AlternateIdea: Sellin' Rails to the Man

May 18th, 2005

Sellin' Rails to the Man

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So you go into work every morning, pull your chair in and wiggle your mouse to wake your machine up only to see the tangled mess of regular asp or .NET staring you in the face. The company you work for has been in business for over 10 years and has seen the rise, fall, and now the rebirth of the internet. The small company has sustained business this long by sticking with what they know to work; They rarely, if ever venture into anything new. Your company is comfortable in its current position, and focuses on production and profit for the simple fact this ideology has never let them down, after all…they survived the internet bust. You’ve been working for this company for a mere 9 months and are itching to work with new technologies and push the limits of the web. You would love to work with Rails on a daily basis, but your company doesn’t do the cutting edge thing. Your company is pretty well rooted in the way it does things, it doesn’t even own a Linux box and just last month invested thousands of dollars on two brand new Windows racks.

The odds are stacked against you right?–Yes, but there is hope. Lets’ see what things you do have going for you?

Your opinion is valued by your colleagues.
The decision maker(s) are willing to listen to you and give serious thought to what you recommend.
You have a colleague who shares your passion.
Your persistent and driven.

With the above in hand, I knew there was a small glimmer of hope for me to sell Rails to the man, but it wasn’t a completely closed door.

h3. Do your homework It’s important

Justin develops iPhone and Mac software over at Labrat Revenge by night and by day he is the Design Director for entp, the company behind Lighthouse, Warehouse, and Mephisto. You can check out his dated portfolio for a peek of what he's done.

Beautifully simple issue tracking and project management. With a beautiful Mac-like interface, email and subversion integration, Lighthouse is the perfect project management tool. We took the suck out of issue tracking.

Jan12

YouTube has just announced HouseHub and Senate Hub.
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Oct10

Best Practices For Cocoa and CocoaTouch—Invaluable tips from Cocoa developers.
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Sep25

Track House And Senate Votes On Twitter. I’ve put together a small script that parses vote data collected by Govtrack.us and posts to twitter.
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Jul28
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Protip: Color grep searches in terminal
```
alias grep='GREP_COLOR="1;37;41" LANG=C grep --color=auto'
```
Stash this away in your Z Shell (~/.zshenv) or Bash environment (~/.bashrc) and set your preferred ANSI code.
Jun08

ActiveRecord Ported To Objective-C brought to us by Ninja Kitten
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May06

With the release of Opera’s DragonFly, IE 8’s Developer tools, Safari’s/Webkit’s Web Inspector and Drosera; and the Grand Daddy of them all, Firebug – we’ve now come full circle.
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Feb08

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DoubleClick and Define using Apple Dictionary


var selection;
if(window.getSelection)
  selection = window.getSelection();
else if(document.selection)
  selection = document.selection.createRange();

document.observe("dblclick", function() {
  if(navigator.userAgent.include("Macintosh")) {
      location.href = "dict://" + selection;
    }
});

A quick (and probably dirty) Prototype-based hack allowing Mac users to get the definition of any word by double clicking it.

Feb08

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A strftime for Prototype


Object.extend(Date.prototype, {
  strftime: function(format) {
    var day = this.getUTCDay(), month = this.getUTCMonth();
    var hours = this.getUTCHours(), minutes = this.getUTCMinutes();
    function pad(num) { return num.toPaddedString(2); };

    return format.gsub(/\%([aAbBcdDHiImMpSwyY])/, function(part) {
      switch(part[1]) {
        case 'a': return $w("Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat")[day]; break;
        case 'A': return $w("Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday")[day]; break;
        case 'b': return $w("Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec")[month]; break;
        case 'B': return $w("January February March April May June July August September October November December")[month]; break;
        case 'c': return this.toString(); break;
        case 'd': return this.getUTCDate(); break;
        case 'D': return pad(this.getUTCDate()); break;
        case 'H': return pad(hours); break;
        case 'i': return (hours === 12 || hours === 0) ? 12 : (hours + 12) % 12; break;
        case 'I': return pad((hours === 12 || hours === 0) ? 12 : (hours + 12) % 12); break;
        case 'm': return pad(month + 1); break;
        case 'M': return pad(minutes); break;
        case 'p': return hours > 11 ? 'PM' : 'AM'; break;
        case 'S': return pad(this.getUTCSeconds()); break;
        case 'w': return day; break;
        case 'y': return pad(this.getUTCFullYear() % 100); break;
        case 'Y': return this.getUTCFullYear().toString(); break;
      }
    }.bind(this));
  }
});

UPDATE: Bugs fixed. Thanks Andrew and Stephen

Also, some of my old and new code has been posted on GitHub. You might find something useful.

Feb04

A beautiful, organic animation by Flight404 created using Processing.

Processing in Action
Jan08

Aaron Patterson shows us how to define ruby methods which can be called from JavaScript using RKelly.
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Jan07

Dustin might not surprise you at your house with a book in hand, but he’ll damn sure send you his innermost fu in the form of a shiny yellow and black book. It’s an excellent read if you’re looking to put more funk in your functions and class in your classes. Check out “Pro JavaScript Design Patterns” by Dustin and Ross Harmes.

—I’m Justin Palmer and I approve this message.
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Dec23

IE 8 PAsses the Acid 2 Test for those not keeping tabs on things.
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Oct24

Mislav has written up an excellent overview on upgrading Radiant (which used 1.5) to Prototype 1.6. The article does a great job of showing how 1.6 is superior to 1.5.
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Oct19

According to the New York Times, the Daily Show Archives, with over 7,000 videos are online—free and searchable.
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Oct11

Telemarketer gets owned

AlternateIdea

Sellin' Rails to the Man

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