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Running multiple Rails applications is easy with Pow

By Greg Pattison | Published: November 8, 2011

Pow is a zero-config Rack server for Mac OS X created by 37signals which “makes developing Rails and Rack applications as frictionless as possible.” I just discovered Pow thanks to overhearing Patrick Bacon discuss his setup for working on multiple Rails applications at the same time. Pow allows me to have more than one Rails…

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Posted in Tools, Web | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Perspectives on Bugs

By Greg Pattison | Published: September 30, 2011

There are two perspectives on bugs and every software company has to juggle them. From a user’s perspective, a bug is unexpected behavior. From a developer’s perspective, a bug is unintended behavior. There’s a very subtle difference here, but it’s important to consider and value both perspectives. The Destination The reputation of an application relies…

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Cross-Compiling Ruby using LTIB

By Greg Pattison | Published: August 20, 2011

Linux Target Image Builder (LTIB) is a tool used to develop and deploy board support packages for an embedded target platform. I used LTIB on my last project to create the kernel image and root file system for an i.MX28 freescale processor running on a custom board.

Posted in Embedded Software, Unix, Linux, and Bash | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

PhoneGap with HAML, SCSS and CoffeeScript

By Greg Pattison | Published: July 12, 2011

PhoneGap is an HTML application platform that runs natively on iOS. After the initial project setup, PhoneGap allows you to pretend you are just writing a web application, meaning you spend your day in HTML, CSS and javascript instead of Objective-C. When I had the opportunity to write a PhoneGap application for a project demo,…

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Posted in Mobile, Tools | Tagged , , , | 8 Comments

3 Ways to Make Tab Delimited Files From Your MySQL Table

By Greg Pattison | Published: May 28, 2011

When it comes to exporting a tab-delimited file from a mysql database table, you have a couple different options without having to resort to heavier programming in Ruby, PHP, Java, etc. Instead, you can use MySQL’s SELECT INTO OUTFILE, run a SELECT statement and redirect the output to a file, or use mysqldump. I started…

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Posted in Design & Development | Tagged | 1 Comment

Don’t forget to add realtime web analytics monitoring to your website

By Greg Pattison | Published: April 20, 2011

Each new web project I do for Atomic Object requires some level of web analytics measurement. Just about every customer knows about and wants Google Analytics, but very few have heard about or understand the advantages of supplementing Google Analytics with a realtime monitoring web analytics service. Using a realtime web analytics service allows you…

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Posted in Design & Development, Marketing, Tools, Web | 2 Comments

Website video using Amazon S3, Amazon CloudFront and JWPlayer

By Greg Pattison | Published: January 27, 2011

Providing video on the web has been done. It should be simple to get it up and running right? Just a Google search away? Well, one Google search will get hundreds of results all giving different methods, technologies and solutions. The following is a road-map of my path to enlightenment and the eventual solution I…

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Posted in Web | 6 Comments