http://blog.westarete.com Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:07:17 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en (This post is only for Mac folks, and only the ones that spend time in the terminal at that. Everyone else can safely ignore this.) As you may already know, you can open a file from the command line using the "open" command. The file will be opened using the default ... http://blog.westarete.com/2008/09/10/quick-look-preview-from-the-command-line/ 1% For The Planet is a group of companies that have pledged to donate 1% of their annual sales to nonprofit environmental organizations. By donating a fixed portion of their "top line", these companies are committed to giving through thick and thin. They've just released a new promotional video that ... http://blog.westarete.com/2008/08/01/giving-from-the-top/ Tom Bell of Stratamodel is an exploration geologist. He travels around the world looking for valuable minerals. He's just wrapping up a several-week expedition to the desert in Niger to look for uranium. This guy has an incredible job. Tom gave me a ring a few days before leaving for his ... http://blog.westarete.com/2008/02/16/stratamodel-in-niger/ I decided that I needed to learn more about all the different ways to declare and use Ruby class methods, so I wrote a 10-line example script to try a couple things out. Two hours later, it had expanded to almost 300 lines (including lots of comments) as I tried ... http://blog.westarete.com/2008/02/15/exploring-ruby-class-methods/ Sometimes we purposely write code that has bugs that we don't intend to fix. I know that sounds terrible, but consider the following example. We were recently writing a class to parse a known set of data that didn't include any whitespace between tokens. Our one-time class worked great for ... http://blog.westarete.com/2007/12/13/anti-specs-using-rspec-to-document-the-bad-in-addition-to-the-good/ We upgraded the disks on our backup server to create some much-needed space. When the new drive arrived, I had to reformat it and copy the entire contents of the old backup disk to the new one. I needed a way to transfer 250GB of small files, while preserving permissions ... http://blog.westarete.com/2007/11/12/copying-a-large-amount-of-data-between-disks/ One thing that bothered me when I started using rails was that there wasn't a built-in way to verify that your actions are getting the correct arguments. For example, in this typical action: def show @dog = Dog.find(params[:id]) end an exception is raised if the "id" ... http://blog.westarete.com/2006/07/26/new-rails-plugin-validate_request/ Most of the documentation and writings for mongrel require setting up mongrel with apache 2.2, so that you get the benefit of the mod_balanced_proxy module. However there are an awful lot of production machines out there running apache 2.0. For small installations, it turns out that it can be quite sufficient ... http://blog.westarete.com/2006/07/25/deploying-mongrel-behind-apache-20/