Elixir — a step in a never ending journey
By Kamil Ciemniewski
June 9, 2014
Every now and then a new programming language is born. In fact, since the not-so-distant introduction of early programming languages, we’ve got about 693 of them! (at least that’s what Wikipedia says).
Why can’t we settle for just one or at least just a handful? Creating a new programming language certainly isn’t the easiest task on earth. It’s one thing to have fun with syntax lexers, but completely different to provide all the tooling and libraries. In fact programming languages authors are being held hostage to their own creations. There’s always a multitude of things to do, which makes leading such a project basically a full-time job.
Why are those languages sprouting all the time then? The answer is simple: out of necessity.
Pitfalls of computer programming
Most of today’s mainstream programmers choose object-oriented programming as their paradigm of choice. It solves the problems of procedural programming… we could say: in a classy way. You can find its advocates everywhere. In fact you don’t even need to search—they will yell at you from just about every corner of the Internet.
Truth be told it’s one of the things that makes producing new software possible. Some of today’s …
elixir erlang functional-programming haskell ruby
Unable to Bcc in mail, Spree 2.0 Stable Rails 3.2.14
By Matt Galvin
June 9, 2014
Hello again all. As usual, I was working on a Spree Commerce website. I recently encountered an issue when trying to bcc order confirmation emails. Others have been asking about this on Github and also on the Spree mailing list, so it was time to write about the problem and the solution that worked for me.
First, I’d like to briefly describe the use case here. As with any typical e-commerce site, a user visits the site, adds some items to their cart, and checks out. After which, an order confirmation (order summary) email is sent to the user with their order details and any extra information provided by the seller.
Spree pretty much handles all this for you automatically. What about if you as the business owner would like a copy of this e-mail? Easy enough. If you review the Spree documentation you will see simple instructions for the “Mail Method Settings” to set up in the Spree Admin Interface.
Ok, so let’s say you follow all the instructions and start placing test orders (or receiving real ones), and you’re not getting bcc’d? This is where it gets tricky, so let’s check out a few things:
-
Check the logs
Check to see if Spree/Rails is attempting to send the …
email spree
CSS Conf US 2014 — Part Two
By Greg Davidson
June 4, 2014
More Thoughts on Getting Vertical, Testing and Icon Fonts
Without further ado I’ve written up another batch of my notes about three more great talks at CSS Conf US in Amelia Island, Florida last week.
Antoine Butler — Embrace the Vertical
Antoine shared his observation that vertical media queries are available to CSS developers but not often used. With the vast array of devices accessing the web today vertical media queries can be a useful tool to adapt your content effectively. Antoine walked us through a couple examples of how he applied this technique in a couple of his projects. The first was a prototype of WikiPedia. While they have gone with a separated mobile site (e.g. en.m.wikipedia.org/), he started with the HTML from the desktop site and applied some vertical media queries to make the content much more digestible. Take a look at his code to see how it works.
The second example Antoine demonstrated was for the navigation at Volkswagen. The client wanted to display an unlimited number of items in the secondary navigation. Once again Antoine applied vertical media queries to handle the varying number of navigation elements based on the device height. Check out his adaptive …
accessibility android chrome conference css html
vim-airline: A lightweight status/tabline for Vim
By Patrick Lewis
June 2, 2014
My standard Vim configuration makes use of around 30 different plugins and I consider vim-airline to be one of the most indispensable because of its built-in functionality and superb integration with a variety of other Vim plugins. It’s a great starting point for anyone looking to extend their Vim setup with additional plugins.
I became interested in vim-airline the first time I saw screenshots of it; the color schemes, custom glyphs[1] and indicators immediately revealed value beyond the basic status bar that a stock Vim installation provides. After installing and spending some time using vim-airline I discovered additional benefits due to its integration with other plugins such as Fugitive, Syntastic and CtrlP. vim-airline provides a common platform for integrating the display indicators of plugins from various authors into one view and presents them all with consistent a consistent style.
A quick comparison of Vim with vim-airline installed:
vs. a standard Vim installation:
reveals new indicators for the current Vim mode, git branch, open buffers, and line endings. Integrating other plugins can add additional indicators for syntax errors, trailing whitespace, and more.
