Like most web developers (that I like) I use Firefox for building my web applications. Its stable, it renders beautifully and it has more 3rd party plugins than you can shake a stick at. But without a doubt the biggest reason I use FF is a plugin called Firebug. I use it primarily for debugging Javascript but Firebug can do sooooo much more. Internet Exploder has nothing like it! Safari didn’t used to .... but for some reason ... it now does?! huh?!

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I’ve been working with Rails about 4 months now. Though I am just a newbie, I’m quite a fan of the restful design approach Rails 2.0 seems to favor. I recently needed to add basic search functionality to my app, but had to think a bit on how that would work with a ‘mostly’ restful app.

What follows is a basic description of the implementation I settled on.

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I had to check it out, scored a nice shot that included Saturn and Regulus as well. Have a look! (click read more)

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I don’t know how I missed this, but apparently earlier this month google added some new themes for people who use their personal pages. I use this service as my homepage and really enjoy having the themes to create atmosphere with, check out the post that tipped me off:
googlesystem.blogspot.com. I should mention, most of these themes actually change appearance based on your local weather after you enter your zip code.

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Courtesy of the #textmate channel on freenode, I found this link: quicklook-and-textmate

I’ve installed both of these and they work great. I’m still amazed that even since the OS 9 days, apple hasn’t modified their clipping system in such a way that I am able to highlight or even edit the text in them. Technically, you can actually select/highlight a portion of text straight from a clipping, but the highlight color is the same as the background, which is useless to me. C’mon apple.

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While running a Rails app in Mongrel today, I noticed some application warnings in my logs. The following 2 lines would appear for every page request.

/etc/irbrc:14: warning: already initialized constant HISTFILE
/etc/irbrc:15: warning: already initialized constant MAXHISTSIZE

After doing some homework, I found a fix!

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Over the past few years I’ve begun using an increased number of open source web frameworks in my development projects. Where I used to code everything from scratch, I now depend on these frameworks to build with. Most recently, Ruby on Rails has garnered my attention and I have committed myself to learning it. After 10 years of writing mostly procedural PHP code (followed by 2 years of OOP PHP) ... I feel I am finally in Programmer’s heaven.

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I wrote this library as a means of knowing which Javascripts to load in my view for a given controller/method. My sites often use a common array of jquery libraries, but occasionally I need to use a special JS script on a certain page, say ... for table sorting or something.

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I’m posting this here as reference for both myself and anyone else that it might benefit. Its a plan of attack I documented on CodeIgniter’s community forums in order to host multiple sites off a single install base .. its primarily intended to help share code across applications.

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I created this image a while ago for my buddy Monty using some pictures he’d sent me of his new baby, Andy. I’m posting it here so that our other friends can see it as well. (created with a neat little app called Comic Life)

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