is a software engineer (EIT) in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
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