philcrissman.com - Latest Comments

Re: Disqus?

Ben L — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 22:05:16 -0000

it's just eh! I am looking into using it and was looking for someone that is...that's how I found you. It's better than traditional comments, and I like video. I also like threaded conversation.

Re: When JavaScript and Flash aren’t playing well together

philcrissman — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 13:14:04 -0000

I believe it can happen in IE as well, though I don't have a convenient way to test that theory.

Re: When JavaScript and Flash aren’t playing well together

mrben — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 09:18:46 -0000

I've noticed that happening in a lot of places - javascript menus dropping down under flash content. Does it happen across all browsers, or is it just a firefox thing?

Re: Kool Aid, Confirmation Bias, and the problem with Democracy

Manny — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 16:38:56 -0000

This is an excellent post. I think people would be kidding themselves if they thought that convincing people on joining your political party is a winning cause. In many ways it is an exercise in futility.

Re: Stupid Ruby Tricks at philcrissman.com

philcrissman — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 17:37:29 -0000

Good alternative; although, 'puts' and 'eval' are the same length. I think those are as short as it gets for something like that.

Technically, using $0 is sort of "cheating" -- if I remember right, part of the challenge of writing a program whose output is its own source code was doing so without resorting to simply reading and outputting the source file... Using something like $0 is much easier, of course. :-)

Something like _="_=%p;puts _%%_";puts _%_ (which I didn't write; found that at http://thisbindle.com/personal/ruby/)

Re: Stupid Ruby Tricks at philcrissman.com

Peter Cooper — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 16:08:04 -0000

Try this ;-)

eval `cat #{$0}`

Re: acts_as_monetized at philcrissman.com

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Re: Ruby Tidbits: Sentencizing A List of Things

philcrissman — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 18:53:11 -0000

D'oh! I _nearly_ asked the other day if Rails had a builtin method for this, decided not to, searched google and didn't see this.

My option is a lot shorter than to_sentence's code, but on the other hand, to_sentence *does* allow you to decide whether or not to skip the last comma, and to choose a connector other than "and" if you want. So much for DRY.

Re: Ruby Tidbits: Sentencizing A List of Things

Luke Francl — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 18:22:45 -0000

Or, if you're using ActiveSupport, you could use Array#to_sentence.

['Larry', 'Moe', 'Curly'].to_sentence => "Larry, Moe, and Curly"

http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveSuppor...

Re: What Microsoft Could Do To Improve Their Image at philcrissman.com

philcrissman — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 13:16:49 -0000

Yes, an admission of failure isn't what most companies would want to put out there. I almost think, though, that the admission of failure in the case of IE would be _better_ press than simply allowing it to continue existing.

I may be biased because IE7 is creating a lot of extra work for me yesterday and today. :-)

Re: What Microsoft Could Do To Improve Their Image at philcrissman.com

studiophi — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 16:14:57 -0000

It's generally bad marketing to admit complete and total failure.

That said, I was at a MS-run conference on Friday where a "Software Evangelist" took a half hour trying to show a room full of us how to debug JavaScript using FireBug.

This happened after the proud announcement that ASP.Net will now support development using MVC, which is really a shout of "Me too!" to Rails developers.

Re: Some Ruby & Rails Tricks at philcrissman.com

philcrissman — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 12:46:27 -0000

It looks like you're correct about named_scope, my mistake.

It turns out the Rails project I am working on has the 'has_finder" gem installed in /vendor, and I mistakenly thought that what I was doing was already part of Rails. I'll have to correct the post, thanks!

Re: Some Ruby & Rails Tricks at philcrissman.com

Tom Brice — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 12:16:13 -0000

Those are great tips. Didn't know about the counter and const_get tricks.

One small correction: I think has_finder is actually named_scope in Rails 2.1 (http://dev.rubyonrails.org/changeset/9084)

Thanks for sharing

Re: Flex and Rails

philcrissman — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 16:16:14 -0000

:sigh: It's true. I've been busy (but then again, everyone's busy). Some ideas for new posts are percolating. Or perhaps they are steeping. Or fermenting. At any rate... yeah. I'm still here. I keep meaning to write something, but I keep having other things intrude in the priority list.

I will return! I haven't wanted to write one of those "gee I haven't written in awhile" posts, so I've been waiting until I actually have something to write....

Re: Flex and Rails

mrben — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 08:32:06 -0000

Phil - where are you? No posts in almost a month! ;)

Re: Strange jQuery.load() behavior

kennykim79 — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 06:22:28 -0000

test

Re: Displaying a Gmail ATOM Feed In Google Reader

philcrissman — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:15:51 -0000

If you mean a downloadable file, you'd have to look up the PHP docs on file IO, I don't think it should be too hard. If you just need a feed, you don't need to do anything different; say the above file was your-url.com/bacn.php, you would just use that address, and an atom feed should be returned.

Even better might be SimplePie (http://simplepie.org/), which was not around when I wrote this and looks very easy to use.

Re: Displaying a Gmail ATOM Feed In Google Reader

Gus — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 03:21:19 -0000

Type your comment here.So say I wanted to write the output to teh screen, or a file, for use with Geektool, how would I do that with the above?

Re: Displaying a Gmail ATOM Feed In Google Reader

Gus — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 03:21:06 -0000

Type your comment here.So say I wanted to write the output to teh screen, or a file, for use with Geektool, how would I do that with the above?

Re: Where Does CTRL-W Come From?

TheGuyThatDoesn'tGiveAShit — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 16:26:31 -0000

wow is that sooooo important???

Re: Where Does CTRL-W Come From?

henryzx — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 16:12:41 -0000

I think it is derived from an original Universal keyboard Shortcut from Mac to close a window of a particular application. Try it on a mac.

Re: Flex and Rails

Luke Bayes — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 22:04:11 -0000

Hey Phil,

Thanks for the pointer!

Please let me know if you have any questions once you do try out Sprouts.

Re: Flex and Rails

VeryVito — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 20:02:00 -0000

Wow. Always good to see the Jabberwocky raise its head again! The scariest part these days is its ancient AS1 text.

Re: Schroedinger’s Glass

shizly — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 15:44:33 -0000

About the forms: agreed.

Also a beef of mine: difficulty in unsubscribing. If I don't use said service, chances are I will not remember my username or password, yet the bad website people want me to go through a "forgot my username" AND a "forgot my password" rigamorole just to unsubscribe. Hell no.

Re: Long Sign-Up Forms Considered Harmful

philcrissman — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 02:00:53 -0000

Right; I agree. In cases where a username is automatically public, then using the email address would be a faux pas.

One simple option would be to simply truncate the email before the '@' and use that as the user id. While it might be relatively easy to guess the address using the major domains used these days (it's still relatively few people who use their own personal domain as their main email channel), it would at least be mildly obfuscated.

But even if one includes a username field, that would (hopefully) be only 3 fields: username, email, password. If you send an email to the new user right away (before you encrypt is and save it to the db) advising them of what password they signed up with, then you don't need a second field for the password; if they really did fat-finger it or forget what they entered, they could just check their email.

There are always exceptions... sometimes you need a little more information from a new user. But in most cases, I think you can leave that until _after_ he/she has signed up; just direct them to their profile page to fill in additional information, if they want to. If it so happens that some information is critical to the app (maybe it simply _must_ know my zip/postal code, for some reason), then you can advise the user that feature X won't work until they've added this information. Etc.

I think it's pragmatic for the web application, as well; I'd venture to guess that the simpler the sign up, the less attrition you'll see at that point of the process. To me, that makes sense; make it so insanely simple to sign up that I just can't resist.