Picking up the breadcrumbs

 18th May 2010 by Chris

Its always easy to skip going through the details of what your stacked up knowledge and just go for trying out new stuff. This time, I take it one step back and skim through pages of books I have always ignored and pick some sections that are worth looking into and post them here.

I've been trying to cut down on paper materials at home. Mostly, trying to read all those books and photocopied materials and just jot down notes from them. I decided to post them instead. See some string, number, time/date extensions.

Acknowledging the unknown as part of the process

 25th February 2010 by Chris

I think this is by far the best, though vague and ambiguous poetry I've ever seen and I loved it!

Makes me want to keep in mind that knowledge in programming is quite volatile as it comes to real world problems to be solved, and that no accurate solution is definite across a period of time. The unknown is really a part of the process.

The power of toggle

 18th February 2010 by Chris

I don't know if we've been missing out on deliberate API lovin' or that we're becoming dumber every minute because of too much work, or its just the love month? ...but we've been missing the power of "toggle".

Toggle is [defined][1] as:

any instruction that works first one way and then the other; it turns something on the first time it is used and then turns it off the next time

Needless to say, toggle is very efficient for use with boolean values (defined by either true or false). Of course you might think its easy to implement, but this is an explicit example to illustrate on saving database reads and writes. Aside from that, you'll write a more elegant code.

DIY Ruby SFTP to S3

 14th February 2010 by Chris

I was faced by a challenge of transferring some files from an FTP server to S3. At first, the nature of the problem seemed simple. I just had to get the files to my local machine and then upload them to S3. Piece of cake! But lo and behold, when I saw that there were over 32K files and each step took me almost 2 minutes each! Oooh lala!

I knew this was a job for fanfare sound here the almighty ruby!

And so, I set my priorities straight.. I had to work elegantly and save time altogether. I'm feeling quite exhausted and would really love to get some sleep soon, so here I am, depending on my great yet simple ruby skills and the power of ruby itself to help me achieve this task!

As I write this article, my script is silently running in the background as a very obedient and competent slave. But to help you out, here is a brief guide on how to sit back, relax and let the task be accomplished in no time! You should really be sending me gifts.. or better yet, donate to me via Paypal! I'll love it, I promise.. I might even give you a page of exposure! :)

Forcing urls to use https

 5th February 2010 by Chris

If you have the need to force certain pages of your site to use ssl, but its becoming extremely cumbersome to find out the links that point to that page, this is a better approach, which seems to be more adhering to SPOT or (single point of truth).

Just add one method to your application controller and call before_filters to your specific controllers. That's it!

Wordpress 2.8.4 release, a joke?

 14th August 2009 by Chris

I have been maintaining several Wordpress blogs (all currently running 2.8.3 as of the time of writing). I logged in earlier today, and found that there was a new release. Of course, I wanted to have them all updated at the soonest possible time.

By practice, I download the zipped file to apply them manually onto our source code repositories for update. Usually, I find this useful because I get to see what the changes really were for the new release. I was surprised to see that the new version I downloaded was a complete joke.

I got Wordpress 2.8.4 here. I downloaded the file also inside the server, for a quick copy of the latest version, in case it will be needed. Applying it to local copy of the repository, I found some big joke. Amusing, but also confusing.

Free mini store search app in PHP and AJAX - for dummies

 2nd August 2009 by Chris

This is a very crude and very simple application which was for a demo purpose as requested by the client. I haven't been using PHP and (moreso) AJAX in over a year and a half already. This task was really more of a fun challenge that I cannot resist. I just wanted to see how long I can work on this and deliver what the client's requests were. Funny that this simple task was quoted to take 14 days of dev work, while it took me less than 5hours (since I was able to work on a CMS from scratch along with this all in 5hours of work time).

If you find yourself in need of a jumpstart, consider this the best freebie for you. Enjoy, and next time, give the client the correct estimates. It might save you both from hating each other and ruining possible future projects.

