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 …

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 …

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 …

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.

Workaround for IE Overly Accepting in Rails’ respond_to format

Looks like Microsoft’s Internet Explorer will accept any format a web server is willing to give it. This doesn’t play nicely with Rails’ 2.0+ respond_to feature. A slick little bit of code that asks the browser what it wants and replies accordingly. Here’s a conversation between Rails & Firefox Firefox: “Hey Rails, I want this …

What if We Had Just 10% More Energy Producers?

If memory serves, the internet was originally developed as a national defense mechanism. A way to keep communications – in a distributed manner – flowing after a nuclear attack. Each node a client and a server, a receiver and producer. Today, not only are the vast majority of Americans online (receivers), but a good chunk …