Category: Uncategorized

Recently I was involved in a project moving a company’s files from a old 2003 windows exchange server to a mac mini server setup. The first setup was to move from Exchange’s email and calendaring to Google Apps. After that step was complete we moved the shared files drive over to thunderbolt RAID 5 storage attached to a mac mini server device. The transition was pretty smooth, however there was one problem which wasted a significant amount of time. The accountant’s in the organization use QuickBooks 2010 for all accounting purposes. Moving to a hosted solution was not an option, and they needed multi-user access to the file (2-3 people could be working on the same quickbooks file at any given moment)…

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After reading the official MacRuby docs on deployment, I read over this guide. Although the deployment build seemed to be working fine on my local machine when I dropped it on my laptop with a standard Lion install it crashed, claiming that there was an defined constant – but that constant was a class. How could it be undefined if it ran fine locally? Looking into it a bit more the class that was undefined was being used as a superclass for another ruby class. Taking a look at rb_main.rb revealed that there is no specific load order. Since the load order was undefined, the class requiring the other ruby class as a superclass was being loaded before the superclass was loaded…

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When developing web-apps locally it is useful to have a fully functional smtp server to test automated emails associated with your application. Many times the network you are developing on will not allow you to simply start up postfix and and run your own local smtp server. However, this doesn’t imply that you can’t use postfix – modifying postfix to relay all outgoing mail to an external / offsite smtp server that you have control of will enable you to develop & test the parts of your application that require a local outgoing smtp server without an issue. Many times port 25 (the default smtp port) will be blocked somewhere along the line in your network connection…

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Empowered Interactivity A while ago I read an article on the lessons to learn from the DropBox marketing model. After reading the chapter on empowered interactivity I immediately recalled that article and how incentivizing referals increased signups by something like 60%. People generally want to share what is useful to them, and they really want to share something if it can benefit them in someway…

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I’m currently reading Buzzmarketing by Mark Hughes, a book about word-of-mouth advertising. I’m only about a 1/4 way through the book but as I’m reading through the book I keep comparing the ideas that he is presenting to experiences in my own life in order to understand the practical application of his ideas. I’m not a marketer by trade, this book is the first step in my goal to achieve a better understanding of marketing methods (especially marketing via social networking channels). The two key concepts I’ve pulled from the first section of the book are: 1) the human desire of having something worthy of the interest of others 2) the effectiveness of creating a ‘pre-packaged conversation’ that people want to share with others…

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I read two articles – the app bubble and bad news about iphone economics – which surprised me a bit. Their analysis, which doesn’t account for gain in human capital and the value of lock-in (or alternatively the cost of switching), seems to posit that the App Store is bad for everyone. I could be completely misevaluating the arguments presented, but I believe that if you dig into the arguments presented significant benefits are not being accounted for. Apple is Paid to Advertise Apps aren’t very profitable for Apple either…

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I love MooTools. I’ve been using it before the 1.2 days; it has been great watching how much it has matured. One of the best things about MooTools is the amount of components that have been written for it: Videobox, SlimBox, and TextBoxList just to name a few. However, the switch from 1.1 to 1.2 broke alot of existing functionality and with that broke alot of the existing components. Just the other day I found just the component I was looking for: Videobox. The examples on the site looked great, but it didn’t work with the newest version of MooTools. I spent some time converting the animation code over to the new 1.2 syntax and fixing some other random bugs, you can grab the fixed version here…

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Yesterday I was greatly distraught when my MacBook Pro’s superdrive would not accept blank DVD-Rs. When I inserted a blank DVD-R it spun around for a bit, sped up, slowed down, stopped, then spit it back out at me with no error message. It read DVDs, burned CDs, and read CDs fine; but I could not get it to accept a blank DVD-R! I searched around and found information about the MacBook superdrive update which killed alot of people’s optical drives. I couldn’t remember if i installed the update or not, so I was fairly worried because I did not want to drop $400 to fix something which an Apple update broke. I tried a bunch of tricks to try to get my beloved superdrive to work, but to no avail…

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Although TextMate comes with a built in CSS validation command it would sometimes fail for me depending on where I was working from (some locations have proxy software on the main router). I rewrote the command in the style of the PHP-HTML validator I posted earlier. You can add more validation options using -F. I’ve only used this script on CSS only files, it might not work on inline CSS in HTML documents. [code lang=”bash”]#!/usr/bin/env ruby -wKU scope = STDIN.read scope.gsub!(/< /?style.*?>/, ”) open(‘|curl -sF file=@-;type=text/css -F lang=en http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator’, ‘r+’) do |io| io < < scope io.close_write while io.gets $_.gsub!(//, '&') print $_ end end [/code]

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