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Programming

Control DMX Lights With Audio Midi

How to control DMX Lights with Audio and MIDI In a different life where I’m cooler and have better hair I would be a DJ. I’m not cool and I don’t have much hair, but I do love…
October 31, 2017
Docker for Mac debugging

The Problem: While trying to setup Docker for Mac I kept getting the following error anytime I tried to spin up a Docker image: Couldn’t connect to Docker daemon. You might need…
September 9, 2016
Canvas install error

If you get an error that looks like this when you try to setup Instructure Canvas:
August 30, 2016
Google IO Day 3

ATAP – future science fiction awesomeness The last day of Google I/O. I go directly to the ATAP line and I’m lucky enough to get in. Trust API The project formerly known as Abacus…
May 20, 2016 · 7 photos
Google IO Day 2

Commuted to Google IO via the Bay Area Bike share program again. Since there’s only one bike share station near my hotel and only one near Google and there are 7000 developers…
May 19, 2016 · 7 photos
Google IO Day 1

Google IO day one is over and my feet are killing me. Here are my key take aways for the day: Firebase Firebase has become a key component in the Google ecosystem. What was once a…
May 18, 2016 · 4 photos
Alexa, Amazon Lambda, NASA and avoiding death

A long time ago when they first came out I was going to buy an (Echo)\[http://amzn.to/1SSB73t\]. Then I didn’t. Then they got really cheap so now I have an…
November 15, 2015
Nasty React React-Router initialization bug

Over the past few days I’ve been tracking down a nasty bug in a React application. It’s the kind of bug that manifests rarely in development but shows up enough on production that…
September 16, 2015
Course Setup Using Google Docs and the Canvas API

From my presentation at InstructureCon 2015: About us We’re Atomic Jolt. We build cool stuff. We built some of the very first Canvas integrations using LTI and the Canvas API…
June 17, 2015
I Didn’t Attend React.js Conf

Unfortunately, I wasn’t one of the lucky ones to win the React.js conf ticket lottery which means I didn’t get a chance to rub shoulders with some of the most brilliant minds in…
February 2, 2015
I Didn’t Attend React.js Conf

Unfortunately, I wasn’t one of the lucky ones to win the React.js conf ticket lottery which means I didn’t get a chance to rub shoulders with some of the most brilliant minds in…
February 2, 2015
I Didn’t Attend React.js Conf

Unfortunately, I wasn’t one of the lucky ones to win the React.js conf ticket lottery which means I didn’t get a chance to rub shoulders with some of the most brilliant minds in…
February 2, 2015
I Didn’t Attend React.js Conf

Unfortunately, I wasn’t one of the lucky ones to win the React.js conf ticket lottery which means I didn’t get a chance to rub shoulders with some of the most brilliant minds in…
February 2, 2015
I Didn’t Attend React.js Conf

Unfortunately, I wasn’t one of the lucky ones to win the React.js conf ticket lottery which means I didn’t get a chance to rub shoulders with some of the most brilliant minds in…
February 2, 2015
I Didn’t Attend React.js Conf

Unfortunately, I wasn’t one of the lucky ones to win the React.js conf ticket lottery which means I didn’t get a chance to rub shoulders with some of the most brilliant minds in…
February 2, 2015
I Didn’t Attend React.js Conf

Unfortunately, I wasn’t one of the lucky ones to win the React.js conf ticket lottery which means I didn’t get a chance to rub shoulders with some of the most brilliant minds in…
February 2, 2015
Twitter, update_with_media, and the nasty Twitter::Error::Unauthorized (Could not authenticate you) issue

I’ve been playing around with the Twitter gem – yes this is what I do for fun. I was shocked to find out that all the cool kids are posting photos. I feel so stuck in the dark…
October 8, 2014
Heroku Database Limits

I’ve been using Heroku for years and it is a great service with great support. Our company, AtomicJolt uses it for all new projects since we an quickly bring up a new site on a…
September 11, 2014
Secure ElasticSearch behind Nginx using Docker on Digital Ocean

I’ve been a big fan of Elastic Search for a very long time. It’s a great piece of software that can be used as an object database as well as a search index. I realize that’s not…
May 2, 2014
Ember Conf 2014 Summary and Resources

This is a mainly a list of links to notes that others took and a few of my own notes from Ember Conf. Some Great Write Ups: What’s coming in ember in 2014 (Not Ember Conf, but…
March 29, 2014
Ember Conf 2014 Wrap Up

Ember.js’ strength as a framework is second only to its power as a community. Over the past two days at Ember Conf I’ve had a chance to interact with some of the top minds in the…
March 27, 2014
ActiveRecord has_many through multiple models

