Just getting back from the Boomstartup Opening social. A big thanks to John Pestana for hosting the first party of the BoomStartup program. I can imagine it’s a bit stressful to invite 20-30 strangers to your very nice home. I had a great time talking with fellow founders and the mentors and getting a better…
OER Glue goes Boom
We’ve been building OER Glue since this last July and the result is a piece of technology that when people see it they have the same reaction they have during a magic show – HOLY SH@#$ how do you do that? We think it’s pretty cool. Beyond pretty cool we feel like it’s an idea…
Babelphish is a Little Less Rotten
I’ve let Babelphish sit for a while. It did what it was supposed so why change it? Then Michael Jenik offered some changes that made it compatible with the latest Google Translate API. To work with the latest API you have to get a key, but it’s pretty easy to do and babelphish will look…
Get jQuery Working With Ruby on Rails 3
I thought I had fixed everything and made ready for Rails 3 in my applications. Turns out I was wrong. My wife tells me I’m wrong all the time so I didn’t feel to bad. The first sign was that something bad had happened was that all my delete links stopped working. I found a…
Converting a jQuery Object into a String
I’m so used to everything having a ‘to_s’ method that when it’s not there I feel like going out a kicking puppies. In jQuery you can always get the contents of a jQuery object thus: Html: var html = myObject.html(); </pre> Text: var html = myObject.text(); </pre> That’s great and has been extremely helpful over…
GearSnyper – Be As Broke As Me
I love to ride and I have a serious addiction to the gear that I use when I ride. It’s a nasty combination that frequently results in diarrhea of the wallet. Since I’ve yet to find a cure I figured that if you’re going to do something you should go all the way. Keeping windows…
In javascript string replace doesn’t do what you think it does
When doing a string replace in javascript if you try something like this: var str = ‘test’; str.replace(‘t’, ‘s’); You’ll find that the result is: sest The replace method in javascript is not a global replace. Instead it does a single replace and moves on. If you want to do a global replace try using…
I Have One Quadrillion Dollars
Zimbabwe was the first country to issue a 100 Trillion dollar bill. I have ten which makes me a Quadrillionaire: Each bill is about 15 x 7.5 centimeters so 112.5 sq centimeters. That’s 1.12500 × 10 16 square nanometers (NM). The diameter of a gold atom is .288 nanometers so it would take 3.90625 x…
Exception Handling in Ruby – a Little Surprise
I’ve got a rake task that includes a section where I do something like this: begin # Do some things rescue => ex puts “Error: #{ex}” end </pre> I know that typically you want to be specific about the errors that you catch, but in this case I just want to move on. The things…
apachectl stopped working after Mac OSX 10.6.5
I noticed today when I tried to restart apache on my Mac that it had stopped working and gave me this error: /usr/sbin/apachectl: line 82: ulimit: open files: cannot modify limit: Invalid argument Luckily the world is a big place and someone had already fixed the problem. Just open up /usr/sbin/apachectl and change (around line…