Patrick Bacon on Atomic Spin

libiconv Problems with MAMP, PHP, and Ruby

Solution to a problem executing a Ruby script from PHP using MAMP on Mac OS X where the wrong libiconv was being picked up.

Web Apps

Upload Files Directly to S3 with Plupload, Rails, and Paperclip

A description of uploading files directly to Amazon S3 from the browser using Plupload, Ruby on Rails, and Paperclip.

Developer Tools

Run Tests From MacVim via Terminal.app or iTerm.app

AppleScript and Vimscript for running Ruby tests being edited in MacVim in either Terminal.app or iTerm.app. Works with Rspec, Cucumber, and Test::Unit tests.

Web Apps

Chaining jQuery Ajax Calls

An example of sequentially chaining jQuery Ajax requests using deferred objects and deferred.pipe.

Project & Team Management

Breaking Down Epic Stories

A discussion of what to do when an Epic story is broken down into smaller stories and the point totals don't add up.

Web Apps

Finding an Element Using jQuery’s andSelf() Function

An example using jQuery's andSelf, filter, and find functions to locate an element starting with the element itself instead of only looking at its descendants.

Web Apps

JavaScript: Don’t Reassign Your Function Arguments

The point of this post is to raise awareness that reassigning the value of an argument variable mutates the arguments object.

Ruby

System Test Active Directory Authentication in Ruby

I came across a few Ruby libraries for connecting to Active Directory, but I used net-ldap gem, the environment_configurable gem and a few lines of code.

Web Apps

jQuery Ajax Memory Leak in IE8

With so many javascript memory leaks in Internet Explorer it can be very difficult to track down the cause and solution to any given leak.

UX/Design Tools

Researching HTML5 Offline

After prototyping and researching offline web application technologies, here are my notes and a few useful links the team came across in the process.

.NET / WPF

Consolidate Multiple FileSystemWatcher Events

.NET doesn't provide a wrapper around the FileSystemWatcher, so I wrote my own. It monitors a directory and only throws one event when a new file is created or an existing file is

Java

Lazy Thread-Safe Collections in Java

I recently needed to update some Java code that was frequently making unecessary calls to an external web service.

Patrick Bacon

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