Category: computer
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Welcomed To The RRoD Club
I powered on the ol’ Xbox 360 this weekend to finish Mass Effect, a feat which I was especially pumped about since I’ve been told I’m extremely close. Much to my surprise, Microsoft had left a super special, albeit slightly belated Christmas surprise up in my tubes.Awesome!! Thanks, Redmond!!
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Rails 2.0: Gmail SMTP With ActionMailer
Marc just checked in a nifty little Rails 2.0 plugin to the OpenRain public subversion repository which encapsulates the voodoo required to use a Gmail SMTP server with an otherwise ordinary ActionMailer configuration. Gmail requires TLS security, which is why this is useful. Grab the plugin for your Gmail-mooching Rails 2.0 site, here. Note: I…
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Small Office VoIP: Skype Pros/Cons
Before the 2007 tax year ended, OpenRain decided to finally solidify a telephony strategy for the next year or so. Key requirements were.. Easy ad-hoc and scheduled conferences. Mobile flexibility and continuity across physical locations. Scalability for the next couple years. Voice mail Call forwarding. Little to no management overhead. (I don’t want to run…
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Ruby Troubleshooting: Hpricot On OS X Leopard
If you upgraded to Leopard, you may be getting this nasty error when trying to install Hpricot, which is required by other popular gems such as mechanize.. preston$ sudo gem install mechanize Password: ******** Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org Install required dependency hpricot? [Yn] Select which gem to install for your platform (i686-darwin8.10.3)…
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Rails 2.0: Validations Without Extending ActiveRecord::Base
In more “enterprisey” web stacks (such as Java with Hibernate and Spring MVC), it’s straightforward to design a validatable form whose contents do not correspond directly — if at all — to a persistent OR/M class: such as may happen in an ecommerce site where you’re collecting payment information but can only store some of…
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Rails 2.0: HTTP Basic Authentication
HTTP Basic authentication support comes bundled with Rails 2.0, alleviating the need for external plugins we used with Rails 1.x. Here’s how you can use (and test) this new Rails 2.0 feature.
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Mass Effect: Holy Freaking Crap
I figured I’d have some “me” time this weekend, so I picked up a copy of the highly praised Mass Effect. Saying it’s good is obvious; awesome is an understatement. Groin-grabbingly enthralling, genre-shattering entertainment is somewhere in the neighborhood. We’re talking a contender for best video game ever here. So if you’re last minute Christmas…
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Rails 2.0: Testing For Well-Formed XML With assert_well_formed
Here’s an easy way to validate that you’re always rendering well-formed HTML in an ordinary Rails application. I’ve written and verified this on Rails 2.0.1…
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Xserve w/Leopard Server (Mac OS X 10.5), First Impressions
We just picked up a refurbished 2.66GHz quad-core Xeon from Apple, which we’ll be using for internal infrastructure. (We’re in the process of migrating from a mix of Solaris and Linux). After about 8 hours of learning the ins and outs of Leopard Server over the weekend, we had the box running Open Directory (Kerberos…
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Invited To The Pentagon
Mugr.com was recently invited to the Pentagon to demo our facial recognition voodoo as a potential biometric component to TIDES: Transportable Infrastructures for Development and Emergency Support. It was a very last minute trip with very little instruction and direction regarding what to prepare, so we packed up our Mactops and hopped on a plane.…