This weekend, I popped by my alma mater for a few hours to briefly catch up with some people that went through the same foreign exchange program I did. Of the few (of hundreds) that brought themselves to a small, rural Wisconsin town from the far reaches of the globe – there are a handful …
Author Archives: Garrick van Buren
Project Launch: Best Buy Forums
I just got word one of the projects I’m involved with at Best Buy launched today: Best Buy Forums The team that pulled it together really ‘gets’ online communities and was a pleasure to work with. Add this to Remix.BestBuy.com, Giftag, and Blue Shirt Nation, and yeah, there’s a stack of very cool work happening …
Picky Password Policy Pet Peeve
Back a few years ago, I was setting up some web apps for a friend and needed his password.. “Oh, try my non-sensitive password: ‘basketball’” Sure enough, ‘basketball’ got me in. That exchange was a reminder that there are different degrees of security and different comfort levels of risk associated with each of those degrees. …
Everything Else You Need to Run a Web App
As a reminder on perspective and complexity, here’s the ongoing list of systems I’ve configured for Cullect that aren’t Ruby on Rails: DNS Web Server: robots.txt Web Server: .htaccess Web Server: Virtual Domains Database Server: MySQL Caching Servers: Memcached, distributed across 2 boxes And this doesn’t even crack the surface of the systems Joyent’s Jason …
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How To: Build a Wiki with Ruby on Rails – Part 2
Back in Part 1 of Building a Wiki with Ruby on Rails, we built the core wiki engine. Time to add some syntax formatting. These days, I’m pretty enamored of Haml, it’s more like HTML (unlike many other formatting engines) and it’s fast to write (unlike many other formatting engines). 1. Install Haml Haml installs …
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How To: Build a Wiki with Ruby on Rails – Part 1
Here’s how to build a very simple Ruby on Rails-based wiki engine 1. 1. Create the Rails App rails wiki and cd wiki to get inside the app. Remember: create your database (i.e. wiki_development) and update config/database.ymlappropriately 2. Generate the Scaffolding There are 3 nouns in this wiki system: People, Pages, Revisions. Let’s create the …
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McCain & Obama Tax Plans: Small Change
Viveka Weiley redrew Washington Post’s chart of Obama’s and McCain’s respective tax plans. First off, a caveat: Basing a vote on potential personal financial changes is as one-sided as basing a vote on gender, skin pigment, or hair color. It’s one factor and one that I hope to argue it is a wash to vast …
Asks: Should We Buy a HD TiVo?
Our Series2 TiVo is on its last legs. With each passing day, its over-the-air recordings (we’re a no cable household) are more and more unwatchable, while digital over-the-air recordings are getting more stable. But seriously, TV without TiVo is like email without a spam filter. Back in January, I replaced our DVD player w/ a …
RE: Aquarium for your toilet
Finally, Fish-n-Flush is bringing the toilet aquarium to market! This proves: if an idea’s good enough, and you wait long enough, someone else will do it for you. The aquarium toilet is one of my longest held It’d-Be-Cool-If ideas. I still remember the moment 15yrs ago when the idea called me. Something about the fish …
Markets Self-Correct
from “Divine Intervention”: Drilling Boom Revives Hope for Natural Gas, Prices Fall By 42% in Two Months – Mark J. Perry I love when markets self-correct. When prices or activity reaches a point where they start to turn back on themselves.