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 [...]
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 [...]
So, I finally made it down to Gankplank. I’ve been meaning to get down here for a while, but I’ve just not made it happen. I took the weekend to get my development environment up to snuff on my laptop (so I can actually work anywhere now!) and decided to give it a shot. This [...]
This is mostly search engine bait, because I couldn’t find a solution on my own when searching, but managed to stumble across it anyhow. I recently did a Windows 7 x64 reinstall, and after doing so, Netflix wouldn’t play in any of my clients – Windows Media Center, Chrome, IE, you name it. After various [...]
I’ve just released my first Android app, called FlexAuth. It’s mostly an excuse to learn Android development, but it does something useful, too – it serves as a souped-up mobile authenticator for Blizzard’s Battle.net login infrastructure. If you’d like the gory details, there’s a specification floating around on the internet that’ll help you understand the [...]
GridFS is a nifty little feature in MongoDB that allows you to store files of all shapes and sizes in Mongo itself, getting the benefits of Mongo’s sharding and replication. However, since they’re in a database, and not on the filesystem directly, how do we serve them? There are lots of benchmarks and numbers under [...]
If you’re familiar with Ruby at all, you know that it can be a little wacky when it comes to memory usage. Most of us have observed a Mongrel/Passenger instance that starts out small and then grows by leaps and bounds, eventually settling on some uncomfortably high number. We’re going to fix that with Ruby [...]
Rather than roll my own URL regexes, I prefer to let the existing libraries do the heavy lifting. Ruby has a uri library which is fantastic for parsing (and validating) URLs. For example, something like this might be used in a model validation: I noticed a bit ago that I started getting invalid URL errors [...]
I’m upgrading blippr to Rails 2.3. Here are some of the things that had to be changed to upgrade: Switch the application entirely to LibXML for all its XML parsing needs In config/environment.rb: Add the following This means that the faster_xml_simple monkeypatch is no longer needed. I don’t think we’re doing much else with XML [...]
