Monthly Archives: March 2011

Looking for hackable electronics your next hackathon meeting?

Posted on March 31, 2011 by Derick Bailey

Hey dumpster-diving electronics hacking people! (image borrowed from the ThinkGeek link, below) I wish I had the time to be a hardware mod’er / tinkerer / hacker … I’ve got enough old junk around my house to do it, but … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Encapsulation: You’re Doing It Wrong

Posted on March 28, 2011 by Derick Bailey

Encapsulation, or Information Hiding, is one of the core principles of object oriented software development. It ranks up there with Cohesion, Polymorphism, Inheritance and all the other OO things we all hear about and learn about. Unfortunately, many of the … Continue reading →

Posted in AntiPatterns, Principles and Patterns | 17 Comments

Using HAML, SASS, JQuery And JQuery-Templates To Build An ASync Search

Posted on March 25, 2011 by Derick Bailey

In my previous post, I talked about setting up an API that let’s me search for insurance companies. My initial use of this is to create a search box on another page in the site and have JQuery call back … Continue reading →

Posted in Async, HAML, JQuery, SASS | 3 Comments

Providing Unauthenticated API Access To An Authenticated/Authorized Controller In Rails 3, With Devise And CanCan

Posted on March 24, 2011 by Derick Bailey

My current Ruby on Rails app defaults to every page and controller action in the system requiring authentication. If you’re not logged in, you don’t get to do anything other than see the login page. Once you are logged in, … Continue reading →

Posted in Model-View-Controller, Rails, Ruby, Security | 1 Comment

Pardon our dust… working on restoring comments

Posted on March 23, 2011 by Derick Bailey

LosTechies has been migrated to WordPress, and we’re still in the process of cleaning up a few things. For example, I’m working on getting Disqus comments enabled. At the moment, though, the comments are not yet working and existing comments … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments

Installing Ruby 1.8.6 And RubyGems On OSX (Snow Leopard) With RVM

Posted on March 14, 2011 by Derick Bailey

RubyGems no longer supports Ruby v1.8.6, so when I tried to install 1.8.6 on my Macbook, via RVM, I ran into this nice little error message: The interesting bit is that ruby itself installed. It’s only RubyGems that didn’t install … Continue reading →

Posted in OSX, Ruby | Leave a comment