Preston Lee's Blog

Tag: howto

  • iCal Domain Account Errors For New Events

    Over the past couple weeks I’ve had issues getting my OSX 10.5 iCal client to continue working properly with our centralized CalDav server. I stopped being able to invite other domain users to my events as well as reserve “locations”, despite all my personal (non-domain) calendars continuing to work properly. I noted these iCal errors…

  • How To Prepare For Ignite

    I recently had the pleasure of speaking at Ignite Phoenix 4, and thought I’d share my perspective to those presenting in the future. See, all my life I’ve been in performing musical groups–rock bands, solos with larger concert bands, marching bands etc.–so despite being introverted to a fault, I’m not easily intimidated by anything in…

  • How To Change A WordPress Permalink Structure While Preserving SEO

    I’ve been putting off changing my blog permalink structure for about 2 years for fear of getting SEO-smacked by Google. No joke. WordPress allows you to easy change the permalink structure with a few clicks, but doesn’t generate permanent redirect (HTTP 301) responses for visitors using the old link structure. Non-redirection link changes for established…

  • Photography Is A Lie: Creating Compelling Event Photos

    When it comes to “good” event photography, it’s a misconception that a given photo is representative of the entire event condensed down to a few well-framed shots. My process is both equal and opposite: to mislead the viewer into believing a few highly manipulated fleeting moments reflect the larger context by pleasing the eye with…

  • Speaking Twice At ABLEconf: Saturday, September 20th, 2008

    I’ll be giving two sessions this Saturday, September 20th, 2008 at ABLEconf: Arizona Business and Liberty Experience hosted at the University of Advancing Technology. The first will be a ~50 minute getting-started-with-ruby-on-rails type session aimed at developers similar to the one I’m giving this Wednesday for Joe Developer. The second will be a plug-heavy talk over how…

  • Installing The MySQL Ruby Gem When Using The Official MySQL .dmg

    If you installed MySQL using the official .dmg package provided by MySQL AB/Sun and are trying to install the native MySQL gem, you’ll need to pass a bunch of flags to the gem install process to get the thing to compile. Try this.. sudo gem install mysql — –with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config ..if you still have issues (check your /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/<ruby_ver>/gems/mysql-<gem_ver>/mkmf.log…

  • 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…

  • Rails attachment_fu/Kropper Scaling Fix: attachment_fu_skip_resize

    I recently integrated Kropper into a custom RoR application for OpenRain affiliate img surf. A fundamental flaw in the upload-save-crop-save process used by Kropper is that attachment_fu automatically scales down the image on first save to :resize_to dimensions. After the subsequent crop–which may result in a significant drop in resolution–the image is scaled back up…

  • Dynamically Generating SSL Certificates with Ruby on Rails

    OpenRain had a couple projects recently need to programmatically generate private keys and SSL certificates in Ruby. To contribute back to the community, we’re releasing several small things today. SSLsicle.com A simple form which does the OpenSSL grunt work and pop outs an SSL certificate ready to use with Apache (or whatever). SSLsicle uses.. eassl_fix…

  • 20 Steps To Xen: A Quick Xen Tutorial For Ubuntu 7.04 x64 Server

    This is an abbreviated and simplified version of a more official document. Run these either as root or with the “sudo” command.. apt-get install ubuntu-xen-desktop-amd64 to install a new Xen kernel and various other tools. Apparently we’re supposed to use the “server” version instead, but it didn’t show up in the repository. Oh well. apt-get…