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

Extending Database_form to send Emails via Mailer extension

 9th March 2009 by Chris

Radiant is just a gem. Its installation is very easy, and super fast. I really didn't have much trouble. But the thing is, I wanted to have more control over the code itself, since I will be tweaking the Radiant app into something that fits their needs, and my deliverables too. And so, if you end up with this decision, just unpack your radiant gem.

gem unpack radiant

Once you have the tree generated, you'll see that its a normal Rails application hiding in the gem. Now you can inspect the code, and have it tweaked according to your will. I made changes in some of the templates, stylesheets, etc, and added some extensions. One of the uses of the site would be to serve as a mail form where users can contact them via a feedback section. I checked out their [Third Party extensions][8] which was quite extensive enough. I found a couple of them that I really needed:

Sorting is a part of Searching

 7th February 2009 by Chris

Caution: Programming is addictive

 30th January 2009 by Chris

True that its symptoms of pain gradually increases over time. I'm a touch typist and I usually feel the pain when typing things for long straight hours without a break. (just like when I blog or when I program). The pain now lasts longer and disappears only for a short while. It has gotten into my attention lately, and so I tried to work on a short term remedy. I bought myself a wrist brace. Although Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) states that CTS is not directly proven to be caused by repetitive activities as compared to structural and biological risk factors, I still cannot take away the fact that the pain emanates during contact with the computer. *Below are photos of my wrist brace*.

Testing is a Remarkable thing!

 9th December 2008 by Chris

I never knew testing could really change the way I code. I know I’m a good programmer because I love implementing standards and doing the “right things” the “first time”.. and yet testing has made me realize something..

Migrating from MySQL to PostgreSQL

 4th December 2008 by Chris

Along with the migration that I have done from SVN to Git and deploying my projects using Capistrano recipes, I was also faced with one task that was not very easy. I had to move my MySQL databases to PostgreSQL.

Why move?

Well, I gave it a thought, and I feel that I am now more comfortable with using Rails with PostgreSQL. Another factor is that I've already used MySQL in my early programming days and seemed fit for small scale projects. Since I have been dealing more and more with bigger databases, I'm getting the hang of using PostgreSQL over MySQL. It didn't really have to be very technical, but the simple preference mattered much.

Trust nothing but tests

 21st November 2008 by Chris

Where have all the tests gone?  What tests??? I "shoulda", I coulda.. but can't.  My energy gets wasted.  

Sound familiar?  I know it does.

Measuring it up

 15th November 2008 by Chris

There are different ways to start your application out right. Some work on TDD methods, some equip their teams with good QAs, the others rely on extremely efficient project management and strong system administration. But the building of a good rails application does not only depend on code alone and its processes…

Quick fixing Blackbook gem for Gmail

 14th November 2008 by Chris

The blackbook gem, though not really maintained well right now has still been a good solution for my needs in networking stuffs. Although, recently pointed out by Marco Fang was some trouble with Gmail changing the way data is retrieved via the API.

Previously, a query for contacts via..