Mac OS X Dropping Connection Frequently

Quick Fix Apparently, Mac OSX Mavericks, El Capitan, and Yosemite can experience IP Address conflicts with other computers on the same home network (particularly with Verizon), causing it to drop its connection with annoying frequency. The error message “network cannot be joined” is virtually useless in figuring out how to fix it, as are nearly all […]

Kill Verizon DNS Assistance for FiOS Quantum Gateway

The Problem: If you’ve recently become a Verizon customer, you may find that Verizon has hijacked your browser, so that every time you hit a page that’s not recognized by its DNS servers, you’re redirected to a ridiculous Verizon co-branded yahoo search page. I guess they still think they need some kind of search presence […]

Ruby 2.0 Keyword Arguments – MUST READ

This is, hands-down, the best post I’ve seen on the topic of the new keyword arguments in ruby 2.0. Clear, concise, simple. justinweiss.com’s “Fun With Keyword Arguments” Go. Read. It. Right now. Really. You’ll be glad you did.

Update Your Git

If you use git for version control, there’s a MAJOR vulnerability on macs and PCs. If you’re on either platform, update your version asap. For details, see: Vulnerability Announced Update Your Git If you installed the git command line client via homebrew, it’s easy to upgrade: brew upgrade git For other versions (like the GUI […]

Screen Cap of Names and Genders extracted from Wikipedia

Male vs Female Biographies on Wikipedia

I attended the Boston Girl Geeks Dinner last week, and left with a mission – to extract the names from all the biographies on wikipedia, and analyze them for gender. There’s a gem that will compare a first name to a 40,000 name dictionary, and determine whether that name is female, male, mostly female, mostly […]

Fun with FizzBuzz

I decided to make FizzBuzz into something that reads (nominally) like English … because I’m easily amused. fizz_or_buzz = (1..100) fizzbuzz = fizz_or_buzz.map do |i|   not_fizzy = (i % 3 != 0)   not_buzzy = (i % 5 != 0)   no_fizz_no_buzz = i.to_s   when_fizzy = (i % 3)   when_buzzy = (i % 5)   if not_fizzy && […]

screen shot of https://rubygems.org/gems/centering_helper

Rails 4 Gem for Centering Images and Content

When I made the gem for generating column widths last week, it was so I could avoid having to litter my code with divs to center the columns if my database contained fewer columns of data than would fill the screen width. So, of course, this week, I’ve made a gem so I don’t have […]

Screen capture from http://www.rails-dev.com/custom-view-helpers-in-rails-4

Rails 4 View Helpers for Noobs

A view helper is a little piece of reusable code that you can place into your views to reduce the amount of code you have to repeat. You’ve probably already used some, such as form helpers (form_for) or others (image_tag). It’s also possible to make your own. If there’s something you do over, and over […]

Making My First Ruby Gem

I just published my first ruby “gem.” It’s a “gemified” version of the column width generator module, now available on rubygems.org: https://rubygems.org/gems/generate-column-widths And here’s the github page: https://github.com/liantics/generate-column-widths A ruby gem is a kind of plugin for ruby apps. You post your gem to a hosting site from which others can get the code, plug […]

Screen cap of code snippet

Module to Auto-generate Column Widths in a Grid System

Yesterday, I added the ability for admins to view, create, and edit categories. This meant I needed to display columns of categories, organized by category type (think of it as meta-categories) – just what I had done on the home page, but without the extra column to deal with. The code I’d written to generate […]