Troubleshooting slow or unreliable home internet Inspired by my multi-month journey battling my local ISP to finally get reliable internet while working from homeMore people than ever are working from home these days. Even if you don't work full
ruby Automating our kids soccer season schedules It's that time of year, when AYSO kicks off for a 10-week season and you fill your Saturdays with soccer, snacks, and socializing. We have two kids playing for the first time this
Hosting Ghost 2.0 blog on Heroku There are a few tutorials on hosting a Ghost blog on Heroku, but I could not find any for the latest Ghost 2.0 update. I was able to get it working (including
Generating CSS sprites for Rails with retina support - from Ruby There is a nice Ruby gem that allows for automatic CSS Sprite generation: Sprite Factory. It has lots of ways to configure it, and allows for output that works with the Rails asset
Christmas Card Address Lists using Google Apps Script and Google Docs My wife and I send out Christmas cards every year. And every year it is a pain to consolidate and update our mailing address list, not to mention then have it in the
SMACSS Workshop Notes #CSSDevConf While at CSSDevConf 2015, I also took a workshop from Jonathan Snook. He helped lead the Yahoo! Mail redesign and works at Shopify as a lead front-end engineer. He developed the SMACSS philosophy
Notes from #CSSDevConf 2015 I attended CSSDevConf last week, on the Queen Mary in Long Beach, CA. The location was very cool and unique, and the content I thought was excellent. I came back very fired up
javascript Recursive Collection in Backbone Model I'm working on a project that is using Browserify modules with Backbone. I will share more details on the full setup and build process I have working, but for today I wanted to
rails Tips on Upgrade to Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan Make sure to install Xcode 7.x (7.0.1 at the time of this writing) via the Mac App Store Install El Capitan via Mac App store Ensure Xcode command line tools
Capybara / Poltergeist tests for Twitter Typeahead search In fixing an escaping bug in a Twitter Typeahead search component we have, I put in some capybara tests. I wanted to not only assert the presence of the search box, but also
Hacking the Amazon Dash Button - Mac OS X Yosemite tutorial So there has been a lot of buzz lately regarding hacking the Dash button. My friend and coworker, who is a real American hero, wrote a post just yesterday summarizing his genius pizza-dash
jquery Javascript Tests for TextComplete plugin In a recent project I needed a auto complete plugin that worked in a textarea, and only based on certain keywords / context. What I found was the jQuery TextComplete plugin, which is awesome!
Trying out Ghost blogging platform now So OctoPress was fine and all.. and I like that it was all in markdown (which makes it nice when doing tech-heavy posts with code blocks). But I also almost never posted once
Firefox 22 changes embed tag behavior (at least with Quicktime plugin for audio playback) Firefox 22 does not support an embed tag with a "hidden" attribute. Even if the "hidden" attribute is set to false (hidden="false"). This worked fine in
Hello New Blog I'm moving away from blogger. (Yes, I was using blogger. It was free, they managed the hosting and it was just one less thing to think about.) But I wanted more control over
Goleta Water Online Portal - UI Fail My water company finally enabled electronic billing & payments. I'm excited as it's the last paper bill I had to deal with (of course I still just paid online using free Chase
Installing therubyracer 0.10.1 on OS X Mountain Lion I was having trouble installing 0.10.1 version of therubyracer on Mountain Lion, because it depends on libv8 3.3.10.4. This is running Ruby 1.8.7. Upgrading
Get selected value from radio button group using jQuery I always forget the correct way to get the currently selected value of a radio button group. I'm documenting it here so I can hopefully finally remember it!Suppose the following markup:<
Rails functional tests - unexpected 406 responses Fun discovery today of confusing behavior with Rails functional test framework (at least version 2.3.4): ### controller ### def create comment = Comment.create!(:name => params[:name]) @result = { :id => comment.id } respond_
How to Unit Test a custom Rails Form Builder I recently created my first custom Rails builder. It was very easy to do.First, create a class that inherits from ActionView::Helpers::FormBuilder and then you can either write your
Detect if object is empty in JavaScript I recently ran across a scenario where a function of mine was returning an Object (also known as a hash in other languages such as Ruby), and I wanted to check in the
Usability fail: similar dialogs, different actions Since Flash 10, the upgrade experience is fairly streamlined, but the dialogs that appear have tripped me up on multiple occasions. And yes, I stress multiple, because they have a point release
Website fail: invalid data It's no secret that I do not like Cox Communications. I am not a fan of monopolies in any industry (don't get me started about text message "packages" and voice plans
IE9 Flash not rendering when wmode is set to opaque or transparent I have a Windows 7 64-bit installation, with IE9 and the latest version of Flash (10.3.181.34) installed. I was not able to view most flash in webpages, even the
Detect a click outside a DOM element It's too bad that Javascript / DOM events do not give you a hook for detecting when there is a click outside of an element. One way you can do this is to listen