Pro Git
Scott Chacon, one of the guys behind GitHub, has released Pro Git, which, as the name suggests, is a new Git book. He’s made it available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 license, which is to say it...
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In defense of "unless" (in Ruby and elsewhere)
I recently came across John Nunemaker’s take on using “unless” in Ruby and thought I’d share my two cents.
Introducing Strongbox
Over a year ago I wrote the wildly popular Encrypting Lots of Sensitive Data with Ruby (on Rails). At the end I said: Clearly, this screams for a plugin; watch this space. Well, it took a while and it turned out to be a gem, but Strongbo...
Emacs on the Mac (Life has a funny way of sneaking up on you)
I’ve been using Emacs for more than 20 years now. I still use it just about everyday on servers I admin. However, a year or so ago I started using TextMate as my day to day editor for development on the Mac. TextMate has some nice featur...
Dealing with read-only fields and partial updates in Rails 1.x
So, you have a column in your database you can’t update after the record is created. Not don’t want to update, but can’t. Specifically, you might have a column that is protected by a trigger, which will cause an error if that column is i...
Quick and Dirty cropping images with attachment_fu
Rick Olson’s attachment_fu is a great plugin for attaching files documents to Rails models. It’s a rewrite of his acts_as_attachment plugin. While it can handle any kind of file data, most commonly, it is used for attaching images; as a ...
Encrypting Lots of Sensitive Data with Ruby (on Rails)
Previously I wrote about how to use public key encryption to automatically encrypt data using Ruby (and thus Rails). Because this method can encrypt data without a password, it’s very useful for securing information received from a form,...
Encrypting Sensitive Data with Ruby (on Rails)
In Encrypting Sensitive Data with Perl I wrote about how to use public key encryption to automatically and securely encrypt information with Perl. This allows you encryption things like credit card numbers, bank routing information, or t...
Encrypting Sensitive Data with Perl
It’s not uncommon to have information submitted through a web form that you need to save, but don’t want to have lying around in plain text. Credit card numbers, bank routing information, missile launch codes, and so on. The trick is to ...