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Upgrading Rails from 2.1.2 to 2.3.5

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 07:00:42 GMT

I recently had to upgrade the rails installation of the project I’m working on, so just thought I would document what steps I took to make that happen since upgrading can be a pain and I found tutorials out there to be very helpful in getting the code up and running again.

Working With Core Data

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 10:47:51 GMT

So I recently started an iPhone game that will be a memory clone, for fun and profit! I learned some things about CoreData that I would like to share, since there doesn’t seem to be a lot of information about what I ran into.

Old Switcheroo Released!

Thu, 14 May 2009 15:11:56 GMT

Should have done this about a week ago, but better late than never. Old Switcheroo has been officially released to the public! Right now we have over 100 users and over 300 items for trade, which isn’t too bad for one weeks time. So tell your friends, and have them tell their cousins, and so on. Tell them it is eco-friendly (2nd ‘R’ in reduce-reuse-recycle). Tell them it’s like using ‘teh’ instead of ‘the’, it’s so cool. Enjoy!

Old Switcheroo - Swap Your Stuff

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 01:30:59 GMT

The latest and (I dare-say) greatest thing I’ve been working on is Old Switcheroo.

Restful Authentication Woes

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 13:31:00 GMT

I recently started a new project (details forthcoming) and of course needed the restful_authentication plugin for getting users logged in. Unfortunately I ran into some problems right out of the box.

Ruby battleship tournament

Sat, 15 Nov 2008 05:35:00 GMT

So I’ve been diligently working away on an entry for the upcoming battleship sparring tournament on Dec 1. It has been extremely fun. I think I’m almost done (just like every other project, eh?), and I thought I would share some insight into what I have learned, mainly about targeting strategies.

Memoizing with arguments

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 17:02:00 GMT

At RubyConf right now and just finished the talk about Scaling Ruby (put on by the Rails Envy guys). At the end of the talk someone asked about how to roll your own memoization when your method takes arguments. It just so happens that the app I’m working had to handle this, and here is how we did it.

plan-my-route

Sat, 18 Oct 2008 02:27:00 GMT

It’s a shame I haven’t written about this yet, but just wanted to write briefly about a handy little application I wrote for my wife almost a year ago: plan-my-route.

Magic Erasers are awesome

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 20:13:00 GMT

So if you haven’t already bought something like this... don’t! I’ve found a solution (one among many, just google ‘clean macbook’ and you’ll get a slew of hits), and it is the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser. Not only do they take crayon and spaghetti sauce off of painted walls without damage (at least walls with a matte finish), but they also get that icky brown junk off of your laptop. Here is a high contrast photo of the before shot:

Mail Fetcher - Fetch Email from Ruby and Rails

Sun, 17 Feb 2008 09:48:00 GMT

I recently had to write something to fetch emails from a GMail account and process the emails to check if the email was a bounce (bad email address). If so, the person in the system associated with the bounced email would be deleted from the database. I did some searching for such thing and found this:

How to receive emails with Rails

About half way down the page you see an example for polling emails from a POP3 server (edited for space):

require 'net/pop'
require File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../config/environment'

logger = RAILS_DEFAULT_LOGGER

logger.info "Running Mail Importer..." 
Net::POP3.start("mail.server.net", nil, "username", "password") do |pop|
  if pop.mails.empty?
    logger.info "NO MAIL" 
  else
    pop.mails.each do |email|

      begin
        logger.info "receiving mail..." 
        Mailman.receive(TMail::Mail.parse(email.pop))
        email.delete
      rescue Exception => e
        logger.error e.message
      end

    end
  end
end
logger.info "Finished Mail Importer."