Posted on 15th October, 2009 | | No Comment
Every once in a while you have a positive business experience that is worth sharing, and I believe that if you have a good experience - sharing it is the best compliment.
Almost anyone who has conducted business with numerous custom PC manufacturers more than likely has their fair share of horror stories. It starts out fantastically when you see the box at your doorstep… you can almost taste the lightning speed PhotoShop batches. You rush the box into the house, cut through all the tape with your car key, wade through the Styrofoam peanuts, and assemble the machine with the haste of a cheetah… Only to find out that the darn thing doesn’t work! Bad ram, an overheating CPU, an ungrounded motherboard, and a faulty power supply. It can be quite disheartening to have your excitement quenched by utter disappointment.
Magic Micro is a breath of fresh air. After perusing feedback and reviews on numerous companies that specialize in this sort of work, my eyes perked when I saw the outstanding reviews given to Magic Micro. Let’s face it… E-bay can be tough turf when it comes to the ever-growing (and often irrational) demands of spoiled consumers. The simple fact that Magic Micro had over 13,000 transactions and not a single negative remark was intriguing enough. Their highly competitive prices, friendly customer support, and spot on responsiveness was just icing on the CPU. Not only did the computer work flawlessly out of the box, but for the first time in many years - I have a custom built PC that continues to perform like a dream without a single hiccup.
Hats off to you guys! Thank you for providing me with not just an excellent piece of machinery, but also reassurance that there are still custom PC manufacturers with passion, expertise, and integrity.
Two thumbs up to Magic Micro!
Posted on 7th October, 2009 | | No Comment
For those of you who are like me in joining the sensation called Phusion Passenger (the quickest and fastest way to run Ruby on Rails applications with Apache), and are using a Ubuntu box.. you may have noticed an error while trying to update the Ubuntu package. Fortunately someone has blogged on the solution for this and I figured I would share it since I just ran into this problem!
http://blog.brightbox.co.uk/posts/brightbox-builds-hardy-passenger-package
Posted on 9th June, 2009 | Tags : plugins, rails, ruby | No Comment
A simple and lightweight ’search’ method for ActiveRecord::Base models that will search text/string-based columns for a specified critieria.
http://github.com/jabberwock/Searcher/tree/master
Usage:
MyModel.search('some text')
You may also add normal ActiveRecord.find options, e.g.:
MyModel.search('some text', :limit => 20)
You may specify which columns get searched in your ActiveRecord model
by specifying +seacher_column+ or +seacher_columns+, e.g.:
class Foo < ActiveRecord::Base
searcher_column :col1, :col2
end
Posted on 1st June, 2009 | Tags : plugins, rails, ruby, tools | No Comment
SmartForm creates nicely laid out form fields for an ActiveRecord object, including it’s content columns and association reflections. The form fields are encapsulated in an HTML definition list.
http://github.com/jabberwock/smart_form/tree/master
Posted on 30th May, 2009 | Tags : cipher, mailto, rails, ruby | No Comment
After losing my dedicated server (including all of my rails plugins) due to reasons beyond explanation, I was very excited to discover that HowFlow has a backup copy of my CipherMail Ruby on Rails plugin. I have added it to my GitHub account!
For those of you not already familiar with Ciphermail, here is the synopsis:
CipherMail provides a safe alternative to the mail_to helper by hiding mailto links from e-mail harvesting bots. The generated output is completely obfuscated by a 1024 bit random key. They keyword is stored on the server, so it is never revealed to the client. Processing is performed on the server-side via an AJAX request and the decrypted redirect is returned to the client, opening a mail composer window… just like normala mailto link.
Posted on 30th May, 2009 | Tags : git, github, tools | No Comment
So after a year of working with a lot of proprietary technologies and using Perforce as my primary SCM, I have decided it is time to join the sensation and begin using Git. So far I have been very pleased with Git’s features as well as its ease of use. For someone who has mostly used SubVersion and Perforce, Git is extremely simple to learn. I was up and running with Git in just a few minutes.
There is a fantastic website for Git users called GitHub. It is essentially a SourceForge dedicated to Git users. Unlike SourceForge, GitHub offers an intuitive and simple interface. Sorry, SourceForge… but you mandate way too many clicks to download software! Github is where it’s at!
You can view my Github profile here: http://github.com/jabberwock.