http://blog.jayamster.com keeping things simple (hopefully) Thu, 22 May 2008 23:55:09 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Yesterday I stumbled across one of the most moving lectures I've ever seen. Randy Pausch, a professor of Computer Science at Caregie Mellon, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and was told he only had 3 to 6 months to live. This lecture follows that diagnosis. I would be doing ... http://blog.jayamster.com/really-achieving-your-childhood-dreams/2008/05/22/ Finally after a few months of nonstop, round-the-clock coding we've relaunched BeenVerified. Check out the BeenVerified Blog for details. Oh, and check out the new look and feel of BeenVerified as well... http://blog.jayamster.com/weve-relaunched-beenverified/2008/04/23/ Browsing around Facebook and LinkedIn today I noticed that there are some people that just have way too many friends. How many people can you possibly be friends with... for real? And then a funny thought came to my mind: "The more friends you have within online social ... http://blog.jayamster.com/the-law-of-inverse-online-friends/2008/01/10/ This was a good post in getting GMail set up in Rails. But if you follow it exactly you'll run into a a hiccup if you're running Rails 2.0. Rails 2.0 has depricated the ActionMailer::Base.server_settings= function and opted for the more aptly named smtp_settings. So just use this for ... http://blog.jayamster.com/using-gmail-in-rails-20/2007/12/15/ Needed something to generate random numeric strings that were 9 characters long [sourcecode language='ruby'] def random_numeric_string length = 1000000000 (rand(length)+(length)).to_s[1..9] end[/sourcecode] If anyone has a better way, please let me know. http://blog.jayamster.com/random-numeric-string-of-a-specific-length-in-ruby/2007/12/15/ In order to get proper syntax highlighting for the new Rails 2 naming conventions of templates (html.erb) in Textmate, just fire up Textmate and go into the bundle editor and make the changes as follows: Textmate > Bundles > Bundle Editor > Show Bundle (or just hit ctrl-opt-cmd B) Select Languages in ... http://blog.jayamster.com/textmate-rails-20-and-htmlerb-files/2007/12/12/ OAuth, an open authentication protocol for APIs, has released it's 1.0 spec yesterday at the Internet Identity Workshop. OAuth allows web application developers to put a level of authentication in front of their APIs that in turn puts the users' back into the users' hand. I was out in Mountain ... http://blog.jayamster.com/oauth-10-spec-released/2007/12/07/ Yesterday was the first day of the Internet Identity Workshop in Mountain View, CA., held at the Museum of Computer History. The sessions held yesterday were just overviews of the technologies and issues we face today in the identity world. I was able to finally put ... http://blog.jayamster.com/internet-identity-workshop-day-1/2007/12/04/ We're heading out to the Internet Identity Workshop in Mountain View, CA. It's definitely gonna be an interesting trip as all the OAuth and OpenID folk are gonna be there. Can't wait to meet some of the people going. I'll be sure to take some photos. http://blog.jayamster.com/off-to-iiw/2007/12/02/ This is good news. I've been working with Rails 2 code for a bit now and have been wondering when this release was gonna make hit. Now it seems that it's coming in just a few weeks. You can catch the blog posting at the Rails weblog here. ... http://blog.jayamster.com/rails-20-release-candidate-2-has-been-well-released/2007/11/29/