Reification sounds horribly abstract, however it is an incredibly important concept, related to writing better software: By means of reification, something that was previously implicit, unexpressed, and possibly inexpressible is explicitly formulated and made available to conceptual (logical or computational) manipulation. Informally, reification is often referred to as “making something a first-class citizen” within the [...] Read more – ‘The Benefits of Reification in Software Engineering’.
These Style Guides capture some of the best practices when writing anything related to a Ruby on Rails Software project. Starting from Rails code via emails all the way to git commit messages, these guides cover a wide range of topics. Read more – ‘Ruby on Rails Software Engineering Style Guides’.
The Firesheep Firefox plugin got a lot of attention lately, and rightly so. It raised awareness for the issue of HTTP session hijacking. It’s about time we make the internet a more secure place. I just secured one of our soon to be launched products (Tiro) and am documenting the process here. When you follow [...] Read more – ‘How to secure a Rails app on heroku with SSL (Firesheep)’.
For simple applications I use cron to run automated background jobs like sending emails or indexing sphinx. I like to have all aspects of my application under version control. Cron is no exception. To do this, I add a file named “crontab” in /config. In there I add all my cron jobs in regular cron [...] Read more – ‘Simplest way to use cron with Rails’.
This recipe shows you how to search, filter, and sort your resource lists in a restful way. We will look at the most simple way to accomplish this and then provide some pointers to further improvements. This recipe works great with will_paginate. It is an end to end solution (model, view, and controller). This recipe [...] Read more – ‘Recipe: RESTful search for Rails’.
I have used strftime a lot lately on one of my projects. I could not find a user friendly reference for strftime, so I wrote one. Here is my user friendly strftime cheat sheet in PDF format: Read more – ‘strftime cheat sheet’.
Here is what I had to do to enable tablet pressure support for the X11 based Gimp and Inkscape applications on OS X Leopard: My setup: OS X Leopard: 10.5.5 on Intel X11: XQuartz 2.3.2 RC2 Inkscape: 0.46 (Mac binary) Gimp: 2.6.3 (Mac binary) Tablet: Wacom Graphire ET from around 2003 Key points are: get [...] Read more – ‘Tablet pressure support on OS X for X11, Gimp, and Inkscape’.
it’s been officially released for a few days now and I think it is a big deal. OpenOffice.org 3.0 is a big step forward: Native Aqua – means it looks as beautiful as we expect from an OS X app. That has a big impact on my productivity. I enjoy working with beautiful tools. It [...] Read more – ‘OpenOffice.org 3.0 for Mac – a big deal’.
or What they mean with thinking outside of the box. Reading this article reminded me of a concept that applies to software design, user interface design, hardware engineering, and pretty much to any situation where you have to solve a problem creatively. I have applied it in a number of disciplines, however I have not [...] Read more – ‘Experts design breadth first’.
