A Helpful Page – Where to Put Rails Modules
It’s been a while since we were shown how to create a module. This site was *very* helpful – clear, concise, easy to follow: http://www.benfranklinlabs.com/where-to-put-rails-modules
Auto-Generated Columns of Auto-Generated-Bootstrap-Column-Widths
Well that was fun! Today’s task was to programmatically generate a set of columns of projects. Easy! Then I decided that if a column didn’t have any projects in it, it shouldn’t display. OK, that took a little more work. BUT that meant that the remaining columns would shift left, because of the way the […]
Women Who Code Hack Night
Great night at WWC Hack Night at Vista Higher Learning this evening! I got to meet a very enthusiastic young woman, and chat a bit about the project she’s involved with – the one that got her interested in learning to program. It was great fun to experience so much enthusiasm. I spent a bit […]
Notes from Engineers 4 Engineers Conference @ Constant Contact, today
I had a fantastic opportunity to spend the day at Constant Contact in Waltham, where they hosted the Engineers4Engineers Conference. I’ve been to a number of conferences over the years, and generally, the presentations are somewhat hit-or-miss. This one was all “hits.” I’m really glad I got the chance to go, even though it meant […]
Not Ruby-Related, but If You Ever Wanted to Geek Out Over Basement Heat Loss Calculations
Insulating your basement, while a bit lower down on the ladder of efficiency measure effectiveness, is still something to consider if you live in a cold climate and the basement is used as a living space. http://www.nesea.org/uncategorized/heat-loss-to-the-ground-part-2/ Let’s assume the temperature below the slab is 50˚F and the average temperature against the foundation wall is […]
Bootstrap JS Modal Dialog
It’s terrible (and annoying) UX when you’re trying to take an action, only to be sent through a whole slew of other pages, or worse, to be logged in, then redirected to a completely unrelated page. However, I need donors to log in before donating, so the donation can be properly managed (oh, those banks […]
An easy ruby tool to make slides
I went to the Boston Ruby group meetup tonight. Jed Northridge demoed his gem for quick slide prrsentations that uses markdown & ruby to build and serve slideshows painlessly. I’ll be using this! https://github.com/jedcn/reveal-ck
Learning to Use Web Sockets
This week was a whirlwind of ajax and web sockets! The result was a simple app to send real-time greetings. I played with the css a bit over the weekend, when I found myself inexplicably awake. Here’s the result, if you want to see..
Spambot Boo Boo
The most recent spambot to submit a comment had a bit of an issue with its parser before sending, so it sent the entire blob instead of the randomized string. The image is a screen grab of a small portion of the text, showing the arrays from which the bot was supposed to choose words. […]
Rails URL Validation
See Michael Bleigh’s original post for details. But in the mean time, taking advantage of the regular expression method of the URI class lets you do this for validating URLs: class Web validates_format_of :website, :with => URI::regexp(%w(http https)) end