http://jarrodspillers.com web development and stuff Fri, 24 Oct 2008 21:23:27 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en At the start of the fall semester I began a continuing education class at the New York School of Visual Arts - Advanced Metalworking. The goal for taking this class is to construct a 11-12th century Norman helmet for use in full contact western martial arts in the SCA. I ... http://jarrodspillers.com/articles/blacksmithing-the-creation-of-an-11-12th-century-norman-helmet/ Last week a ran into a bit of an issue trying to write Rspec Stories for the app I am working on. The app in question depends on a remote service based authentication system. Creating "test" users on a remote user authentication service already running as production for other apps ... http://jarrodspillers.com/articles/faking-the-funk-stub-authentication-in-a-rails-rspec-story/ By now most Rails developers have come to know and love (or not?) RESTful resources and the controller code that implements them. For the most part Merb's implementation of resources will be familiar and adheres to the same convention - GET safe creates, updates, destroys, a single base URI for ... http://jarrodspillers.com/articles/merb-crud-ie-how-to-properly-destroy-things/ you bastard! http://jarrodspillers.com/articles/kevin-rose-broke-my-twitter-homepage/ So its finally official... I am headed out to RailsConf in Portland, OR next week! http://jarrodspillers.com/articles/headed-to-portland/ Thanks to my good friend and mentor Jerry Jackson forcing me to practice every day until I grew to like it, I am a die hard VIM user. To me it is just a much faster way to write code and edit text in general. Once upon a time I was ... http://jarrodspillers.com/articles/vim-is-good-for-your-health/ The situation: A class, it's descendant, and a module included in the parent class all have a method of the same name. Calling super from the child's method causes a call to the parent class and not the module... module Something def foo(&block) puts "Hello Module," ... http://jarrodspillers.com/articles/fun-with-ruby-blocks-modules-class-inheritance-and-super/ Requirements and Dependencies svnmerge.py - a python script that helps you keep your branches in synch with the trunk. The script and full documentation are ... http://jarrodspillers.com/articles/managing-branches-in-svn/ First of all – what the heck is a “pipe”? The character referred to as a “pipe” (|), in Linux, Unix, or OSX, is used for redirecting the output of one terminal command into another (ex: ls | grep “something”). It is also very commonly used, albiet only for presentation, ... http://jarrodspillers.com/articles/css-pipe-delimited-list-menus/ Gone are the days of the table based layout… days where CSS, if used at all, would simply be a replacement for the notorious font tag. In this day it is very common for a stylesheet to contain many times more line of code than its ... http://jarrodspillers.com/articles/css-advanced-formatting-and-organization/