Using …
vim
CSSConf US 2014 — Part One
By Greg Davidson
May 28, 2014
Geeks in Paradise
Today I was very lucky to once again attend CSSConf US here in Amelia Island, Florida. Nicole Sullivan and crew did an excellent job of organizing and curating a wide range of talks specifically geared toward CSS developers. Although I work daily on many aspects of the web stack, I feel like I’m one of the (seemingly) rare few who actually enjoy writing CSS so it was a real treat to spend the day with many like-minded folks.
Styleguide Driven Development
Nicole Sullivan started things off with her talk on Style Guide Driven Development (SGDD). She talked about the process and challenges she and the team at Pivotal Labs went through when they redesigned the Cloud Foundry Developer Console and how they overcame many of them with the SGDD approach. The idea behind SGDD is to catalog all of the reusable components used in a web project so developers use what’s already there rather than reinventing the wheel for each new feature. The components are displayed in the style guide next to examples of the view code and CSS which makes up each component. The benefits of this approach include enabling a short feedback loop for project managers and designers and encouraging …
browsers conference css design html
Supporting Apple Retina displays on the Web
By Phineas Jensen
May 27, 2014
Apple’s Retina displays (on Mac desktop & laptop computers, and on iPhones and iPads) have around twice the pixel density of traditional displays. Most recent Android phones and tablets have higher-resolution screens as well.
I was recently given the task of adding support for these higher-resolution displays to our End Point company website. Our imagery had been created prior to Retina displays being commonly used, but even now many web developers still overlook supporting high-resolution screens because it hasn’t been part of the website workflow before, because they aren’t simple to cope with, and since most people don’t notice any lack of sharpness without comparing low & high-resolution images side by side.
Most images which are not designed for Retina displays look blurry on them, like this:
The higher-resolution image is on the left, and the lower-resolution image is on the right.
Now, to solve this problem, you need to serve a larger, higher quality image to Retina displays. There are several different ways to do this. I’ll cover a few ways to do it, and explain how I implemented it for our site.
Retina.js
As I was researching ways to implement support for Retina …
graphics browsers compression
DBD::Pg, array slices, and pg_placeholder_nocolons
By Greg Sabino Mullane
May 25, 2014
New versions of DBD::Pg, the Perl driver for PostgreSQL, have been recently released. In addition to some bug fixes, the handling of colons inside SQL statements has been improved in version 3.2.1, and a new attribute named pg_placeholder_nocolons was added by Graham Ollis in version 3.2.0. Before seeing it in action, let’s review the concept of placeholders in DBI and DBD::Pg.
Placeholders allow you store a dummy representation of a value inside your SQL statement. This means you can prepare a SQL statement in advance without specific values, and fill in the values later when it is executed. The two main advantages to doing it this way are to avoid worrying about quoting, and to re-use the same statement with different values. DBD::Pg allows for three styles of placeholders: question mark, dollar sign, and named parameters (aka colons). Here’s an example of each:
$SQL = 'SELECT tbalance FROM pgbench_tellers WHERE tid = ? AND bid = ?';
$sth = $dbh->prepare($SQL);
$sth->execute(12,33);
$SQL = 'SELECT tbalance FROM pgbench_tellers WHERE tid = $1 AND bid = $2';
$sth = $dbh->prepare($SQL);
$sth->execute(12,33);
$SQL = …database dbdpg postgres
Kamelopard version 0.0.15 released
By Josh Tolley
May 22, 2014
The Camelopardalis constellation, as shown in Urania’s Mirror
I’ve just pushed version 0.0.15 of Kamelopard to RubyGems. As described in several previous blog posts, Kamelopard is a Ruby gem designed to create KML documents quickly and easily. We use it to create content for our Liquid Galaxy customers. This release doesn’t include any major new features, rather it provides a number of small but very helpful modifications that taken together make life much easier.
New Spline Types
Perhaps the most useful of these new features relate to spline functions, introduced in Kamelopard version 0.0.12. The original spline function interface described here accepts a series of equi-dimensional vectors as control points, and returns vectors as results, but there’s no indication of what each dimension in the vector means. This is convenient in that you can use splines to make nice paths through any number of dimensions and use them however you’d like, but in practice we most commonly want to make tours which fly through sets of either KML Points or AbstractViews (Points include just a latitude, longitude, and altitude, but AbstractViews include a direction vector, so they describe cameras and …
gis google-earth kamelopard visionport open-source kml