Why rescue nil is bad

03/25/2012

From time to time I see people write code and at the end of the line there will be: rescue nil. This is not good because it will rescue from any exception. I see people rescuing nil because they have a variable and they aren't sure if it is nil so they want to protect against run...

Switching to Sublime Text 2

01/05/2012

Updated – 01/12/2012 I recently switched over to Sublime Text 2 for my primary development editor. I was waiting to see what TextMate 2 would be like, needless to say I didn't see much an improvement. Sublime Text 2 has got some nifty features like multiple columns, rows, or even gri...

Set OSX Snow Leopard to UTC

10/04/2011

I was recently looking into a production issue that had to do with time zones. In order to accurately debug it I had to set the time on my machine to UTC. This is how I changed it on OSX Snow Leopard: $ sudo ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/UTC /etc/localtime Once your done c...

EngineYard AppCloud Account Management

09/27/2011

If you are working on several projects that are all deployed on EngineYard AppCloud managing deployments can be a bit tricky. When you first deploy an application using the engineyard gem you authenticate using your email and password. A file named .eyrc containing an API token ...

Video Encoding with Uploadify, CarrierWave and Zencoder

09/17/2011

For a recent Rails 3.1 project one of the features requested was to allow users to painlessly upload videos and have them all look consistent. We choose Zencoder for our video encoding service and Rackspace Cloud Files for storage. We were already using the gem CarrierWave for attachments...

Inaugural Post

08/20/2011

Welcome to my blog. I've been telling myself that I should create one for the past couple of years, it seems that every project I work on I end up with some bits of information that I think might be useful to others. I built this blog using the latest version of Ruby on Rails (3.1) and it is hos...