My Point of View

I love Ruby, but I don’t understand how it works.

Note: Please don’t share this on Hacker News – I don’t need the grief from gatekeepers telling me I don’t know how to write a compiler.

Sorry, this post will read like a “dear diary” entry rather than some life-changing HN-worthy guidance.

Hi!

First, some background 🔗 My church uses Planning Center Check-Ins to track attendance for churchgoers, and to help with security with little ones going to kids areas.

I’m very proud to announce the completion of my first programming language compiler!

Recently I switched to the Sway window manager on my favorite laptop and realized that ClipIt does not work there.

Recently I made the decision to shut down the church.io website (it’s now a redirect), delete the corresponding Slack community, and move the GitHub repositories back to my own personal account.

Late in 2017, I politely said good-bye to Twitter and deleted my account.

Note: We no longer use this.

CanCan is a wonderful plugin for Rails that allows you to define all your authorization logic in one place.

If you’re like me, you have thousands of photos on Flickr, and thousands more scattered accross your laptop, external drive, and phone.

A lightning talk (5-minute) presentation I gave at TulsaWebDevs: What is Quality Note: I used to have this presentation embedded here, but it was scrolling the page and interfering, so now it’s just a link.

Here are some common time sinks encountered when building a JavaScript app, along with some tips to avoid them.

Posterous is set to shut down on April 30th.

I recently switched from Gnome to i3 on my main laptop.

So far the Tulsa Hackathon, an all-night programming drive benefiting needy Tulsa non-profits, is going underway and going well.

More pics!

The Tulsa Hackathon is steaming ahead.

I wanted my own Campfire-style web chat room, so I created on with node.js and socket.io that runs on Heroku.

Oh Good Lord in heaven, forgive me: I've started a new blog.

Introducing jqtal, my tiny jQuery plugin that provides a different way of doing client side HTML templating. jqtal is different because it is a part of and lives alongside the HTML itself.

Hey friends, I wanted to let you know I will be giving a presentation on Backbone.js at the next TulsaWebDevs meet-up.

Red Dirt Ruby Conference in nearby Oklahoma City was even better this year than last year, and that’s saying a lot.

I won’t bother explaining to my regular readers what these two things are.

Just got done watching this excellent discussion of Ruby hashes, associative arrays, testing, and Ruby culture.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor

I created a free micro instance on Amazon EC2 a few weeks ago.

If you're running a Linux desktop in an otherwise Windows environment, winexe may be something you'll enjoy.

Today, my small patch to Rails was applied by the core team.

I tend to use rsync when others would typically use a simple cp for copying files.

Just some pics. :-)

My 1st generation Macbook Pro is starting to show its age, but tonight I used my birthday money in an effort at rejuvenation.

Back in 2005, I uploaded a bunch of crude little pictures to my Flickr account [edit 12 years later: this account is gone] and called them my “Whiteboard Icons” set.

csv2wufoo.com is a little side project I wrote using Sinatra, my WufooParty lib, and James Edward Gray's FasterCSV lib.

I wanted to understand the Facebook REST API better, and decided I needed a simple wrapper for it.

I just updated my Greasemonkey userscript that generates usage graphs for Tarsnap.

Continuing with my HTTParty, I've created a fairly simple Flickr API wrapper for Ruby: flickr_party.

Update: This was renamed to campaign_monitor_party.

I’ve been working on a little experiment lately… a Ruby domain-specific language for generating Cascading Style Sheets called CascadingRubies.

sudo aptitude install libavahi-compat-libdnssd-dev sudo gem install technomancy-dnssd -s http://gems.github.com require 'rubygems' require 'dnssd'

I didn’t find this information anywhere, so here it is for the Google archives… To get Prototype to run after squeezing it through ShrinkSafe, you need to put back every instance of the variable $super.

I build web apps.

Just posting this for any friends getting ready to sign up for a SliceHost account.

We’re gearing up for the upcoming, very first Tulsa Ruby Workshop.

I still plan on writing the final part in the Git series on this blog, but in the meantime, on a related note, we now have a page up on the OneBody wiki about Using Git.

Oooo I really like the new Firefox 3 beta.

Just to save you a half-hour of your life, I thought I’d share that you should never create a named route called “directory” – it will break Rails migrations and other rake tasks in mysterious and hard-to-track-down ways.

For Part 2 of our 60-second Git tutorial, we’ll look at some super simple branching and merging. git branch tells you which branch you’re on. git branch -a lists all branches, even remote ones. git checkout mybranch checks out the branch you want. git che…

First, the mental hurdles:You don’t need a server to have a git repository.