REST-less with link_to

This week, I file my first major complaint with Rails. I was innocently running tests and tweakings some views – when I discovered function that should work longer did. A little background, my app is filled with routes the make the URLs more contextually appropriate and memorable than the standard REST URL construction. If you …

Where are the Good Minnesota Business Blogs?

I asked twitter about good MN business blogs and Mike Keliher mentioned the new Twin Cities Business Magazine site, while it’s not wholly a blog, there’s an editor’s blog and a very short list of local business blogs, including Graeme Thickins’ blog. I’m not confident in getting the whole story from a single source, so …

Kongrats to Kris with a K

Since the beginning of podcasting I’ve looked to Kris Smith to make a go of it professionally in a way that feels right (selling services) verses some of the smarmier approaches I’ve seen (CPM, shoehorning the broadcast network model). Today, Kris announced he’s leaving Room 214, the marketing firm he joined at the beginning of …

Passing Sessions and Referers in Rails Functional Tests

So, you’ve set up your Rails app to present different views to authenticated people verses non. Now, how do you test functionality for the authenticated people? Seems silly to have your tests sign in before checking whatever it is you want them to check. Well, pass the session data in the test as a hash. …

Walk It Off

Ed Kohler draws a 2 mile circle around his house and identifies all the places within biking distance. Walkscore.com quantifies and ranks the amenities within 3 miles of your house on a scale of 0 – 100. Suprising results at least for me – the Roseville Apple Store is bikeable at 2.48 miles away.

Project Launch: Sun Downloads

Sun’s new download service launched yesterday – a project I’ve been working on for 18 months or so. Big congrats to Gary Zellerbach and the rest of the project team on this milestone. If you’d like to compare and contrast, the initial four products (of the 1000s being migrated) are: Solaris™ Operating System for x86 …

MySQL on OS X Reinstall Reminders

First off, if you can avoid reinstalling MySQL on OS X – by all means do. Whatever the reason is that you want to do a reinstall, it’s not a good one1. Just buck up and work around whatever issue you have. It’s not as bad as what follows. Let’s say you decide to reinstall …