branch14log

  • A custom wiki with Gollum

    I've had a personal wiki for some time. Until recently I went with Mediawiki, simply because I've been too lazy to evaluate any alternatives. But keeping it uptodate, upgrading on a regular basis to cope with emerging vulnerabilities wasn't really worth it. I quess I was hardly using 5% of Mediawiki's features anyway. → read more

  • Help RSpec to help you

    Unfortunately code is not in all cases crafted in a way so that failing specs in RSpec yield meaningful errors. If your own code is to blame, you might want to consider changes here first. In cases where the code is set in stone it might help to make RSpec a little more verbose in case of failing specs. → read more

  • Versioning & Migrating Local Storage (in CoffeeScript)

    With the recent influx of applications with offline capabilities a recurring requirement is the versioning (in some cases even migration) of data stored in local storage. Especially during development it comes handy to be able to wipe the content of the local storage just by increasing a version number. In later stages of the project you might even face the problem to migrate the user's data to work with the new release. → read more

  • Signature Pad, Image Magick, Inkscape & Pdftk

    Signature Pad is a jQuery Plugin to provide a widget to capture handwritten signatures on touch devices. It will store the signature as JSON drawing instructions in a hidden field. → read more

  • Find hot spots with Git

    A couple of months ago an article on the Googles engineering blog discussed bug prediction, as a measure to sustain quality of a code base. Part of that discussion covered hot spots, which Google defines as section in our code base which get touched a lot, because those are likely not well designed and thus prone to bugs. → read more

  • Setting up PostGIS

    Setting up PostGIS on Debian Squeeze is quite easy. The only gotcha is due to permissions you have to switch users in between. Only the user 'postgres' is allowed to run the commands in 'postgis.sql', which enhances your database with function specialized on working with geo data. → read more

  • Function Wrapping in CoffeeScript - Revisted

    Some days ago I was writing about function wrapping in CoffeeScript as a general pattern to built upon existing code. Here is a slightly better version which will also work with an arbitrary amount of function parameters. → read more

  • Function Wrapping in CoffeeScript

    Suppose you want to override a method of a class in CoffeeScript, like you would in Ruby by including a module and then calling super, or by aliasing methods with the once famous alias_method_chain. → read more

  • GMail, OfflineIMAP & Mutt

    OfflineIMAP makes accessing your GMail account with Mutt a breeze. In this example the offline Maildir directories are put under a pangmail directory, so you can easily at multiple account each into their own directory. → read more

  • A Rails Fake Cron

    Recently I've been working on a project on which a simple cron job was not an option, while it would have been the perfect solution for the task given. Since we were sure that we were not dealing with long running jobs we decided that it could run during a user's request. But not on every request, only every so often would be just fine. → read more

  • Rails 3 & Exim

    At my company we usually host Rails projects on Debian. Exim has been Debian's default MTA for quite some time so we stick with it. But recently I've run into some troubles while upgrading a Rails 2 application to Rails 3. → read more

  • Batch make textures with GIMP

    {% gist 557394 %} → read more

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