Bug This! Techie Journal - Developer's geek eyes on the world

My Photo Fun: Green Light (Color Accent)

2009-11-25T13:34:00.003+08:00

Green Light (Color Accent) Originally uploaded by goodwill1120 Kinda off topic here :) I just got my Canon Powershot S90, and one of the really interesting effect I found in this little babe is the color accent feature- basically it helps you to filter the entire picture to black and white except the color you have chosen. Kinda fun effect. So I have experiment this with a traffic light near my

So you can actually nest rails layout in nth level...

2009-11-22T17:17:00.001+08:00

Yeah I know probably I have overlooked this feature (I mean, I should have know this long ago :P), but this is something really handy:http://guides.rubyonrails.org/layouts_and_rendering.html#using-nested-layoutsThere are a few things you can learn here:1. A yield can be conditional by nil- if you yield something first or yield the other one, that would give you a chance to select which to be

Freebie for Ruby: ISO Country List

2009-11-07T11:49:00.002+08:00

So every time when a customer ask you to get an ISO country list setup on your project, you start to pull your hair and dig the source. Usually you would end up finding some kind of source, but then spend a few hours to do data nursing. This is what I have did, and to avoid you do it again, here is my output:http://gist.github.com/228512If there is smarter way please let me know :) Otherwise hope

So here is a big reason why you should use reCAPTCHA instead of doing your own

2009-10-28T17:26:00.000+08:00

I might be too slow for this, but reCAPTCHA actually helps to recognize old text book (i.e. Human OCR)??? That's amazing. http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html Now this is a very good reason for you to use it everywhere.

We have launched our new company website!

2009-10-27T19:10:00.000+08:00

It's been long overdue, but finally we have launched our new website. With no surprise, it is powered by our own developed Content Management System, named Prism. It's somewhat based on some concepts of Radiant, but as we found Radiant is so incomplete, we have developed our own with the mighty Ruby on Rails. If you have interest to find out more about the product, feel free to contact us via

Latest Linode Feature: One-click resizing and libcloud support!

2009-10-27T16:30:00.000+08:00

Finally finished busying with the office relocation and renovation, today spent sometime to read linode's blog. I realize they have just released two very exciting features: 1. One-click resizing of linode: Just select your new plan and click submit, 8 minutes later you got your new resized linode! http://blog.linode.com/2009/09/09/self-serve-linode-resizes/ 2. libcloud support: Now you can

See you all @ Barcamp.hk 09

2009-08-31T11:02:00.002+08:00

I would probably going to Barcamp this year too, so if you guys want to see me, we could meet at some kind of Ruby/Rails section I guess... http://barcamp.hk/

Microsoft got your post from fixoutlook.org, still not listening

2009-08-24T16:27:00.000+08:00

The worst way to market your company is really to hear what people say about you, and then still enforce what you believe is correct: http://blogs.msdn.com/outlook/archive/2009/06/24/the-power-of-word-in-outlook.aspx#comments This is freaking stupid idea- basically, we are not complaining the use of Word as the mail composer, but the use of Word as the mail renderer for EVERY EMAIL. The

Here's why you should not consider using Outlook 2007 (Unless if your company force you to do so, of course)

2009-08-21T16:27:00.000+08:00

The fact is, basically you can do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING in modern HTML email if you want to send email to outlook 2007 clients. http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/2393/microsoft-takes-email-design-b/ We absolutely once again got pissed off by Microsoft. Thats awfully stupid. If they want to maintain compatibility within MS Word RTF email, the easiest approach is to have a x-header embedded

Wow.... 160GB SATA II HDD is THAT expensive?

2009-08-18T16:48:00.001+08:00

Take a look before its gone :Phttp://www-607.ibm.com/shop/asiapacific/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/default/ProductDisplay?catalogId=-344&storeId=344&langId=344&dualCurrId=104&categoryId=4611686018425008260&productId=4611686018425053276To prove I have seen something interesting, here is a screenshot:P.S. Thats roughly 14K USD for a hard drive :)

Stop throwing away computers....

2009-08-05T18:16:00.000+08:00

Just when I hope I could buy a new Macbook Pro for my colleague, somebody sent me this: http://www.storyofstuff.com/index.html I tend to agree what the author says, especially I really don't feel my 3 year old Dell Inspirion unusable, the problem is- software availability. With a mac, I could use my BSD environment I use for most of my apps, Windows, and Adobe Software natively. Windows sucks

Oh man, I want google voice!

