Web on Holyarmy.org

Have fun RESTing!

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 10:46:59 +0000

Cheesy post titles aside…

I just discovered the very simple but incredibly useful RESTClient at: http://code.google.com/p/rest-client/ .

It’s a simple Java GUI app for testing out one’s REST services. You can choose your: URL, HTTP method, add any custom headers, add a body for PUT/POST, set auth info, SSL info, and do simple scripting.

This is an incredibly useful tool, AND a far cry better than doing it all on the command line with curl.

Jive Launches SBS and a Rocket

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 21:07:04 +0000

My company is amazing. In preparation for the launch of our new product, some of the team got together to launch a rocket. After all, NASA uses Jive, so why shouldn’t we use rockets?

There was one dude on site who managed to catch this awesome snapshot!

Updating RubyGems on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 04:38:40 +0000

I’m just posting a simple tip today.

I was wanting to play around with the very cool SASS meta-language using Compass. The language and tool are implemented in Ruby, which is pre-installed on OS X, but as I discovered, I needed a newer version of RubyGems.

I had already known I needed to update Gems, so I was doing the following:

$ sudo gem update

Eventually I got errors like this:

Updating installed gems...
Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org
Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.github.com/
Attempting remote update of RedCloth
ERROR:  Error installing RedCloth:
    RedCloth requires RubyGems version >= 1.2
Attempting remote update of capistrano
ERROR:  Error installing capistrano:
    capistrano requires RubyGems version >= 1.2
Attempting remote update of net-sftp
ERROR:  Error installing net-sftp:
    net-sftp requires RubyGems version >= 1.2
Attempting remote update of net-ssh
ERROR:  Error installing net-ssh:
    net-ssh requires RubyGems version >= 1.2
Gems updated: RedCloth, capistrano, net-sftp, net-ssh

Turns out, to update RubyGems, one must update the gem system!

Foxmarks: Bookmark Synchronization Heaven

Sat, 21 Feb 2009 22:19:25 +0000

Long have I searched for the magic bullet solution to my bookmark synchronization woes. I’ve wanted a simple plugin that would synchronize my bookmarks between multiple installations of Firefox and Safari, thus making it simple to access said bookmarks from any computer, or between the two commonly used browsers on my Mac. I’ve looked at many options, but always the solution only allows me to sync one browser or the other, leaving me looking for some secondary sync tool to get between Firefox and Safari on my Mac itself, not via network or a proper sync.

Logins with mod_rewrite, Cookies, and Javascript Redux

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 06:44:45 +0000

A while back I posted a simple solution for restricting website access in a situation where HTTP basic authentication couldn’t be used.

Not much more to the story, but I did make a few tweaks to my sample code. The mod_rewrite rule and javascript have been a tiny bit improved, so now after a successful login, it will try to redirect you to where you intended to go. (Previously, it always sent the user to /)

WordPressMU Plugin Commander

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 07:56:01 +0000

I’m solidly impressed with the WPMU Plugin Commander. One thing that seemed odd to me about WPMU was that I either enable users to have plugin control, or NO ONE (not even the site admin) has the ability to enabled/disable plugins (without a lot of hacking).

This plugin provides a control panel where I can globally enable/disable plugins, set plugins to be auto-enabled for new blogs, and give users the ability to enable/disable only selected plugins.

I Downloaded Firefox 3

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 02:28:21 +0000

As I mentioned recently, I’ve been using pre-release versions of Firefox 3 for a while now. I’ve been happy, but today is great because FF3 was officially released!

They are trying to set the record for most downloads in a day, so go get it!

Firefox 3 rc2 Is Out!

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 16:41:01 +0000

Since moving to the Mac, I’ve tried to use Safari almost exclusively. I definitely like it, and it’s got some great tools, but I usually found myself running back to Firefox 2 whenever I had to really do work on a website because I really like some the power Firefox extensions give me. A couple of the things NOT too like about Firefox 2 was the heavy memory usage, the crashing, and the lack of native Mac OS X widgets.

Plainview: presentations ala web

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 09:18:11 +0000

I just stumbled onto the coolest little app for Mac. Plainview is a web browser based on WebKit (also the guts of the Safari browser). What’s unique is it’s intended to NOT have chrome (the name for all tose fancy navigation bars, address text boxes, menus etc). It’s slim… so slim the chrome is non-existent. This is a full-screen mode web browser, intended to utilize the full screen real estate for presentations! Essentially, instead of having to take screenshots of websites and put them into power point or something, you can just demo the site. It’s awesome… and i’m not even explaining it as well as they did… but I am tired. 🙂

Investigating OpenID

Tue, 27 May 2008 15:02:43 +0000

Aaron (one of my co-workers), recently posted a link about OpenID. I’ve given OpenID only cursory glances over the last year, but the Coding Horror link in Aaron’s post had a comment to this Google Video where Simon Willison gives a Google Tech Talk on The Implications of OpenID. The video is nearly a year old, but to date, it’s done more to convince me to get on the OpenID bandwagon than anything else.

Logins with mod_rewrite + Cookies + JavaScript

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 03:05:32 +0000

I recently had an odd situation come up, though it’s not incredibly hard to imagine. I needed to create a staging web server, identical to production, but it should live on a different hostname (eg, staging.sherman.bz, instead of www.sherman.bz). The content should not accessible to the public, nor to search engines. This isn’t really so much a privacy or security issue as it is a convenience and customer service issue. If search engines somehow picked up on our staging site (and they would, given it’s full of SEO triggering info, google analytics scripts and the like) then our search information could become poisoned with the staging URL. Also bad would be if a customer found the staging site and posted information to the wrong place. I’ve actually seen both of these happen in the past when measures were not in place to prevent it.