Technobabble Category

OS X Tip, recover windows from external monitor

In: Technobabble

So one latest OS X annoyance that I actually stumbled across the solution for. At work I hook up an external monitor to my MacBook Pro, and usually keep all my terminal windows on that one. When I leave, I try to remember to unplug the monitor before I close the lid, because [...]

Poor, poor snow leopard

In: Observations, Technobabble

So Apple has released their new OS, Snow Leopard, and this is what the Apple homepage looks like:
I imagine this leopard, chillin, enjoying a nice snowy day, when along comes an Apple photo crew.
*FWAP*, they nail him in the head with a snowball, and as he looks at them with annoyance, they snap his picture.
I [...]

Rails Gotcha Regarding Test Fixtures

In: Technobabble

I wasted a chunk of time running in circles over this issue.  I had assumed that when I loaded the fixtures into my database via ‘rake db:fixtrues:load’ or ‘rake spec:db:fixtures:load’ in Ruby on Rails that it was blowing away all the data in all of my tables before creating records. It turns out that it [...]

Facebook Now Allowing Spam?

In: Reviews, Technobabble

You can’t turn around lately without hearing about the latest craze on facebook: 25 Random Things.  The premise is, you put up 25 random and usually useless things about yourself, and then “tag” a bunch of people so that they can come read it and praise you for the witty and interesting things you have [...]

New Look for OLEX

In: Technobabble

Today we deployed the latest version of our product OpenLogic Exchange (OLEX) and it includes a brand new look and feel.  The design was truly done by concensus with our entire engineering department, and it came out better than anything I think I could have done in isolation.
I used a varierty of techniques I had [...]

I’m going to be an Android

In: Technobabble

After several hours of mashing the refresh button in Firefox, I was finally able to get to the G1 preorder form and place mine.  On October 22nd, I will be the proud owner of a G1, the first Android powered smart phone.  The phone has a touchscreen interface similar to the iPhone, but it also [...]

I saw this new Microsoft commercial the other day, and I have to say I think it’s brilliant for the following reasons:

It shines light on the fact that Apple is casting an unfair stereotype of PC users
It gives existing Microsoft costumers a group of people they can feel proud identifying with
It makes Apple look like [...]

Commiting to a new branch with Subversion

In: Technobabble

UPDATE: Don’t follow this guide, look down in the comments and do what John suggested.  This totally screwed me up, as none of the changes I did before I created the branch came through in the merge.
I started working on a new feature for my product today, and realized after several hours that committing my [...]

Rails Upgrade Woes

In: Technobabble

The Ruby on Rails application that I work on uses a plugin called Hobo. We are using a fairly old version of Hobo, because upgrading has been difficult, but the recent security concerns prompted us to take a serious crack at it. It seems that every time I get close to pushing through, [...]

Ruby debugging with colorized logging

In: Technobabble

One of the ways I prefer to debug is to print things to standard out and watch a console window. The problem is, in Rails, I get a lot of spam to sift through that I usually don’t need: SQL statements, routing and rendering info, etc. It makes finding your output difficult. [...]

About this blog

This blog is a dumping grounds for my experiences as a web developer, a parent, an artist, a writer and a human being. Maybe someday there will be something here that is worth your time, some sort of useful information or words that piece your very soul. Probably not though.