More than a few times now I’ve run into a situation where I really need to be able to relate one object to another through multiple tables – basically use ‘has\_many’ twice…
March 24, 2014
Bringing the Web Back to the Blind with Ryan Florence

Ryan Florence presenting “Bringing the Web Back to the Blind”. Probably the biggest accessiblity resource on the web: webaim.org. Accessiblity Accessiblity is more than just alt…
March 17, 2014
Refactoring and Making Promises

After spending the last year writing Ember.js code I’ve realized one really big thing – Ember is about promises. I recently had a chance to refactor some code with a number of…
March 16, 2014
Firefox, Vimeo and Froogaloop Have a Little Problem

On one of our latest projects we’re integrating with Vimeo. They provide a great Video player API that makes it pretty simple to interact with videos. Vimeo even provides the…
March 9, 2014
Open Assessments Code Sprint with OERPub, MIT and Lumen

I’ve been spending a lot more hours driving back and forth between Salt Lake City and Logan lately than I normally like. Today was spent integrating Open Assessments with OERPub…
February 10, 2014
Session timeout for your Ember application

We ran into an issue with sessions timing out while users were doing client side stuff with an Ember application we’re building. Once the session timed out they could no longer…
January 2, 2014
Using Chosen with Ember.js

Harvest’s Chosen select control is handy for cleaning up unwieldy or horribly long select boxes. It’s a nice little bit of UI sugar that can help make your users happier and we…
October 7, 2013
jqXHR Returning Readystate 0 and Status 0?

I’ve seen this error a couple of times and I always forget what causes it so for my own sanity I post it here. If you make an Ajax request and the response comes back with…
February 25, 2013
Font Awesome (or any other webfont in production)

If you are using Twitter Bootstrap then it’s likely you’re also using Font Awesome. If not you need to check it out. We ran into a problem after deploying to production that we…
February 20, 2013
jQuery ajax request yields statusText: No Transport

If you write code you hate Internet Explorer. You get everything just right in Chrome, Firefox, Safari – any other browser really and then everything falls apart in Internet…
December 6, 2012
Script iterm2 to Save a Bit of Time.

I don’t have to reboot my Mac very often but when I do it feels like spend forever getting things setup so that I can start development. I finally got sick of all the hassle and…
September 12, 2012
Upgrade to MySQL 5.5.12 and now MySQL won’t start

I messed up my local install of MySQL (it’s a long story that involves me almost throwing a punch to my 30” monitor). I finally gave up, deleted everything MySQL related according…
July 5, 2011
Exception Handling in Ruby – a Little Surprise

I’ve got a rake task that includes a section where I do something like this:
November 30, 2010
Textmate RSpec Bundle Error

After installing the Textmate RSpec bundle I started getting this error: /Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Support/lib/builder.rb:86:in…
July 31, 2010
Userfly Ruined My Weekend – “jQuery(“form.ajax”).ajaxForm is not a function”

I’ve been a big fan of Userfly because they make usability testing easy. Their tool is really quite amazing. However, this last weekend and into today I’ve become less of a fan…
July 20, 2010
How New Carpet and Rattlesnake turned me into a Consultant or What the Hell Happened?

I was sure I would never become a consultant. The stress is high. You sell your time. You don’t get time off. You don’t get sick leave. Just try to get health insurance…
November 17, 2009
How New Carpet and Rattlesnake turned me into a Consultant or What the Hell Happened?

I was sure I would never become a consultant. The stress is high. You sell your time. You don’t get time off. You don’t get sick leave. Just try to get health insurance…
November 17, 2009
How New Carpet and Rattlesnake turned me into a Consultant or What the Hell Happened?

I was sure I would never become a consultant. The stress is high. You sell your time. You don’t get time off. You don’t get sick leave. Just try to get health insurance…
November 17, 2009
How New Carpet and Rattlesnake turned me into a Consultant or What the Hell Happened?

I was sure I would never become a consultant. The stress is high. You sell your time. You don’t get time off. You don’t get sick leave. Just try to get health insurance…
November 17, 2009
How New Carpet and Rattlesnake turned me into a Consultant or What the Hell Happened?

I was sure I would never become a consultant. The stress is high. You sell your time. You don’t get time off. You don’t get sick leave. Just try to get health insurance…
November 17, 2009
How New Carpet and Rattlesnake turned me into a Consultant or What the Hell Happened?