2009-08-03T11:38:00.001+08:00

This is SOOOO SLICK. I want it. http://www.google.com/googlevoice/about.html#

Forgot require 'rubygems'? Actually you have a better choice

2009-07-30T00:21:00.000+08:00

I just testing erubis recently, and realize the code doesn't work. The problem is simple- the command line script does not require 'rubygems' automatically. Originally I thought its a bug- read a bit more, maybe not :) http://gist.github.com/54177 The extract- you can use your environment variable to make rubygems your default option, and since Ruby 1.9 has included it already, you dont have to

Facebook Ads Evil!

2009-07-26T23:20:00.002+08:00

This is what I see in my Facebook friend's wall. I am putting it here to get everybody aware such evil setting in facebook. If you don't want to make your friend got into ad trap accidentally, go change the settings now! ALERT: Facebook has agreed to let third party advertisers use your posted pictures without your permission. Click on "Settings" up at the top where you see the "Logout" link.

Hardcoding browser support is so ancient, and poor HKSAR government is still doing it

2009-07-24T13:51:00.001+08:00

I just don't understand if anybody could go writing website without considering the issues stated by Zeldman in his Designing with web standard book. The fact is, once I got my Firefox automatically updated to 3.5, HKSAR government tax system just block me out- it doesn't even allow me to try using the platform.This is not a safety measure, instead it just completely discourage people using

So who is this old browser anyway?

2009-06-06T12:48:00.000+08:00

Read the text- designed for older browsers... Which is this old browser anyway :) I will let you find out the answer yourself.

Extension Method in C# Rocks

2009-05-18T11:58:00.001+08:00

While I always say ASP.NET SXXKS, at the same time I always give credits to the great C# language itself, its very robust, high performance, and the best of all is: the team learn a lot of great syntax from other languages.I have been writing Ruby for almost 2 years, one of the coolest thing you found in Ruby (and many dynamic languages) are the ability to extend your class dynamically with your

It turns out livequery is still very important on jQuery 1.3

2009-05-08T13:49:00.001+08:00

When jQuery introduced live and die event, we thought we don't need livequery plugin for hooking AJAX update element events. True for the statement above, but if you think you don't need livequery anymore, not quite. The truth is you still have something other than AJAX that requires livequery. This plugin has a very interesting feature which allows you to hook a function base on a new element

So you want a javascript html template... PURE.

2009-05-06T14:52:00.000+08:00

Stefan sent me this link: http://beebole.com/pure/ This thing rocks. I think everyone (especially those who have used JSON) should have come across need to do HTML template on the client JS and update the content when actual JSON data comes back. This could be really handy, and of coz, like many great libraries, its jQuery based.

The ASP.NET WebForm way of AJAX...

2009-04-28T17:39:00.000+08:00

I have been working for an ASP.NET AJAX project recently, to do a partial update, instead of issuing $.load/$.post in jquery, I have to: 1. Create a display:none div with a hidden field and a button 2. Add the button to async post using ScriptManager.RegisterAsyncPostControl 3. When user click the link collection I have generated runtime in client side (so thats why I can't hook the event before

HKROR April Meetup

2009-04-24T16:32:00.001+08:00

Ok we have finished our April meetup :) For those who haven't come, here is a brief summary:1. I am the speaker for jQuery + Rails, I have talk about issues you would encounter when trying to use jQuery with Rails, workaround, and then a tic-tac-toe demo with json and js eval design.2. Aaron Farr did a demo for Phusion Passenger + Apache, some hiccups but finally things works :)For my

OK... mod_rails + nginx, dont get too excited just yet

2009-04-18T11:10:00.000+08:00

I was very excited about the news until I really test it myself. As its a 1.0 support for nginx, as usual things broke: If your have PCRE installed at system instead of linking it with the nginx compilation, it would by accident proceed without linking it. i.e. All your rewrite rules will no longer work I tried to go without the rewrite and just put phusion up, performance is terrible. I really

Phusion Passenger Married with Nginx!!!!!!

2009-04-17T11:51:00.000+08:00

If that 6 exclamation is not enough to show the excitement, see the video yourself. http://www.modrails.com/videos/passenger_nginx.mov In short, now mod_rails supports NGINX too. That would be too much of a great news for rails hosting, especially those who don't really need the huge footprint apache. Indeed now NGINX also able to run php on fcgi, so I guess unless you are into something that's

The classical April's Fool- Google TiSP

2009-04-02T11:33:00.001+08:00

If you still havent check this one out before (I think it has been out for a few years), go check it and have some fun :) http://www.google.com/tisp/

Please, for the sake of the world's benefit, go update your IE (if you still using IE i.e.)

2009-03-25T09:16:00.002+08:00

IE8 is released. With so many horrible pitfalls in IE6/7 regarding css compliance, you SHOULD goto update immediately, if you ever consider you want to use IE in any case. Of course, you can even choose to switch to FireFox/Safari/Chrome like the 50% of people in the world (according to recent w3schools browser statistics)