Learning vs. Solving
Often times you're tasked with solving a problem you haven't faced before, requiring the use of technologies you haven't previously been exposed to. This is a great thing! These experiences are the...
View ArticleFormStack API Call Over SSL With Ruby
I recently had to use the FormStack API in the context of a Rails app. You need to make these calls over SSL, and API returns either XML or JSON. I chose JSON because it's much easier to work with in...
View Articlegoogle-define and last-fm plugins released
Over the last few days I released my first open-source plugins on GitHub. google-define - Extracted from a side project I worked on, it's basically a wrapper class for parsing definitions from Google...
View ArticlePython’s Tornado has swept me off my feet
I've been working with Python's Tornado for about 2 months now and I love it. Tornado is a non-blocking web server written in Python. It's structure is similar to web.py so users of that popular Python...
View ArticleImproved deploy:cleanup for capistrano
We ran into a problem today where capistrano wasn't correctly cleaning up old releases on a 15-minute multi-host deploy. It seems like the default deploy:cleanup task wasn't written with multiple hosts...
View ArticlePython libwkhtmltox module – wrapping a C library using Cython – convert HTML...
First of all, big shout out to antialize for creating wkhtmltopdf (github repo). Also, this project is being hosted on GitHub @ http://github.com/mreiferson/py-wkhtmltox. wkhtmltox What is wkhtmltox...
View ArticleConvert HTML to PDF in PHP (libwkhtmltox extension)
A common problem when developing a web application is having producing a high-quality PDF out of an existing layout/view/template. Perhaps for a reporting engine, an invoice, a receipt, or any number...
View ArticleMigrating from a legacy authentication scheme to Authlogic
I've been working on a project where I inherited a database with over 9,000 users. The passwords are stored as an MD5 hash, with no salt. For obvious reasons, I wanted to transition the old...
View ArticleAsync DNS Resolution in Tornado’s AsyncHttpClient (curl multi, c-ares)
I learned some rather important facts about cURL's multi interface (which makes it possible to perform asynchronous HTTP requests and what Python's Tornado framework uses under the hood in it's...
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Experiences Developing My First iOS / iPhone App – OnCall for Nagios
I've long since wanted to participate in the explosion of popularity that is the iOS App Store. I toyed with demonstration-purpose applications, learning the foundational aspects of developing on this...
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