I was sure I would never become a consultant. The stress is high. You sell your time. You don’t get time off. You don’t get sick leave. Just try to get health insurance…
November 17, 2009
Social Search, User Discovery

As a follow on to my social profiles post I’m adding more images to help examine the way in which users find each other on a given social network. Billions of dollars have been…
November 13, 2009 · 19 photos
43 Social Profiles

One challenge any community site faces is how to let users express themselves. It is hard to express the sum total of any individual on a web page, but in the virtual world that…
November 11, 2009 · 43 photos
River – Amazon Wishlist Gem

One more post on Amazon Wishlist code. As another follow up to my post on Amazon Wishlist RSS, Ruby and Signing/Authenticating your Requests and the site I built to run the code…
October 30, 2009
Amazon Wishlist RSS

As a follow up to the post I did a bit back explaining how to write ruby code to talk to Amazon.com I have also built a site that makes it simple to get your Amazon.com Wishlist…
October 26, 2009
jQuery.ajax – Get in Firefox, Post in Internet Explorer

The docs for jQuery.ajax indicate that by default the request is made using ‘GET’. I would still recommend setting the type to ‘GET’. We just deployed a site and found that for…
July 8, 2009
Authorize.net – User authentication failed due to invalid authentication values

So you’ve worked hard to integrate your website with authorize.net and now you’re ready to turn it on and make the big bucks. You run your first real transaction and get: User…
May 12, 2009
It’s Your Head Not Your Butt That Matters

I’ve been writing code all day, again. Luckily I enjoy writing software. There are moments when I and the computer don’t get along. On those days I consider becoming a garbage man…
October 13, 2008
Teachers Without Borders

During the day and lately most of the night I work as a Fellow for Teachers Without Borders at Utah State University. (funded by Cisco). What I actually do bores most people and…
September 3, 2008
Open Any Document in Google Docs Via a Url

We are looking at ways to integrate the new Teachers Without Borders site with Google docs. Turns out that you can open: documents – .pdf, .doc, .txt, .html, .rtf and .odt…
August 28, 2008
Using Starling, Workling with Ruby on Rails

For the project we are working on for Teachers Without Borders we need a reliable asynchronous way to process tasks. There are a myriad of ways to do this and if you aren’t…
August 18, 2008
Helpful Git configuration file

For anyone out there using Git here is a great .gitconfig file. It will help you get started with aliases etc.
August 7, 2008
51Weeks at ICLS

Last year for our open ed conference here at Utah State I built an application called 51weeks to help preserve the presentations and to help people interact. Tomorrow it will be…
June 24, 2008
Morph Exchange Review

I recently wrote about Cloud Computing. Alain Benedict from Morph Exchange told me that I neglected to add his company to the list. I said I would check it out. He said he would…
April 11, 2008
Elastic Cloud Computing

One of the most difficult tasks when putting up a new site is picking the right host. Moving hosts later on is terribly difficult so choosing the correct hosting company is as…
April 8, 2008
Ruby Grand Masters

I spent two years in Japan. While there I met all kinds of interesting people. I remember one individual in particular because he was a chess grand master). He was also very good…
March 31, 2008
Plugin Loading for Ruby on Rails has Changed.

I am tired of recreating the login system for Rails for each new project so using the RESTful Rails Authentication Tutorial I created a template project that I can use to create…
March 22, 2008
This Clears Things Up a Bit

I’m not sure if anyone has seen David Wiley’s blog today, but I think his efforts help to illustrate the idea of distributing the social network. Take a look at it. It might…
March 10, 2008
Turn WordPress Into Social Butterfly

I have been pitching this idea of a distributed social network to everyone that can stand to listen to me. I realize that the conversation around WordPress and the future of…
March 6, 2008
Content Connected to Geography

Marion has been working on this idea of connecting information to a location for quite some idea now. WhereIGo has made some of the technology that is needed to make it happen…
March 4, 2008
Note to Facebook, Myspace and Other Social Silos: DIE

I wrote three Facebook apps and I have ideas for several more. The most successful was the House Plans application I did for ThePlanCollection.com, but in the Facebook world you…
March 4, 2008
hexadecimal value 0x1A, is an invalid character

All of my ASP.Net work these days is for ThePlanCollection.com so I have started publishing my problems and hopefully some solutions there. My most recent problem was the…
March 3, 2008
Kill Internet Explorer With CSS

We got a call today at The Plan Collection that was interesting. A guy was trying to print out one of our pages. Each time he tried his browser would crash. At first I thought…
February 27, 2008
Mozy.com’s Backup Software is Shit

Yes you read that right. I used to love this company. The concept is great – backup your data online for dirt cheap. Install the software and away you go. They backup everything…
February 22, 2008
Creative Commons Opens Legal Documents

A couple of developers from Creative Commons were at the code sprint last week. It is fun to interact with guys who are making the world a better place. Creative Commons latest…
February 12, 2008
Setting up Subversion on Bluehost

I love subversion. It is handy for all kinds of development. I needed an easier way to update WordPress on my Bluehost account. I tried the standard compile methods but kept…
February 11, 2008
WordPress Makes Me Happy

