Kangaroo Court {concept47 blog}

jQuery Deconstructed

admin — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 17:29:16 +0000

Very cool visualization of the entire jQuery framework code It visually breaks the code into sections/categories with short explanations of what each does. Makes it really easy to follow and understand the jQuery code. Built by UK Developer, Dave Stewart

Running thin instead of mongrel with script/server

admin — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 08:48:06 +0000

Just go to the the rails directory that corresponds to this one on your computer (This is on a windows XP machine, but you should be able to figure out the right path on your machine) C:\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\rails-2.3.5\lib\commands Open up server.rb And edit the line that says server = Rack::Handler::Mongrel to say server = Rack::Handler::Thin enjoy

In the midst of crisis, opportunity … a counter-argument to “Free Kills”

admin — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 23:42:55 +0000

Today I read this really insightful article about how giving away software can kill the market for it. While I largely agree with the Andy, I think that he has missed one important point. Giving away a really good product in a certain space can depress sales and stifle innovation, but there will always be that small percentage [...]

Google dropping support for IE6 in March 2010

admin — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 20:56:16 +0000

Finally!

How to add updated_at and created_at (timestamps) columns to an existing table in rails

admin — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 13:20:32 +0000

From Rails Guides … change_table :products do |t| t.timestamps end

Google Chrome adds RSS feed notification/preview/subscription via extension

admin — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 08:55:22 +0000

This may have been around for a while, but I just learned of it today. If you run the dev version of Google Chrome, you may already be aware that it supports extensions. In fact when I first found out Google had published a few extensions for eager beta testers to try out, I went and got [...]

Don’t hit the business growth accelerator just yet Joel!

admin — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:21:44 +0000

Yesterday, Joel Spolsky posted an article about why growing steadily but slowly might not be such a good idea. When I read it, I had my reservations about it, but I couldn’t express them … the whole idea just sounded wrong? Well, the guys over at 37Signals issued a rebuttal of Mr Spolsky’s argument, and I have [...]

From the books: Exceptions to Ruby’s standard variable assignment by reference behavior

admin — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 07:30:37 +0000

The un-reference: immediate values Some objects in Ruby are stored in variables as immediate values. These include integers, symbols (which look like :this), and the special objects true, false and nil. When you assign one of these values to a variable (x = 1), the variable holds the value itself, rather than a reference to it – [...]

Wordpress creator Matt Mullenweg on staying in the ‘zone’ as a developer

admin — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 06:04:45 +0000

“Music helps me when I’m coding, which is still my priority. When you’re coding, you really have to be in the zone. I’ll listen to a single song, over and over on repeat, like a hundred times. And I turn off instant message and email. If you are taken out of the flow, if that [...]

Passenger dying … too many apache processes

admin — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 05:56:10 +0000

I encountered this problem when I first started working with Passenger, and have run into it repeatedly over the last year, so I thought I’d just throw out the fix I have for it. Usually people having these problems are usually running the prefork MPM and have a section in their apache config file that looks [...]

rake aborted! development database is not configured.

admin — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:16:05 +0000

You might have been happily running migrations on your development box for weeks and go to get the application set up on a production server. And all might even have been going well until you ran rake db:migrate only to see it crash and burn like this. ** Invoke db:migrate (first_time) ** Invoke environment (first_time) ** Execute environment rake aborted! development database [...]

Real programmers write in Fortran!

admin — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 20:04:02 +0000

And oldie-but-goodie … Mel’s job was to re-write the blackjack program for the RPC-4000. (Port? What does that mean?) The new computer had a one-plus-one addressing scheme, in which each machine instruction, in addition to the operation code and the address of the needed operand, had a second address that indicated where, on the revolving [...]

Netbeans 6.7 final released

admin — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 21:57:43 +0000

Click image to go to Announcement page. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to install it and write a half-decent review soon (for the Ruby/Ruby on Rails part at least)

Rackspace goes down … takes internet with it.

admin — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 21:32:49 +0000

Nothing insightful to say here but just link to the blow-by-blow account of the incident as it happened Apparently it was such a big deal that even Justin Timberlake weighed in … pure hilarity. The ironic thing is one of the folks I work for, *just* got a rackspace server.

How to get a 25% boost in your Rails app?

admin — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 20:39:59 +0000

I was working on a rails app today, and got to wondering about the very many SHOW FIELDS FROM MySql queries I was seeing. I had always thought about whether there was a way to get rid of those completely, or reducing the number of them by caching or something. Well, today I actually did some digging and found [...]