Blog - ShiftEleven

Maybe someone may have told you to use ruby and CGI together, but I think that person has a screw loose. I mean, come on. Everyone knows that what you really need to use is Rack

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Rails is great and all, but sometimes it can be just a little too much and you just need to set up a few pages, not the next big app. Fear not, there is still tool in the ruby tool box at your disposal: the CGI library. CGI is fast and lean and still can be used will all of your favorite friends, like HAML

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I have migrated my blog over to WordPress, finally! It’s something that I’ve been wanting to do because I wanted to free up some resources on my host as typo was taking up precious memory.

While I was at it, I also downloaded a new theme for the blog. Hope you like.

I did this a while back, but I thought I would mention it now: I have dropped the www from ShiftEleven. This came about from a discussion I had with Jason. He proposed the important question: “Is www even important or mean anything anymore?”

So like Ambethia.com, ShiftEleven is a B class domain, which means www.shifteleven.com redirects to shifteleven.com. What fun!

RailsForge is hosting a survey to see what you, the Rails community, would like in a site for rails gems and plugin management.

So if you have some free time, please take the survey to help this project turn into something that you actually want to use

It make look like an Array, hell, it even has a length attribute; however, it may not actually be an Array. JavaScript is sometimes a quirky language to say the least and the notion of what is an Array is no exception.

So what are these array-like objects that I speak of? Well there are a few of them, one of which is arguments. arguments is a special variable that is available inside the body of every function. It is in fact, the list of arguments that were passed in.

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Safari has come out with their public beta and every is excited because the browser is now available for Windows XP/Vista; but there is also a beta available for Mac users.

So I downloaded it and I started to use it. I love the ability to resize text areas and there is a Web Inspector (only for OS X) that allows you to see what properties are available to HTML nodes and their styles.

So I was using it and I noticed something: Safari now styles submit buttons. Do you remember that aqua button that you could never do anything to? Well now it responds to border stylings and the like. Interesting.

I previously mentioned that I was experiencing pain points with dreamhost and I have finally done something about it. I purchased a slice from slicehost and set up my own Ubuntu box.

So now instead of Apache and FCGI running the show, I am using Lighttpd and Mongrel and I must say, it’s running much faster! In addition to running fast, holy crap is mongrel eating up some memory. I purchased the cheap slice, so I only have 256 megs of RAM, but 1 mongrel instance is taking up about 25% of my memory, and this blog isn’t the only blog I’m going to be hosting.

Because of this, it looks like I may be saying good-bye to Typo and am going to move to WordPress unless anyone out there has any suggestions.

Today I played around with Lighthouse, a site for tracking the issues and features of your project. It’s very simple, but in a good way. I have used several issue trackers, like phpBugTracker, Quality Center, and Mantis to name a few and Lighthouse has a different feel about it. In a word, it’s all about simplicity.

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Javascript Kata has a teriffic an article on how to create objects with JavaScript the old fashion way, without any JavaScript libraries. But I use prototype and it has its very own way to create a classes.

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