September 2010
1 post
Rails IE Conditional Tag Plugin
There are a number of ways to support defining different CSS styles for specific versions of Internet Explorer:
Known CSS Hacks (ie, tricking the parser’s tiny brain with strange incantations)
Using IE-specific conditional comments around link tags to additional stylesheets
Applying version-specific CSS classes to help differentiate them, using conditional comments
I agree with Thomas...
July 2010
1 post
2 tags
Riak: A friendly key/value store for the web
A few days ago I had the opportunity to speak at DevNation Portland on Riak — a fun NoSQL system I’ve become interested in lately. Here are my slides from the talk.
Note: For some reason both Scribd and Slideshare tend to mangle vector graphics imported into Keynote. You can a download “prettier” PDF version here. (I’m told it looks pretty nice in iBooks.)
...
June 2010
1 post
2 tags
Speaking at DevNation Portland
Just a quick note — a rare spike of activity in my [sadly] dwindling ability to write anything on my blog…
I’ll be speaking at DevNation Portland on July 10th, covering a technology I’ve become interested in lately: Riak. Riak is a robust and friendly key/value store for the web, built on top of Erlang (with a bit of C and Javascript thrown in). I’ll focus...
May 2010
1 post
1 tag
A bandaid for Rcov on Ruby 1.9
If you’re running into issues with this encoding-related error using RCov 0.9.8 & Ruby 1.9.X:
in `block in is_code?':
invalid byte sequence in US-ASCII (ArgumentError)
Here’s a quick monkey patch to drop into your test helper or Rakefile until a fix is released:
if defined?(Rcov)
class Rcov::CodeCoverageAnalyzer
def update_script_lines__
if...
April 2010
3 posts
3 tags
Checking Executables with Spex
If you’ve ever built (or configured) tools for system administration, you know the frustration of not being able to easily verify the effects of running those tools in real-world situations. Executables are little black boxes that can have far-ranging effects on systems that are hard to track down, validate, and even harder to check across multiple executions.
Spex is a simple, extensible...
2 tags
RSpecfully, I disagree
RSpec has a very, very strong following in the Ruby community, and for a lot of good reasons. It’s fairly easy to use once you grok it, it’s a DSL (thereby marking off that most important of checkboxes — “expressiveness” — we Rubyists do like our blocks), and its popularity has played an important role in building the Ruby testing culture. Bully for RSpec!
...
1 tag
Constrain Yourself
I’ve been traveling a lot lately. After wrapping up two very successful weeks in the U.K. — a fun trip to Edinburgh, where I spoke at the Scottish Ruby Conference (previously “Scotland on Rails”), and a week in London, where I taught a course for Puppet Labs — there was little I wanted to do but get home. I enjoy traveling (especially to the U.K., where I spent some...