I ran into a rather surprising little problem earlier this week that I felt bore documenting. It turns out that the “simple” Rails strip_tags helper is massive overkill when you just want to strip markup out of a document. It offers a lot of functionality, but it comes at a pretty ugly performance cost. Here’s [...]
I’ve recently set up Fedora 16 on my laptop, and all has been smooth, save for the brightness switches. The on-screen display would show up when I used the fn-F2/fn-F3 key combinations, but the brightness just wouldn’t change. Additionally, the brightness was stuck at the lowest level. Turns out there’s a pretty easy fix in [...]
For a long time, I used the PixelPerfect Firefox add-on to compare rendered comps with my finished web work. This was a fast and effective way to make sure that I got the spacings, font sizes, and other such things done properly. However, PixelPerfect doesn’t work all that well (well, at all) anymore, and Firefox [...]
I recently found myself needing to share session data from my Rails app with a PHP app on the same domain. We use cookie sessions for a number of reasons, and while they work great, the data stored in them is stored in Ruby’s native Marshal format, which is not trivial to reimplement in PHP. [...]
Easy way to trigger off a reload of a service managed by Monit without having to become root. In my case, I’ve got a monit service called resque-worker, and I can restart it by just touching tmp/resque-restart.txt. Ties in nicely with deploy tasks, and you don’t have to end up leaving root access SSH keypairs [...]
MongoDB, as I’ve mentioned before, is not without its warts. I’ve run into another, and it’s a nasty one. It turns out that if you perform count() on a query cursor that includes any conditions, even if those conditions are indexed, the operation takes O(n) time to run. In practice, I’ve found that this costs [...]
Resque is a bucket of awesome slathered in a delicious candy coating. It makes background job work really, *really* easy. I recently switched to it, and found that in the process of testing it, I was generating an awful lot of extra unfulfilled jobs in my queue, when the job was a side-effect of some [...]
I’m a huge fan of MongoDB – after years in MySQL, Interbase, and Postgres SQL databases, it was quite a breath of fresh air to get to try a document database on for size. I’ve more or less adopted it as my default data store for web applications, due to a number of awesome features [...]
Once upon a time, I wrote a quick-and-dirty Rails plugin for site configuration. Since then, I’ve continued to use variants on this pattern, and it’s evolved to the point that it deserved a revisit. After continually slimming down the code, I realized that even though it’s tiny, it’s danged useful to be able to just [...]
It’s like it’s 1996 all over again, except with less suck. Webkit now supports styleable scrollbars, and you get to use all the Webkit CSS3 goodies, like gradients and rounded corners and the like. If you’re using Chrome or Safari, you might notice that I have the blog theme rocking super sexy grey scrollbars now, [...]
