Shane on Apr 4th, 2008acts_as_aspdotnet plugin for Ruby on Rails (April Fools)
This is hilarious.
Someday I’ll write my big asp.net rant.
Shane on Dec 1st, 2006The 5 Books that Every Programmer Should Read
Over the years I have read many programming related books, and there are a few that really should be required reading for anyone who develops software. All of these books are language-neutral and cover ideas that pertain to any kind of programming. These are the cream of the crop. I would not trust a developer […]
Shane on Sep 11th, 2006ruby-ldap and win32
ruby-ldap is a ruby module for communicating with LDAP, also know as ActiveDirectory for Windows. Unfortunately there is not a windows version of the module. I found a site that explained how to compile and get it working for windows, but it looks like the site is dead now, so I am going to go [...]
Shane on Sep 11th, 2006PHP 5, Sqlite, and Windows
My first task at my new job was a simple enough one. All our customers have a review site that has a list of contacts. The file was contacts.html and it was just a static html file. The managers had to edit the html directly to add, update, or delete any contacts. Since editing HTML [...]
Shane on Aug 28th, 2006Why Ruby on Rails is Awesome Part 1 - Migrations
I've been doing web development since 1994 and Ruby on Rails is a breath of fresh air. In the past I have developed sites in Perl, Php, Asp.net, and Java. Ruby on Rails blows them all away in terms of ease of use and development time. I thought I would go through the specifics of [...]
Shane on Aug 3rd, 2006Problems with Ruby on Rails
I'm a huge Ruby on Rails fanboy, and I've been using it to write web applications for a year and a half now. I think it's superior to everything else I've used in the past 12 years. It does have problems though.
Migrations are not executed within a transaction
This one has bitten me on a number [...]
Shane on May 10th, 2006Keeping track of user-made changes - Part 2
In my Keeping track of user-made changes post I descriped the various options for implementing change-tracking in my application. I ended up doing something completely different. Ruby on Rails has a cool feature called Observers which basically act like database triggers. After certain events(save, update, create, etc) happen your observer code will automatically get executed.
I [...]
Shane on Apr 17th, 2006Passwords Should Always be Encrypted
I signed up with changenotes.com recently and like most web applications you have to confirm your account. When I read the confirmation e-mail I noticed the URL had my password in plain text in the url as "pass=MY_PASSWORD"!!
Web developers, you should always encrypt passwords! Passwords should be one-way hashed with a randomly generated salt. [...]
Shane on Mar 28th, 2006Keeping track of user-made changes
In my web application I have been building for over a year, registered users can edit content. This is structured content that is stored in different fields and database tables. Every change that a user makes needs to be approved by a moderator/admin user. There are a couple of ways you can do this, and [...]
Shane on Mar 8th, 2006How to persist Rails sessions via cookies using the Login Engine plugin
I absolutely can't stand having to log in to web applications on every visit. If I manage to remember what login I used, I'm not going to remember the password. It's just one more unnecessary step that I don't want to take.
If you're building a Ruby on Rails application that requires authentication, you're probably [...]
