Category Archives: Uncategorized

Fixing git pre-commit hook woes

I’ve had something strange occur when attempting to commit changes to a Git repository located on a flash drive. A pre-commit hook, which is a script Git runs before the git commit command does its thing, prevents me from committing files until I’ve removed whitespace characters from the ends of all the lines in the [...]

Deploying a Sinatra app on Dreamhost

I’ve been down with the flu and confined to the couch for the last couple of days, so what better way to pass the time than learning a new web framework and deploying it to Dreamhost? Only a brain cooked by fever would think something like this might qualify as fun, but my grey matter [...]

Helipad, now on GitHub

The Helipad Ruby interface is now available on GitHub in addition to its original home on RubyForge.

There’s no difference at all between the two, apart from the GitHub copy bearing my name, which is GitHub’s convention for preventing collision between identically-named gems. If you wish to install the gem from GitHub instead of RubyForge, you [...]

Improved dynamic human-readable RESTful routing

Earlier in the week I posted about making dynamic RESTful routes in Rails. At the end of the article, I mentioned that the method I was using might not work in a production environment, and after searching Agile Web Development with Rails for the word “restart,” I confirmed my suspicions. Generating routes on the fly [...]

Crashing InDesign with bookmarks and hyperlinks

After generating a table of contents for a multi-document InDesign book, I tried to export the book to PDF. Adobe InDesign CS3 fell right over, presenting me with the friendly “please tell our developers what the hell you were doing that crashed our fine software” dialog.

When generating the table of contents (Layout > Table of [...]

Dynamic human-readable RESTful routing

I’m slowly becoming a convert to the RESTful routing model in recent versions of Rails, largely because it builds a pile of useful named routes with a tiny amount of code. If I put map.resources :sections in my routes.db file, I instantly get sections_path, edit_section_path, and all their friends. When coding a controller, it’s a [...]

TextMate as a blogging tool

There’s something extraordinarily wrong about this. I just discovered, through Barry Hess’ blog, that TextMate has a blogging bundle. It hooks up to the ubiquitous XML-RPC interfaces sported by modern blogging software (Wordpress, Movable Type, Typo, what-have-you) and lets you use your text editor to create and edit weblog posts.

This is a far more comfortable [...]

Helipad Ruby interface

Spurred by my need to upload a bunch of notes from the now-defunct Stikkit to my account on Helipad, I wrote a Ruby wrapper for Helipad’s XML-over-HTTP API. The interface takes care of all the XML magic, letting you concentrate on the fun stuff: playing with your documents on Helipad.

hp = Helipad.new("lonnon@example.com",
[...]

Silly meme time

Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
Turn to page 56.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post that sentence along with these instructions on your LJ.
Don’t dig for your favorite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. Use the closest.

Armadillos: This witty description of the armadillo was produced by the descit environment.

Alas, the nearest book to me is Leslie Lamport’s [...]

Apache hinkyness

I encountered a weird web problem today when adding images to the company website. The new images I’d added wouldn’t appear on their page, and when pointing the browser directly at them, I received a 403 Forbidden error.

After insuring that the permissions and filenames were all correct, I sat down with the sysadmin to see [...]