Lance Ennen: Rails, Ruby, BDD, and Javascript

Obtiva Geekfest - Programming for business users - By. Brain Marick

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 12:37:55 -0400

Awesome interactive role-playing explanation of programming for business users by Brain Marick. See it yourself at the upcoming Agile2010 conf! I film this with my iPhone 4, and clipped it together using iMovie on my iPhone.

Obtiva Geekfest - Programming for business users - By. Brain Marick from Lance Ennen on Vimeo.

GrouponCon

Mon, 24 May 2010 17:53:00 -0400

This past weekend, I went to grouponcon which was an Open Space format conference for groupon and obtiva. At 9:30am, we began our Open Space facilitation and determined the direction for the day.

The first talk was a career retrospective of the man: Ward Cunningham. We discussed hypercard, which was his inspiration for wiki. Signature survey where Ward Cunningham talks about writing throw away scripts, and learning by reading the signature of the script. Fit, and finished with a quote by Ward Cunningham ”work effectively on the right thing in a visible way”.

Next we discussed scaling groupon the issues discussed were traffic spikes, high volume requests, expenses requests on card authorization, and collections. We focused on card authorization issues, and came up with ideas to pre-authorize good standing customers, based on number of purchases on there credit card. Tools were discussed such as Memcached, fragment caching, REE, upgrading mysql, LRU.Query cache, CDN, resque, upgrading hardware, cache render views, sphinx, profiling benchmarking.

After lunch I joined Matt Puchlerz for an HTML5 discussion. Matt suggested, if you haven’t read Dive into HTML5 that you start. He also pointed out html5shiv which makes IE recognize HTML5 elements. Matt, showed off Blowing up HTML5 video and mapping it into 3D space. This really showed off the power of HTML5. We finished the discussion with westciv and discussing 3D transforming in webkit.

I finished the day up with a discussion on how groupon used Mustache to develop a new secret beta version of groupon that everyone will soon have. Very cool!

Thanks to everyone at Groupon for having me!

I created a groupon chrome extension with Nate Jackson in less...

Fri, 07 May 2010 13:01:52 -0400

I created a groupon chrome extension with Nate Jackson in less then 4 hours. Download V.01 of the Groupon Chrome Extension here or check out the code on github.

My first time speaking. A little rough, but you got to start...

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 11:23:00 -0400

My first time speaking. A little rough, but you got to start somewhere! Thanks to Colin Harris and Tyler Jennings for making CSS-SPRITER Also, thanks to Colin Harris for images used in my slideshare.

Passenger, VMWare, and Windows for testing sites

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 16:37:00 -0500

I’ve been using Passenger for my Rails projects for the past year. When it comes to testing my Rails apps for browser compatibility I like to use crossover for ie6 (on OSX), and Windows 7 for ie7 and ie8 using Internet Explorers Developer Tools. I run Windows 7 using VMWare.

When I need to test an app that’s using Passenger in VMWare in the past I’ve updated my hosts file (/Windows/system32/drivers/etc/hosts) with my current IP address. This has become a pain, and time consuming.

The solution since we can not use 127.0.0.1 for a hostname. Run this command in your Terminal “ifconfig vmnet8” and grab the ip address next to inet. Take this ip address and update your hosts file on your Windows VM. Don’t forget to copy your hosts file from your Mac to the Windows hosts file.

Fixing Select Drop down issues in IE using jQuery

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 13:01:00 -0500

Firefox does auto width on data in select drop downs automatically, but IE doesn’t. This is a quick example of how you can use jQuery to fix this width issue, and allow your web visitors access to all the data in your drop downs the same in all browsers.

You can either use the input name, ID, or class. In this example I’m assuming you have an input name on your select field.

Resetting a cycle tag in Jinja

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 11:36:00 -0500

At my current client I’m working on a platform that uses Django, and a templating system called Jinja.

I had to use Jinja to change the CSS class to modify the background color for each dynamic data returned in each loop.

This seems straight forward after looking at Jinja’s documentation using the cycle tag.

So, the code looked like this:

and then the class in each loop look like this:

Each loop… that’s when I ran into an issue. We had more than one loop on one page, but we needed to have the class change, and increment by 1.

It was incrementing by 1, but not resetting after each loop. So, if 3 were in the first loop the next loop would start with 4, and not reset until after 5.

So, here is an example of resetting a cycle tag in Jinja:

By calling the cycle and using .reset() this returns none, and resets the cycle.

You will noticed I have commented out {{ row_class.reset() }} without comment tags this will render “None”. So, the hack is to just comment this out.

Check this out! I get 2 seconds of TV fame!

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 14:41:00 -0400

Check this out! I get 2 seconds of TV fame!

99 beers on the wall! FOR FUN!!!

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 00:15:00 -0500

Custom form with Validations using Rspec and Story Runner

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 01:31:00 -0500

To Install:

This is a custom Contact form with Validations without ActiveRecord. This works nicely without the use of the database or ActiveRecord model. It’s quite easy with a gem called Validatable.

"Life is one big road with lots of signs. So when you riding through the ruts, don’t complicate..."

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 12:03:03 -0400

“Life is one big road with lots of signs. So when you riding through the ruts, don’t complicate your mind. Flee from hate, mischief and jealousy. Don’t bury your thoughts, put your vision to reality . Wake Up and Live!?”

- Bob Marley