I'm getting sick of people calling what's going on in Canada Undemocratic. I'm looking at you, Harper.
What Harper does not seem to realize is that in the Canadian Parliamentary system, we do not vote for him, or his Government. We vote for local MP's who then we send to parliament. The Governor Gen…
We did it! Today marks the first day of open beta for Viviti, and we are pretty excited about it. Along with the open beta, Shawn did a great job on the new design for the front page so it looks pretty too. This is a personal milestone for all members of the team here as we've all put a lot into th…
I've redesigned my blog again! I'm always open to feedback so if anyone thinks I missed anything or finds anything broken, let me know.. I've got a few small tweaks I want to do, but I think I'm mostly done. This is the second design I've done of nullcreations.net since it was moved to Viviti, and t…
It's been a long time since google has made any real noticable changes to their search engine, so i was a little suspicious when two little icons appeared beside my search results allowing me to promote or demote search results... Had some malicious software found it's way to my computer?
A quick …
A long time ago, in a summer far, far away, I was working on Flickr integration in Viviti and found most of the ruby libraries I could find were for the old and now defunkt Flickr API. To solve this i created a very simple wrapper around their REST interface, and then fleshed it out a little bit to …
Well, it's the next day and things are more or less as they were. The Conservatives still don't have a majority, the Bloc still holds almost all the seats in Quebec, and the Liberals are still the official opposition.
So who won? In my opinion there were no real winners. Sure, there were small vic…
I'm back!
My absence for the last 4 weeks was due to a much needed vacation, most of which was spent sailing down the Pelleponese with my father on the gaff-rigged schooner he built. Part vacation, part training so I'll be able to sail Iliopotissa without help, we had quite the adventure.
In the 3 …
Monday was planned to be our release day of a new version of Viviti, but it was not to be. An underground explosion and fire took down a chunk of the power in downtown Vancouver, and while the water cooled generators worked, they stopped working in a hurry when the Vancouver Fire Department tapped i…
After riding a supermarket giveaway bike (which proudly displayed the MJB Coffee logo on it's frame) for a couple years I finally gave in and bought a new bike. Perhaps more accurately, the bike gave out and I replaced it!
I love it - but it won't stay clean for very long, so I took some pictures …
The Conservatives have finally introduced the DMCA, resulting in somewhat predictable outrage from Canadians. For those not familiar with what this means if it's passed, I urge you to read some of Micheal Geist's recent posts - he breaks down the fine print. He's also posted a nice list of 30 things…
In Rails 2.1, they added partial updates - which is a great idea and a long time coming. This makes ActiveRecord only updates the parts of a model that has actually changed, and also gives you the ability to see if a field (or a record) has changed since retrieving it from the database. (via mode…
I've regressed back to the late 90's in terms of design for my personal blog, and once again have a black-based design. Not sure how long it will last, but for now I like it!
Also, in the name of 'eating your own dogfood' I am now using Viviti for this blog. Previously it was custom blog software, w…
A friend was complaining that there was nowhere he could find to get an RSS listing of movie showtimes, so I made a little script using Hpricot to parse forreel.com. Hopefully they don't mind!
Fr those of you locally, feel free to use it: http://jerrett.nullcreations.net/files/nanaimo_movies.xml
Well we've finally launched Viviti - It's a web based/hosted CMS system that's component based. Fully themable using normal HTML, and all editable in browser (drag-n-drop to move stuff around, etc.).
As it is now, it supports adding custom blocks (text or html blocks), rss feeds, blogs, and a few ot…
For anyone doing stuff requiring a good MIME library in Ruby, shared-mime-info works well. On OS X a few things are necessary to make it work though.
First, use ports to install the shared-mime-info database:
sudo port install shared-mime-info
Then you have to set XDG_DATA_DIRS to point at the right…
After using git for a little bit I started tinkering with ZSH, to get the current branch in my prompt. What I ended up with is this:
Turns out it's pretty easy - somewhere in your .zshrc you need to put the following:
# get the name of the branch we are on
git_prompt_info() {
ref=$(git-symbolic-…Clearing floating elements is pretty commonly handled by a a div or br tag with clear: both.
Recently I ran into a problem with this; the layout I was working with was using floats for the sidebar and part of the main content had floated list of images. Using the clear both trick caused it to clear …
There is a post on RubyInside today that spawned quite the cascade of comments on the topic of deploying rails. While a lot to wade through, there are some interesting comments buried in there. I still find it strange that everyone is clamoring for a solution, while ignoring one that exists because …
I've found a couple nifty tools that I figured I'd share:
Rak is a grep replacement written in ruby - it has some pretty neat features including nicer output by default, ignoring .svn and other similar directories. Definitely worth poking through at least the info on the website.
Reggy is a very sim…