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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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Penguin Pimp
I Celebrated my friend Gilraen’s birthday by molding figurines out of Sculpey, which turned out to be an excellent party activity. Karen started off with a cute penguin body, but somehow we ended up with a pimp: complete with hat, cane and technicolor dream coat. There are.. hmm.. “other” complementary figurines, but I’ll refrain from…
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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.…
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What's Better Than Windows Balloon Help?…
Twice as much balloon help! My current testing environment for JumpBox development uses two Windows XP virtual machines on OS X under Parallels coherence mode: one with IE6 (gold taskbar on the bottom), the other IE7 (blue taskbar on the right). While they perform sufficiently with 4GB physical RAM, the constant nurturing required to keep…
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6 Things I'm Thankful For
An awesome first business year for OpenRain. The constant stress of context switching between software projects has become more managable, making weekend relaxation slightly more frequent. Marc has been a geeky Asian version of Superman, and our part-time office manager Gracie has been a godsend. Business has been great, and 2008 should be an exciting…
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Switching To Dvorak: One Week Later
It’s been exactly one week since I switched to the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard (DSK) layout. Thoughts… The first couple days are especially frustrating while you memorize key locations and build a small bit of muscle memory for common phrases. Hang in there.. this is the toughest part. Temporarily relabel your real keyboard with cheap stickers…
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Switching To Dvorak
After years of deliberation, I’m finally taking this Thanksgiving break to switch to the Dvorak keyboard layout. It’s been frustrating, yes, but I believe my wrists will be much better off with the change. Within a couple hours of switching I’m probably crawling at ~15 words per minute, which is faster than I expected. Stuff…
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