I use this blog to communicate things to you that I find interesting or useful. I also use it to remember things for myself. It took me a minute to find this one again, so I thought I better post it so I don't lose it again. It's a solid talk with some good information, so check it out. Scott Hanselman talks about social networking and other interesting things. Social Networking for Developers

You’d think the todo list problem was solved by now. Email is solved. Google solved it. Srsly. If you aren’t using Gmail, what’s really stopping you? No, Yahoo! and Microsoft aren’t doing it better. Google wins. Spam is pretty much solved. Google once again solved it by sheer volume, you throw millions of emails at a Bayesian filter with crowd sourcing (that little button in Gmail? that’s crowd sourcing) and it gets pretty damn smart. Okay maybe…

It occurred to me the other day, that I should take a look at the middleware I use on this blog. I don't know what it was. My spidey senses just tingled. Boy was I right. I totally had it backwards. Rack middleware is a fantastic thing. It's like a little encapsulated rack application that you can use to filter, process, or otherwise mess with responses. There is middleware to add etags, configure caching, catch and log exceptions, deal with coo…

The nth-child pseudo selector is a nice feature in CSS3. Well, most of the things in CSS3 are pretty sweet. Chris Wanstrath has a good post on the nth-child selector, and I'd suggest reading it for a bit more in depth on what the nth-child selector actually does, as I just cover getting the same effect in all browsers. Unfortunately, while Internet Explorer does support some of the CSS3 stuff, it doesn't support a bunch of them.aspx) either. (Di…

sinatra-bundles is an easy way to bundle CSS and Javascript assets in your sinatra application. Yes! It has tests! They are on runcoderun Usage sinatra-bundles combines Javascript and CSS into one file. Meaning, you can bundle 2 or more Javascript files into one, similar with CSS stylesheets. Any bundled files are expected to be in the public directory, under 'javascripts' and 'stylesheets' Assuming you have the following files in public: ./styl…

I used to have some really ugly code to generate the archive links you see on the right column of this blog. It was terrible. Granted it was some of the first code I wrote on this blog, and I was cruising through it because I just wanted to get it done and working, but still, it's not really a valid excuse. It can be seen here. I had a thought the other day that it would be much better handled by the Range class, and boy was I right, although it…

Sometimes you do silly things. Like check big binary files into source control. Ones that shouldn't be in source control. This causes problems. Okay, well not really problems, but it has some effects. Cloning the repository takes longer, of course, since there are big files, and other operations can take longer too. But fret not! If you need to purge files from Git, you can. Now, you can't just remove the file, since it's still technically in th…