I'm a 37'ish year old web application developer from South Portland, Maine. I love meeting fellow techies, drop me a line if you want to talk shop.
Posted on 05/05/2008 at 06:29 PM
I found these old renders on my drive recently and thought I might share them. They date back to about 2000 when I was doing contract work for a digital graphics shop in Camden Maine. I spent most of my time modeling the interior and exterior of various buildings, but these particular renders came from just goofing off at the local coffee shop. Nothing extraordinary!
Posted on 04/16/2008 at 03:53 AM
I had the honor of presenting this week at our local Ruby Users Group. This was my first time speaking publicly and it was thrilling experience. I spoke for about an hour and despite my preconceptions, survived well beyond the first 10 minutes of my talk!
The topic I chose was Design Patterns in Ruby, largely because I had just finished reading (twice) an excellent book by the same name. Design Patterns in Ruby, by Russ Olsen, was just fantastic to read. Russ’s approach was so casual, and un-reference like ... that I rarely felt lost in the patterns being described. I’ve tried a few times to read other books on the general topic of design patterns, but usually these were written for an audience of Java or C++ programmers. As well, those other books rarely did anything other than flash a few UML diagrams at you and drop you in the middle of code that was more complex than the pattern at hand, hardly an elegant way to learn a new subject. After reading Design Patterns in Ruby I actually felt a bit like Neo from the Matrix when he said ... “I know kung fu!”
Its a couple days later but I wanted to post my factory pattern examples for those who attended. My apologies for the delay, its been a busy week. The other examples I presented on were largely unchanged from examples found in the book, so I wont publish Russ’s creation. (wait, thats me!)
Thanks again to those who were able to bare with me and withstand the awkwardness of a first presentation. Kudos to Casey Rosenthal of Port Forty Nine for convincing me to get up there. I really enjoyed myself and might be convinced to do it again. Continue reading to view the example factory patterns!
Posted on 03/05/2008 at 04:12 AM
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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Posted on 03/04/2008 at 02:30 AM
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.
Posted on 02/21/2008 at 12:22 AM
I had to check it out, scored a nice shot that included Saturn and Regulus as well. Have a look! (click read more)
Posted on 11/30/2007 at 06:09 PM
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.
2 Comments
Posted on 11/28/2007 at 08:35 PM
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.
0 Comments
Posted on 11/28/2007 at 05:55 PM
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!
Posted on 11/26/2007 at 05:09 PM
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.
Posted on 10/10/2007 at 03:49 PM
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.
Often times I will release code for free or go that extra distance to help others online. If my skills were useful to you, please consider a small donation. Thank you very much.
@ github.com
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@ calendaraboutnothing
Foundation's Edge, RJones Family, We're Not.com (only for staging), Ailee Jones (same as rjones for now)
Aaron, Barnaby, Brian, Chris, Dirk, Frank, Four, Justin, Matt, Mike, Monty, Paul, Sean, Travis
I can usually be found lounging on irc.freenode.net while I work, on the following channels: #fauna, #github, #hello-heroku, #jquery, #passenger, #ruby, #rubyonrails, #slicehost, #sproutcore, #textmate, #werenot.