Three till Seven

My new job at CirrusMio has been going great these past couple of months. I got to go to RubyConf 2012 in Denver, which was awesome. I had never been to RubyConf before, and it was great to go to a conference so relevant to what I do and enjoy. I especially enjoyed Refactoring from Good to Great and Jim Weirich’s keynote.

I recently changed jobs, going from a web developer position to programming. I had been at a consulting company where I did a lot of web design with a bit of WordPress and Drupal customization. Now I’m at a local Ruby on Rails company as a programmer, and I’m super happy to be back in Rails. I hadn’t used Rails regularly since an intern position I had years ago, back when Rails was on maybe at version 1. I forgot how awesome a language Ruby is, too; I hadn’t used Ruby since I finished my Master’s project last year. Now I get to use Capybara, CoffeeScript, Sunspot, SASS, Arel, and experience all the new stuff Rails 3 has to offer.

I got the Supernatural expansion pack the other day off of Amazon, for The Sims 3. I had been hoping for such an expansion ever since Makin’ Magic for the first Sims was so awesome. Supernatural has been pretty good so far, enough to where I’d recommend getting it. I can’t say the same for, say, the Generations expansion.

Today at work I set up a WordPress install on CentOS Linux so that it could send email. It’s pretty useful and almost required to have this working, since if you forget your password, WordPress needs to send you an email to reset it. That’s how I discovered mail wasn’t set up correctly, actually: a user tried to reset their password and WordPress gave an error about “email could not be sent”, and no email was received. Fortunately it was pretty easy to fix.

There are possibly a million tutorials out there about jQuery and menus, but there weren’t a million and one… until now! ;) I recently had cause to make a sliding drop-down menu for a project at work and thought I would write up how I did it. First off, check out the demo. The commented source code is below.

Last summer I worked on a project where I needed a search engine that supported simple Boolean queries and key-value parameters. This was to be used on a Python site, so I wanted to write the query parser in Python too. At the time, Lepl seemed like a good choice. I figured out the grammar necessary to support the search query language I wanted, and all was good. I went to check out Lepl just now and I see it has been discontinued, which is a little disheartening. Regardless, I figured better late than never to post this since it still works and Lepl did the job.

I wanted to try Backbone.js, having never used a JavaScript MVC framework before, so I started a project a few days ago to create a web app version of the Grandfather’s Clock variant of solitaire. I figured it would be an easy game to implement, and since I pretty much have it all working, it turned out to be pretty easy after all. You can check out my code on Github, and here is what it looks like: