border: solid 1px red;

vijo doesn't overheat my cpu! (yet)

Here’s what I came up with during the Hack Day portion of the incredible Open Video Conference 2009 this weekend. It’s a VJ’ing tool written purely in HTML5 and JS.

Bear with me if it’s glitchy! It’s just a prototype.

go to vijo

Deprecating 'www' from Rails Requests with Metal

In ‘app/metal/deprecate_w_w_w.rb’:

# Allow the metal piece to run in isolation
require(File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/../../config/environment") unless defined?(Rails)

class DeprecateWWW
  def self.call(env)
    if env['HTTP_HOST'].slice!(/^www\./)
      location = "#{env['rack.url_scheme']}://#{env['HTTP_HOST']}#{env['REQUEST_URI']}"
      RAILS_DEFAULT_LOGGER.info "DeprecateWWW: Redirecting to #{location}"
      [302, {'Location' => location}, []]
    else
     # A 400 status (Not Found) passes the call on to the next piece in the stack,
     # which can be another metal piece, or your rails application.
     [404, {"Content-Type" => "text/html"}, ["Not Found!"]]
   end
  end
end

For example, ‘http://www.solid1pxred.com/foobar’ would be redirected to ‘http://solid1pxred.com/foobar’

Radial Gradiant in Safari / Webkit (CSS3)

Many of the docs on gradient support in WebKit right now only include examples for “linear” style gradients, while just mentioning the syntax for “radial” styles:

-webkit-gradient(type, inner_center, inner_radius, outer_center, outer_radius, / stop...)

So here’s an example of how to do a “radial” background gradient:

background: -webkit-gradient(radial, left top, 30, left top, 100, color-stop(0.7, #7C95AC), from(#FFF), to(#304B67));

And here it is!

Keep it shortenTweet

Behold… shortenTweet! It’s a wee microapp for Twitter that tries to shorten your tweets using UTF-8, ASCII and some shorthand. It’s a combination of Sinatra + jQuery, and after doing this I’m all aboard this microapp train (esp. with how easy it is to deploy Rack-based apps on Passenger).

And — par for the course — after I “launched” it, I discovered 2 or 3 or services that already did “tweet shortening” (although I don’t think any of them actually employ UTF-8).

Rails 2.3 : Uninitialized constant CGI::Session

Upgraded to Rails 2.3 today… very nice, but I ran into this

uninitialized constant CGI::Session

To solve, look for anywhere you reference the builtin session stores for rails (ie CookieStore), and change “CGI::Session” to “ActionController::Session”. (ie “CGI::Session::CookieStore” to “ActionController::Session::CookieStore”)

Convention over Configuration'ing my Blog.

I’m pretty close to ditching my 3-year-old Typo/Joyent shared hosting blog setup soon. I might just replace it with this Tumblelog.

(apologies to anyone who was following my old blog feed)