2008 August Archive at Ramblings

Archive for August, 2008

29Aug08 $0.23 Skiddoo

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Just for grins and giggles, I went to see how much I’ve earned from scribefire thus far — $0.23 cents — they’ve determined that 218 impressions have been viewed.

That said, I’m currently at about 1520 views for the last three weeks. I did the scribefire on the 25th, I’ve had ~400 views (according to wordpress) since then. I expect that a good bit of the traffic is feed related (hence no ads), but still, as an experiment, it means that at my current rate of views I make $1/month, which is 20% of my hosting fee — that said, I’d like to plug my provider, DrakNet
(if you click on that link and sign up, I do get an affiliate fee). They’ve been simply wonderful to work with. Their tech support is great and they really are friendly and go the extra mile. I can’t recommend them more highly. Additionally, they are carbon neutral, if you’re into that sort of thing.

29Aug08 CSS tooltips using CSS Sprites

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Thought Bubbles!

For a project I’m currently working on I wanted to make some “bubble” tooltips. In order to cut down on the size/number of images, I’m using css sprites. A quick google reveals that nobody else has (at least on the first page) put together tooltips using sprites. The technique will work with any sort of image, so you needn’t use the “bubbles”. So, here’s how I did it, with the caveats/gotchas. Continue reading ‘CSS tooltips using CSS Sprites’

29Aug08 Blogs I’m excited about…

Uncategorized

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Earlier I was going through rss feeds when I noticed that a blog had been updated. I thought to myself “Oh, cool! they’ve updated.” It struck me that there are certain individual (as in written by an individual) blogs which I follow and am excited when I see posts. Here’s a partial list — bear in mind a number of blogs (most, in fact) I read through aggregators. While there are some really nifty ones there, I’ve left them out. Also I’ve left out “magazine” blogs, however cool they may be. Well, with one exception, which I miss, and I believe others miss a lot.

In no particular order, I present….. (with links to feeds):

Does anyone have feeds like these that they love to see?

28Aug08 CSS “width” gotcha

css gotchas web web design

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I found out something interesting today. Per the W3C, the total “width” that a block element uses is:

If ‘left’ or ‘right’ are given as ‘auto’, their computed value is 0. The following constraints must hold between the other properties:

‘margin-left’ + ‘border-left-width’ + ‘padding-left’ + ‘width’ + ‘padding-right’ + ‘border-right-width’ + ‘margin-right’ = width of containing block

This made life interesting while working on a css sprite (more on that next). I kept wondering why it bled into the next sprite….

I had thought it was the total width of the element. Foolish me. Now I know and……

27Aug08 Programming philosophy in the oddest of places

philosophy programming

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Today’s thought for the day from A Word A Day is:

Not being able to govern events, I govern myself.

-Michel de Montaigne, essayist (1533-1592)

This struck me as being very much the idea behind defensive programming. Because we don’t know what sort of events life will throw at a programme, we need for it to be robust and able to respond to most anything, barring, of course, Fear, Fire, and Foes.

So how do we go about doing so? For starters, there’s testing, whether BDD or TDD. Boundary conditions and fencepost errors frequently cause grief. And any time the programme interracts with the “outside” there’s room for error — whether it be bad data or an I/O error.

Assume Nothing! Trust no one! Paranoia is good! (in moderation)

26Aug08 Mini Sagas

Just Enough Programming mini sagas

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One of the manifestos from ChangeThis this month is about Mini Sagas. The author, Rajesh Setty presents the idea that writing mini sagas, which contain exactly 50 words, expands your creativity — following on the idea that Creativity Loves Constraints. Typically the mini saga expresses some sort of message or value — I think in some ways they might be like koans or zen stories. Here’s one I’ve written:

Once there was a developer who wanted to make the new killer app. He plotted and planned for months, seeking perfection. He planned for infinite scalability and flexibility. Then he coded.

Another developer wrote code that was just enough to solve his problem. And the problem of millions more.

26Aug08 Sometimes More is Just Enough

Just Enough Programming programming

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In the quest for simplicity and maintainability, sometimes we need to add components. It seems counter intuitive, perhaps, but sometimes it’s true.

As an example, I once came across a project which had multiple queries, each of which contained over 40 lines of SQL code. I don’t know about you, but 40 lines of code for a single query smacks of being overly complex. The query was too long for the database to optimize and far too long for humans to maintain, let alone understand.

In this case, to “simplify”, the queries were perfect candidates for database views and stored procedures. Thus, by adding components to the architecture, we’ve actually made it simpler and easier to maintain.

26Aug08 Why my code is broken….. (break my code redux)

gotchas programming ruby

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Yesterday, I posted an article entitled Break my code, please, wherein I posted a very fragile piece of code, with the challenge to find ways in which to break it.

What follows is a discussion of the code and why it is bad/fragile/easily broken…..

Continue reading ‘Why my code is broken….. (break my code redux)’

25Aug08 Rails Project Setup Script

rails

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I got tired of typing the same commands all the time and/or looking up urls for plugins. Hence this script…. Yes, I know it’s been done before, but this does what I want (for now; I’m sure I’ll edit it).

It does the following:

Creates rails instance (optionally setting the database, etc.)
Installs rspec & rspec-rails
Installs acts_as_statemachine
Installs restful_authentication
Modifies routes.rb
Adds an observer
Adds email settings

You can see the script below the cut or download it here:start-rails

(Edit: Removed an un-escaped pair of parens)

Continue reading ‘Rails Project Setup Script’

25Aug08 Testing Scribefire

administrivia

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I’m testing scribefire to see how well it works…. Nothing to see here, move along.

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