If you need a secure password, look no further. Security Guide for Windows - Random Password Generator

In case you just crawled out from under your rock just to read my blog, and haven't the foggiest, cucumber is a ruby acceptance testing framework, and works great with rails. I was writing features for admin users in this application, and needed a step like this: Then I should be editing "test@example.com" Where the quoted email is the login. Later on (in fact right after…I was testing edit functionality, and after safe you end up on the view us…

Google Wave Preview. Awesome.

The ruby-openid gem was giving me problems with Passenger, causing IOError problems. I found the fix here The gist of it? Add OpenID::Util.logger = RAILS_DEFAULT_LOGGER to environment.rb, and you're good!

My, what a nice rack you have. Rack is what Sinatra runs on, and it's just a great interface for webservers. Here's some brain food. 32 Rack Resources to Get You Started

Sometimes, checking RSS feeds is boring. Sometimes you just want to grab a picture or whatever from each item. For that, there's ruby. Oh and feedzirra. There is an RSS feed I read, except it's more of a picture feed and I just want to grab the pictures from it, and doing this through Google Reader is no fun. That's where ruby and feedzirra come in. feedzirra is a ruby gem for dealing with RSS feeds. It's got a great interface and just works. So…

If you go download the ruby-gnome stuff, and GTK fails to compile, it's easy to fix. It whines about some defines, and you can just comment out the block that's causing the problem.

intoDNS replaces DNS Tools, which used to be free, then became pay for, but now looks like it's back to being free, but whatever. intoDNS provides a bunch of nice information, and seems quite useful. Check it out. intoDNS

I don't know if this is a problem on Jaunty anymore, but whatever. I had to do this on 8.10 to get Eclipse to actually run and function properly. In a word: printing. In more words: disable it. Who prints from Eclipse anyway? Add this as a vmarg in your eclipse.ini -Dorg.eclipse.swt.internal.gtk.disablePrinting The long story: When I was at school, my Eclipse instance just would not start. Well, scratch that. A blank workspace would start fine, …

Create a branch locally, and push it to origin: git checkout -b branchname git push origin branchname Get at that branch from elsewhere: git checkout -t -b branchname origin/branchname

Adam Wiggins hooked me up with the Heroku stuff (and by hooked up, I mean I emailed Heroku support and he enabled the services for me), and so I moved my professional online presence to be hosted on Heroku. The URL is the same as before (http://www.darkhax.com), but now it should be just a bit snappier, and easier for me to deploy to. If you haven't at least checked out Heroku by visiting the site, do so now.

I keep coming back to asking myself what the difference between stub and mock objects are and I have it figured out, so here it is: Stubs just return whatever you tell them do, and that's it. Mocks have expectations and cause tests to fail if those expectations aren't met.

You'll hear the phrase "the cloud is the future" a lot floating around the tubes, and a lot of people seem to dismiss it. I came across this from my RSS feeds, and one comment in particular caught my eye. I can get 1.5 tb hard drives for less than 70 Euros and they are accessible even if my net connection is down. I didn't quote the entire comment, since the poor grammar caused my head to hurt… This person is clearly missing the point. They've o…

I almost threw my laptop out the window figuring this out, but if you want to install ruby 1.9.1 alongside ruby 1.8.7 (whether the prefix is the same or not), you have to give ruby 1.9 a program suffix, but also a baseruby. So you need something like this: ./configure --prefix=$HOME/local --program-suffix=1.9 --with-baseruby=ruby --enable-pthread

I checked out Scribes this week, and I must say it has potential. It has a slick yet simple interface and look, and a few nice features. It has word completion and template support, so you can setup snippets, and tell the cursor to tab through sections, so for example, you can have a ruby snippet to make a do end block, which will create the code, put the cursor in the block variable section, then a tab puts you in the block so you can write the…

I always find myself needing this but never remember. -fverbose-asm Throw that at gcc when you are outputting asm (-S flag) and you'll get some useful comments to see what some of the code is actually working on.

