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hello, i'm yan

This blog is about startups, blogging, Ruby On Rails, virtualization and cloud computing, photography, customer service, marketing, ux and design, git, and lots more.

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planypus

I'm the founder of Planypus, the place to share your plans!

cohesiveft

Accessible, manageable, virtualized application stacks ready to download or deploy to the cloud!

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Reach me at yan at pritzker.ws

Posts Tagged software

Noobkit: a better way to get your Rails API docs

Recently launched Noobkit is a great new way to get at your Rails API docs. The visual design is pleasing and it’s got an OpenID login system and ability to make bookmarks. It covers the Rails API and many common gems. The look is much more pleasing than the similar gotapi.com which covers more programming [...]


Helio Ocean Tips & Tricks

Strange but true: hold down your ‘backspace’ (the one below the flame) and it will turn on your flash/flashlight!
The USB cable included actually charges the phone. Plug it in, then exit the media sync mode and you can use your phone while it’s charging. The indicator will go green when it’s on full charge.
To send [...]


Five tips for twitter usage in the workplace

Here are some ideas for using twitter for work. We use this for Planypus since our team is highly distributed (both geographically and temporally). Sadly twitter doesn’t have true group support so what we’ve done is create private twitter accounts for our team and befriended each other. Those of us who have public twitter accounts [...]


Dynamically adding routes from your engine plugins

At Cohesive FT I am developing a sort of webmin console that has drop-in pluggable components. I am using the RoR plugin system with the engines plugin to drop entire chunks of MVC infrastructure into my application as required. This is all well and good except that rails engines require you to add this line [...]


Bugtracking in the new millenium: how to build a better mouse..err..bug trap

It’s not Bugzilla’s fault that it sucks. When most of the bug tracking projects out there were started, we didn’t know rss, we didn’t understand tagging, we thought in terms of fields and hierarchies, and we thought proper usability and web design were out of our reach and not as important as getting a functional [...]


Virtual Appliances running a rails admin console

Hello everyone, it’s been a while since I’ve written here mostly because I’ve been super busy at My new job at CohesiveFT. It’s been a fun and hectic several weeks, as I was dumped head first into a brand new environment and technology–building virtual appliances!
We released two new versions of our financial trading appliances [...]


Five ways to get insane productivity boosts

It is said that really good programmers are orders of magnitude more productive than the average ones. What makes this the case? And why isn’t this the case in other industries? I believe the answer lies in that computers are very good at automation. And good programmers know how to make computers do what they [...]


Rails request log filtering

Just as I was thinking of writing a plugin to filter sensitive data from request logs, I googled and found that the core guys had snuck something into the 1.1.6 release to do just that: read the blog. Sweet!


Encrypted db passwords for Rails with database.yml and erb

Some people are upset that database.yml can expose passwords in plaintext. However, there is a pretty simple way to get encryption into database.yml. Because the database.yml file is actually run through an ERB interpreter by Rails, we can put code into our file:
##### database.yml #####
production:
adapter: oci
username: user
password: <%= PROD_DB_PASSWORD.decrypt(PROD_KEYFILE) [...]


Consuming document literal SOAP webservices with Ruby and ROXML

Ruby support for consuming doclit webservices is still less than stellar. Recently I had the task of integrating a standalone RoR application with a backend Java core login system via webservices. Because of our complex schema, soap4r would not work well for creating the data binding objects. Instead, I discovered a very simple and concise [...]


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