Codedrop™ Weblog

A few months ago I ran into a situation where my new MacBook Pro would no longer allow me to pull my mail from the shaw servers using Apple’s mail application. Turns out that this was a simple DNS issue. Error reported was ‘The server “shawmail” cannot be contacted on port 110.’. From a terminal [...]

An often useful technique for storing options is to use bit masking to identify if a particular option is enabled or disabled. A contrived example (and this is a poor example!) might be a ATM that allows control of what options are available to the user. Eg. 1 – Chequing 2 – Savings 4 – [...]

Finally after what seems like nearly 2 years development, Cenqua has released their new product entitled ‘Crucible‘ that supports online peer code reviews.  I’ve yet to try it personally but the screencast looks very promising.  My only hesitation at this point would be the mass instability we’ve had integrating the underlying product Fisheye. I’ve run [...]

We arrived in Australia last wednesday after a near 24 hour travel time. Sydney is beautiful… hot and fairly humid for us, even this time of year! So far our adventures have been mainly been in the Sydney area. Went to see the highlights like the Opera House, Darling Harbour Bridge, Aquarium and the Toranga [...]

Getting started on a new rails app and want to get setup on svn?.. These are the common tasks you might need to get you started. 1) Create your new repository (if it doesn’t already exist). svnadmin create <path to repository>/<repository name> 2) Create the project directory structure and import it into svn. mkdir -p [...]

I launched my first ever Ruby on Rails project a few days ago at www.holidayhiatus.com.  Still very preliminary and mostly using only view technologies at this point, but I’ve been really impressed with the turn around time you get out of rails.  Using capistrano I can now churn through development and push out builds faster [...]

Stumbled across a good page with some information on obtaining vmware license keys.  Essentially all that is really required is that you register.. but suprisingly this wasn’t very easy to get to from the website.click here to receive your free serial number(s). ( non-expiring license key) free vm license keys powered by performancing firefox Tweet [...]

If your running a local MySQL installation, the mysql client will attempt to connect through a socket file.  The default location of the socket file is typically /tmp/mysql.sock or /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock.  If you are doing a custom install (eg. building from src) you may need to modify this location to suit your needs. You can verify [...]

Finally spent the time to do the wordpress / gallery integration which will make it much easier to publish photos here going forward…. So to test it out.. heres some pics of Karma and Caleb from their first halloween.. I couldn’t resist! They call me super… 8546 8543 .. and the strawberry fairy! Tweet This [...]

Just got back the The Rails Edge conference hosted by Pragmatic Studio in Denver Colorado.  All in all I’d say it was a great conference and an eye opener the direction ruby on rails is headed. Some key items I walked away with are: – Make use of the console. The ‘app’ is now accessible [...]