Solar Flare

• 16 June 2013

  Pump.io on Raspberry Pi

  Note: I’m using the Raspbian distro, but I imagine this would be very similar on other distros since there’s no package manager involved. I’m just using the latest binaries available from the node.js project.

  The version of node.js in Raspbian apt is too old to run pump.io, so we’ll have to install the .tar.gz version that’s available on node’s site....

• 09 December 2011

  OS X Style Monitor Switching on Ubuntu

  I recently decided it was complete bullshit that you can’t just plug in an external monitor and switch to it easily in Ubuntu. In OSX you’ve been able to do this for years. You just plug in your external monitor and it automatically switches to the last known good configuration for that monitor.

  Anyway, with a little searching I discovered...

• 27 February 2011

  Ajaxy Edit-In-Place with Autocomplete

  I’ve been working on creating a slick UI for WikiGini, a new genealogy project I’m building. As part of that I’m using the “Best In Place” jQuery plugin for in-place editing, and the corresponding gem for Rails 3. I’ve also been...

• 17 February 2011

  Skype for Chrome

  I’m working on a Chrome extension that will link phone numbers within pages so you can call them with Skype. It’s rough, but check it out if you’re interested:

  • on GitHub at https://github.com/jacksenechal/Skype-for-Chrome

  • or the extension on the Chrome web store

  In particular, I haven’t figured out how to make the external...

• 12 February 2011

  Android Video Encoder

  I wasn’t having much luck finding an easy way to encode videos for viewing on my phone, so I cooked one up. I followed the instructions for ffmpeg as listed here, and wrote a Ruby wrapper that detects the dimensions of the video and scales them down to the right size for you...

• 09 January 2011

  Flex Text Height within a List

  There’s a little trick if you’re trying to use a Text component as part of a custom itemRenderer for a List. The Text component will automatically wrap the text and set its correct height. However, when it’s in a list, you may find it gets cut off anyway. You have to set the variableRowHeight attribute of the List to true.

• 03 January 2011

  Bi-directional relationships in Rails

  Really that should be “Bi-directional self-referential relationships in ActiveRecord models”, but that’s just too much to say!

  A common example for this would be if you had a Person model and a Friendship model, and you wish the friendship between two people to be a two-way road, like on Facebook. The project I’m working on is a genealogy application that...

• 16 December 2010

  Using Flex 4 With The Flex 3 Halo Theme

  With Flex 4 comes “Spark”: a much more “flexible” (haha), and in my opinion much less beautiful theme than the one in Flex 3. Of course, you can use Spark to create all sorts of beautiful things, but if you’re looking for something pretty out of the box, it’s not that.

  The Flex 3 theme is called “Halo”, and as...

• 10 December 2010

  WikiLeaks and the future of Openness and Transparency

  The world is in a storm this week over the leaks of more sensitive government documents on WikiLeaks, and the arrest of its founder Julien Assange.

  Personally, I think Assange may be tapping from the dark side of the force… he doesn’t feel right to me. I’m all for press freedom, but I’m not sure he’s doing good when he...

• 29 August 2010

  Batch CD and DVD ripping/burning

  I was faced with the task of ripping a few box sets of DVDs and CDs today, and after a quick and fruitless “topeka” search for a way to automate this, I wantonly decided to write my own.

  A short time later I had a nice Ruby script capable of ripping discs to images without any user input, except sticking...