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Has It Really Come to This?

2007-07-31T18:24:00Z

Really? LOLCATS has become such a pervasive meme that it is used in mass media advertising now?

This isn’t a screenshot from some crazy techie blog or something, this was on The Seattle Times website. It’s actually an ad for their own classifieds service.

I can’t imagine that any significant portion of the general readership of the paper has any idea of the significance of that ad.

On Endorsements...

2007-07-30T18:50:00Z

Now, I realize it’s a new release and all, but if the only person you can find to provide a nice endorsement of your product is the product’s marketing manager…

I’m sure there are people out there that would give ColdFusion a nice endorsement; I think this was just a poor marketing decision on Adobe’s part (I wonder if Mr. Buntel made this decision…hmmmmm…) rather than an indictment of the quality of the product.

(Found on the ColdFusion product page at Adobe.)

Migrating Decimal Columns for Rails 1.2

2007-01-30T23:57:00Z

Rails 1.2 added native support for fixed decimal variables using the BigDecimal class. This is great news for anyone who needed to deal with currency in their Rails applications because it means we can move away from storing fixed decimal values as integers in the database.

But wouldn't it be nice if you could automagically migrate your existing fixed decimal columns to use the new-fangled decimal type?

I sure thought it would be, so I wrote a couple of migration helper methods so that I could write a one-liner in a migration file to convert a column from fixed decimal as integer to a real decimal column. All the gory details are available after the jump.

I apologize if reading this post made your eyes glaze over.

Here is a usage example from a migration script I wrote. It's pretty straightforward, you just feed the method the model it's working with, the existing column name, and the new column name.

require "migration_helpers"

class ChangePriceColumnsToDecimal < ActiveRecord::Migration
  extend MigrationHelpers

  def self.up
    decimalize_column(Item, :price_in_cents, :price)
  end

  def self.down
    undecimalize_column(Item, :price_in_cents, :price)
  end
end

And here are the actual helper methods. These should be placed in lib/migration_helpers.rb for your app. (Create the file if you don't have one already.)

module MigrationHelpers
  def decimalize_column(model_name, old_column, new_column)
    rename_column model_name.table_name, old_column, new_column
    change_column model_name.table_name, new_column, :decimal, :precision => 8, :scale => 2
    model_name.reset_column_information

    model_name.find(:all).each do |row|
      unless row[new_column] == nil
        row.update_attribute new_column, row[new_column] / 100
      end
    end
  end

  def undecimalize_column(model_name, old_column, new_column)
    model_name.find(:all).each do |row|
      unless row[new_column] == nil
        row.update_attribute new_column, row[new_column] * 100
      end
    end

    change_column model_name.table_name, new_column, :integer
    rename_column model_name.table_name, new_column, old_column
  end
end

Hope someone else finds this helpful.

Introducing Graphite!

2006-12-01T20:49:00Z

I’m proud to introduce a brand new way to quickly and easily create mockups for your next new website or web application, it’s called: Graphite. As in, the stuff inside a pencil.

Ok, so all I really did was take a screen shot of a Safari window and arrange them into a few PDFs that you can print out. Then you can quickly sketch out screens (views) to flesh out your ideas.

Everyone says that this should be just about the first step in any new web design/development project, but I felt like I needed something to help me visualize the way things would look just a bit more than what a completely blank sheet of paper offered.

Here they are (Achtung! Direct PDF Links Below!):

Very Small USB Drive

2006-11-30T22:14:00Z

My boss recently returned from a business trip to China. During the trip, he was needled by a local about the size of his “old-fashioned” USB thumb drive. So to rectify this situation, he picked up a half dozen of these tiny 1GB drives in Hong Kong.

He said he paid about $20 for each of them. I actually found the same item (for around the same price) on Newegg a couple weeks ago, but it has now disappeared off the site.

Anyway, I just thought it was cool.

More photos after the jump.

Where I've Been

2006-11-30T00:27:00Z

Since Andrew posted one of these, I figured I should as well. I’m nothing if not an obedient sheep. I actually went through this thing when it was featured on Digg a couple of days ago, but it took Andrew to inspire me that the information might be something of interest to someone else. I’m still dubious.

Anyway, you can enjoy my lovely (sparse) travel map after the jump. (Seriously, 3 percent? That’s pitiful!)

Do you know the Tootsie Roll man?

2006-10-13T17:37:00Z

Well? Do you?

P.S. Apparently my image reflection skills in Photoshop could use a little work. I would make some tweaks right now, but my “actually save a copy of the image with the new layers you just added” skills also need some work.

Hi-larious!

2006-10-09T18:35:00Z

This screenshot probably looks pretty bizarre to the untrained eye. It’s an MSN page, recommending that you download Firefox. Of course, if you look closely, you’ll notice that I was visiting the page in Safari, on my Mac. Quite a while ago, Microsoft decided they were done supporting IE on the Mac, so actually, it’s not really surprising that they are recommending Firefox to any Mac users that want to view this content.

At least they didn’t just say, “We’re sorry, but you need a PC to watch this news clip!” Better than nothing I guess.

Not that anyone really cares whether or not they make a new version of IE for the Mac, but would it really be that hard to make things work in Safari?

The iTunes 7 Icon is Ugly

2006-09-14T06:35:00Z

Actually it’s not too bad. But I think I like the iTunes 6 icon better. Unfortunately, Apple made it surprisingly challenging to find the old icon and perform the ol’ switch-a-roo. Here’s how I did it on OSX.

First, I had to find the image. Luckily, Wikipedia saved the day again. I mean, 128x128 transparent PNG? How can you get any better than that?

The only snafu is that OSX doesn’t really support transparent PNGs as icons. At least, it doesn’t seem to respect the alpha-channel transparency. What OSX really wants is a ICNS file. Luckily, I managed to find a nifty image to ICNS converter.

Voila! An iTunes 6 ICNS for your downloading enjoyment. (At least until I get the C&D from Apple legal.)

To perform the actual swap, first click the ICNS file and hit CMD-C (Copy). Next, find iTunes in your Applications folder, select the app and hit CMD-I (Get Info). Click on the icon in the top left of the info window. (It should get a little blue glow around it.) Hit CMD-V (Paste).

That should do it! The icon on your dock probably won’t change until you actually launch iTunes.

New at Disneyland!

2006-09-13T00:41:00Z

Ok, so I doubt this is going to be a featured attraction in the magic kingdom anytime soon, but were this machine real, it would be just about the coolest thing ever. (For some reason, one of my local PBS affiliates was showing this during a pledge drive last night while I was channel surfing.)

I don’t know, maybe I’m just the last person on Earth to discover ”Animusic,” but I thought it was cool.

Ruby and Buddha

2006-09-11T23:31:00Z

Today’s quote comes to us from the home page of the Ruby DOM library, REXML:

Can’t you feel the peace and contentment in this block of code? Ruby is the language Buddha would have programmed in.

I think they are right. But in all fairness, they were comparing a snippet of Ruby to a snippet of Java. Java being the language that the Marquis de Sade would have programmed in.