I have used WordPress for years. Not long after I started using it I went to the Web 2.0 Summit in San Fransisco. While there I engaged in the requisite schmoozing even though I…
February 11, 2008
WordPress Multiuser Extensions

I didn’t just want to setup a WordPress Multiuser site. I also wanted to be able to use multiple domains. Here’s the plugin to make that happen. Setting up the multi site manager…
February 8, 2008
WordPress Multiuser

I have a couple of blogs – this one and some family ones. Since WordPress updates their code fairly often it has become a royal pain to manage all of them. I debated setting up…
February 8, 2008
secret given to the #protect_from_forgery call

My code was running fine under Rails 2.0.2. Then I enabled the db based session store by uncommenting this:
February 7, 2008
OER Code Sprint

We are at the end of the second day of the OER code sprint. This has been a great time feels quite a bit different than the higher level OER meetings I have attended. The first…
February 6, 2008
Utah WordPress Meetup

I spent this afternoon with some really cool and interesting individuals from around utah. Matt Mullenweg, the original developer of WordPress was in town and was willing to come…
February 3, 2008 · 4 photos
Professionals and The Enterprise

Professionals and the enterprise Under threat of divorce if I didn’t hang my Christmas lights this past Christmas I braved the elements and managed to put them on the trees. Of…
January 30, 2008
Framework Problems Will Ruin Your Day

I created a code generator that writes all the of the code that connects ThePlanCollection.com website with its database. It is kind of like ActiveRecord that makes Rails so…
January 23, 2008
A Gazillion House Plans on ThePlanCollection.com

I updated ThePlanCollection.com last night. I must admit that updating when you are tired is not always the best idea, but I figure everyone else is probably asleep so there isn’t…
January 23, 2008
Use Mac Ports on Leopard to get Ruby on Rails Running

I am stealing this from Dave South, Logan Ruby User Group Illuminati. If I don’t extract it from my email I’ll never find it again. So I’ll ask for Dave’s forgiveness for the…
January 17, 2008
SWFUpload – the Best File Upload Utility for Any Platform

Uploading a file to a website is a pain. Uploading lots of files to a website makes the UN list of known methods of torture. At tonight’s ruby group meeting Dave South showed off…
January 15, 2008
The Inflector Module – Another Reason to Love Rails

I love how when you need something in Rails the solution is usually already in place. For instance in the indulgenc.es application I have the need to create a rank with 1st, 2nd…
January 11, 2008
Indulgenc.es

My second Facebook application is up. I and Marion built something to help you and your friends enjoy the lighter side of life. Try out Indulgences.
January 10, 2008
Google Base and Windows Pain

So I have been trying to figure out Google Base for the last week so that I can send all the house plans from The Plan Collection into the Google product feed. Getting your…
January 5, 2008
Setting up ZenTest and Red Green

I can’t take credit for any of these instructions. Dave South from the Logan Ruby group sent these out in an email. I am posting them so that I can find them later on. Install…
November 16, 2007
Stupid Error That I will Blame on Lack of Sleep

So if you are ever working oh so hard on a ruby on rails application and all of a sudden your application stops working and you have no idea why because the error looks like this:
November 12, 2007
Working on Second Facebook Application

It is top secret, but I am working on another Facebook application. This time I am using Ruby On Rails since I don’t have to deal with legacy issues. I’ll be interested to see if…
November 10, 2007
iPhone App

I have an iPhone. It is an awesome little toy. I couldn’t just own one. I need a reason to play with it so I wrote an application. igag.us It lets you gather your favorite news…
July 23, 2007
SQL Server 2005 Express error: 40

I ran into this error while trying to run some scripts on my SQL Server 2005 Express Database: An error has occurred while establishing a connection to the server. When connecting…
June 18, 2007
Rails Conference Day One

We flew into Portland last night so that we would be ready bright and early this morning. I hate waking up at 6:30 am to go to a conference. We are programmers when will they…
May 17, 2007
Something Scrumdidilyumptious

Just short of a year ago I hacked together a project that we loving called scrumdidilyumptio.us. I and Wiley managed to finish it at about 2 in the morning in a hotel in NY during…
December 5, 2006
PPH – Profanity per Hour

I have been working on getting some CSS to work for a new design for The Plan Collection. The payoff is terribly small. I am really starting to hate CSS and the new “tableless”…
July 29, 2006
Learn this, no this, no this

I have been a programmer for a few years. During that time I went from “Bill Gates is the antiChrist” to Microsoft isn’t so bad to I just don’t care give me money. Programmers are…
September 15, 2005
This shouldn’t be so @#!&! hard

So as is typical in Utah I moved into my house with an unfinished basement and now to “save money” I am finishing it myself. That’s a bit of an overstatement. I am actually…
September 15, 2005

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