I couldn't resist. xkcd

I wrote this a while ago on my old blog, so I'm just reposting here. It's useful since you can have an enum of error codes, which also, when converted to human readable text, are useful messages. Here's how I did it.

Speaking of git, you can get it on Windows, using msysgit. It works pretty well, in that I haven't had any problems with it, except some minor line ending things. msysgit Getting Started with Git and GitHub on Windows - Kyle Cordes

The good thing about design pattern writings is that they never really go out of date. Hence this link. It actually doesn't have a date, but I found it a long time ago. Anyway, here it is. Use them already! Design Patterns

I guess I should probably read this again, since my web development world is expanding immensely. 8 Web Design Mistakes That Developers Make

It's an older talk, but it's still awesome. If you've never heard of git before, check it out.

It's for the 4.x version line, but whatever. Old but good. An Overview of the MySQL Engine and its Latest Features

I found this a long time ago (in a galaxy far, far, away), and it's still up and still good. If you want to learn python, fly through this article and you should be good. Learn Python in 10 minutes

I was looking around for an Amazon S3 browser and cam across digital inspiration talking about CloudBerry Explorer. The first thing that caught my eye was this screenshot. If you read around it, you can see you have two options of moving files between S3 instances. While options are nice, I'm not sure why anybody in their right mind would want to select the slow and expensive way. If you move between S3 instances on S3, it costs zero dollars. If…

Great talk from Joel Spolsky at last year's RailsConf. Joel Spolsky, Fog Creek Software: Friday Keynote

I'll take 10. DDRdrive

Found this in my RSS feeds today. Awesome.

I've had this problem before, but never wrote down how I fixed it. emacs would whine about not being able to open a termcap database file, and wouldn't start on the console. The X version worked fine, but using the -nw option resulted it in dying. The fix! infocmp -C rxvt-unicode | sudo tee /etc/termcap If you strace emacs when you start it, you'll see it tries to open that file, which doesn't exist on Ubuntu by default. I tried everything else,…

I discovered TurnKey Linux while I was running around on the web, and found it quite interesting. From the site: TurnKey Linux is a new open source project that aims to develop high quality software appliances that are easy to use, easy to deploy, and free. The appliances are based on Ubuntu 8.04.2 which is an LTS release, so updates are supported until sometime in 2011. They even provide a base setup of either plain JeOS or the the basic stack.…

So today I started my new job. There was much rejoicing. Mainly by my father, whose bank account I slowly siphoned away whilst at university. Being a software engineer (member-in-training), I work on a computer. This computer happened to be a Dell E521. Not a top end machine, but for what I was going to be doing it was plenty of machine. I could do with it what I wanted I was told; awesome. I'm now the first person at CodeBaby to be running Ubun…

Code Project is a great resource for developers. I use it, have projects bookmarked, read the newsletter, and got the T-shirt (okay that's a lie…just the underwear). This makes it even better. You can search Code Project by doing little more than highlighting or copy/pasting code, typing in a few words, and blamo!, there you have it. it uses Live Search for MSDN and the intertubes, which I'm not overly keen on, but if I want to really search my …

I found this slick little app a few years ago, and it looks like it's still around. Count your VC# and VC+ lines, and it differentiates between code lines, blank lines, designer lines, etc, which is nice. The downside: it's really only useful for VC# and VC+ projects, which is alright if that's all you are working with. Check it out. C#, Visual Basic and C++ .NET Line Count Utility - The Code Project - .NET PS. You'll note that I didn't mention …

Oh me, oh my. When I first posted about this, in June of 2007, my original post started with Ruby is sweet. I should use it more often. And now, on Monday, I get to start my new job playing with Rails all day long. Funny how things change. Regardless, the quality of this tutorial hasn't changed, so here it is again. Rails Envy: Ruby on Rails Rake Tutorial

Who actually uses notepad anymore? Notepad++ is pretty much the bomb, so use it instead. .:: NOTEPAD++ ::.

I had to do auto increment in Oracle a while back and it was painful. It ended up happening, but not in the nice MySQL way. Whatever, it worked. This site has a few tricks. Autoincrement primary key for Oracle