Premium should be quality

 5th July 2009 by Chris

Aside from daily tinkering of Ruby on Rails application, both for work and play, I have to serve requests that involve other scripting languages such as PHP and Python. PHP is the least of my favorites, but since its still the most widely used scripting language, in which more and more non CS grads have been so boastful of knowing, then I still go ways to cater to such applications. Love of Python is another thing. Its as beautiful as Ruby is for me, and as strict as how I tend to live my life.

As of the moment, I have a project running in PHP which was built using Smarty, though is not yet deployed on client's public server. Aside from this, I am also happily supporting several Wordpress powered blogs. I don't choose the themes, but I do have an input on whether its a good choice or not. We have completed customization of two of these blogs and was working on the last one yesterday. The chosen theme was IndoMagz2. Of course, I immediately uploaded the theme for use. After that was the anticipation of other stuff to be removed or added.

I couldn't have reacted negatively if I didn't have to go through the codes themselves to make some tweeks. At first glance, it looked just like any other magazine type wordpress theme. Blocks of elements are organized in the left and right columns of the layout. Although, I quite believe that three columned layouts are far better in information exposure, I don't have anything against using two columned layouts. I even thought that the layout was neat looking and the default banner would have really suited the new blog we were fixing. It was called "Ugaling Pinoy" which translates to "Filipino Attitudes" or even "Filipino Characteristics".

Be wrong to be correct

 1st July 2009 by Chris

Making GTD work for you using Hiveminder, Google Calendar, iCal, iSync and your mobile

 21st June 2009 by Chris

I'm a fairly new member of Hiveminder. I remember, I saw it first from a Lifehacker article discussing about the best GTD tool. I wanted something unobstrusive and could be used in a variety of ways.

I found Hiveminder and I gave it a spin. I immediately liked its simple layout which is quite refreshing and neat. I don't have to think much about how to use it. I immediately began using the "braindump" for all the tasks I had to work on. Though I'm a fan of handy notebooks, I would very much love to have technology remind me of things I need to work on too. Sometimes, I get too lazy to read my notebook or scribble down my thoughts for most of the time, I think faster than I could write!

Playing it safe with Google's web tools

 4th June 2009 by Chris

Just for the sake of 'doing-it-right', I enrolled all my sites into Google's Analytics and subjected them to Google Webmaster's tools. I'd check them from time to time to set some updates and fix reported errors.

Google Webmaster's tools is quite a handy measure for beginners who don't know where to start with their site monitoring or how to improve their pages the way Google sees it. You can optimize your page titles, see how to do it..

Migrate to your Wordpress blog using Ruby and Atom

 31st May 2009 by Chris

Recently, I have encountered a dilemma regarding my personal blog. I have it hosted by a local blog host provider. It was great staying there and blogging there when there was still this very tight-knit community of bloggers. From time to time, we'd all meet up and just express our thoughts in person. The providers were really great with hearing out their users' thoughts, wishes including rants and raves. They were really good with what they were doing (up to some point in time).

...

Now, being the Ruby lover that I am, I decided to write a Ruby script that would scrape my content and push it onto my new Wordpress blog. There are a couple of assumptions/caveats for this script:

• You can scrape off content from only YOUR OWN BLOG. Please don't use this to steal other people's content. I am not liable for any online content theft from the use of this script.
• You must be able to understand the structure of the blog you are scraping. You should know where the "excerpt", "main body", "post date", "post author", etc. info are located from the markup/source of the blog you are scraping.
• You must have the credentials of the blog where you want to push the scraped content.
• If in case you need something else, or some more tweaking to this script, you must know Ruby, or maybe you can drop me a line and I'll see how I can help you.
• This script uses Atom tools, although there are other gems available, this is what I chose to use.
• Turn on Atom publishing in your Wordpress blog.

...

Code revisiting and housekeeping

 11th April 2009 by Chris

Its a great success for every programmer once a project or an assignment has been completed. But give it a day, a week or even a month and the good old code in place is now stale.

Its every programmer's duty to revisit their codes once in awhile and reassess if the old codes are still pretty much the best codes to be inplace or if there's something new that could do something better, faster and easier with much less effort than before.

Easy CSS rounded corners

 5th April 2009 by Chris

Removing "out of sync" error in acts_as_solr

 27th March 2009 by Chris