Feb 132012
 

My Etsy store has been doing well, but I’d like to overcome the friction of requiring an Etsy account. To reach a wider audience, I’d like to additionally offer my products on a site that wasn’t specific to a community. To that end, I created a tool which generates a static HTML + Javascript eCommerce site. Here’s the result: Creative Retrospection. Continue reading »

Aug 282011
 

Ruby’s standard library includes the Singleton module, which lets you easily implement the singleton pattern. It can make unit testing a little difficult, though, because you cannot easily instantiate different versions of the class. This post will look at three solutions, two of which are hackish/wrong, and one of which is basic and clean (imho). Continue reading »

Mar 032010
 

For Inspectinator (a sinatra microapp), I needed a database-less authentication solution that was as lightweight as possible, but with a reasonable amount of security and maintainability. I came up with something that suits this purpose well, and I’m sharing it in case anyone is looking for something similar. I call it EasyAuth. Continue reading »

Feb 142010
 

I’ve been wanting to experiment with sinatra for a while, so I popped something off my things-to-do-someday list and put together Inspectinator.  It’s aim is pretty straight-forward: parse standard ruby #inspect strings into a more palatable form.  It parses a string into a system of nested objects, and displays it as a tree.  Some simple jQuery let’s you drill down to the level of detail you want. Continue reading »

Aug 242009
 

I’ve been playing around with Erlang lately, and it’s been quite a departure from the language I’m most comfortable with (and use everyday): Ruby. As part of my exploration, I’m doing a variety of sample problems (from the “Programming Erlang” book, among other places) in both Ruby and Erlang, and comparing the different implementations I come up with. Continue reading »