I’ve learned of some very interesting things that happened in this country recently as a result of researching about The Dark Knight and the very different character of the Joker (Heath Ledger) in this film than the previous Joker played by Jack Nicholson.
Comics Code Authority
The Comics Code Authority (CCA) is part of the Comics Magazine […]

I couldn’t find a helper in the API to just display months if you’re storing them as numbers (1-12) so I made one.
Add this helper code to your application_helper.rb or other appropriate *_helper.rb file.

def monthname(monthnumber)
if monthnumber
Date::MONTHNAMES[monthnumber]
end
end

Use it in your view like this:

< %=h monthname(item.month) %>

So I’ve had two really good ideas lately that I found already had plenty of other people already doing them in practice. First one was a question/answer-based social networking site. Three sites found:

http://www.pollsb.com/
http://wis.dm/
http://airow.com/

airow was closest to my idea… actually almost exactly. Too bad they beat me to the punch three years ago. […]

So it’s official. I’m working on Soashable. Not going to replace my current job, but it’s going to be a big focus for me now. It’s basically an opensource clone of meebo. It allows you to use your instant messaging accounts through a web interface.
Right now I’m mainly working design, research, […]

In thinking about using OpenID with TYWYK I’m now thinking about security issues with it.
OpenID is really just about as insecure as email is for authenticating. Anyone can create an OpenID server (just like a mail server) and as many users as they want (just like a mail server). OpenID is not a […]

There’s no good tail -f equivalent for commandline in Windows. I’ve tried the following with success. All are free:

Lightweight and my favorite for now, pretty easy to customize: BareTail
Very lightweight: Tail for Win32
Somewhat more heavyweight and customizable. Easy to change highlight colors: MakeLogic Tail

All of these have tabbed/multi-buffer interfaces.
Just download one […]

For TYWYK I wanted to prevent spam early on, but still allow anyone to post. I chose using a CAPTCHA. I’m using Jason Perry’s ReCAPTCHA plugin which uses ReCAPTCHA.
It’s pretty straightforward. Just read the README and all the comments on agilewebdevelopment and you should be good to go!
Only gotcha that I ran […]

So I downloaded Safari 3.1 for Windows today and I started playing with the “Develop Menu”. You can enable it through Edit>Preferences>Advanced and check “Show develop menu in menu bar”.
The network profiler thing on this is an amazing piece of work. If you’re ever looking to do a performance assessment of a website […]

I often try to find ways to get back to nature in my life. It may seem odd that my job involves me spending all day on my computer, but I really do try to incorporate the old ways of the world. There’s a lot of ancient wisdom that has been lost for […]

I’ve used MRTG in the past. It’s cool, but it’s hell to configure. I just need something simple for a single server that just works.
Munin rules.. especially if you’re on Ubuntu/Debian. It’s good for monitoring multiple servers or just one. Here’s a demo.
Install is pretty much:
sudo apt-get install munin munin-node
Pretty much […]