DerekBender.me

"The corn city central is where we play corn city central fructose all day run that ball, plow that..."

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 16:45:00 -0500

“The corn city central
is where we play
corn city central
fructose all day
run that ball, plow that field
all the sugars is what we yield”

- This hymnal of corn , brought to you by chefkittie.com.

How Not To Sort By Average Rating

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 10:19:39 -0500

How Not To Sort By Average Rating:

PROBLEM: You are a web programmer. You have users. Your users rate stuff on your site. You want to put the highest-rated stuff at the top and lowest-rated at the bottom. You need some sort of “score” to sort by.

The solution:

Algorithm discussed and a Ruby implementation provided! Love this sort of applied statistics. Discussion in link below on HN.

Unsecured Mass Assignment is Bad

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 15:06:31 -0600

A slew of github gists. I don’t understand why people don’t make these blog posts, I can only imagine the traffic they’re getting. Embedding gists is easy.

Homakov shows us how he was able to compromise Github.com
Jbarnette shows us how to make your Rails app warn on ActiveRecord::Base#update_attributes
Wycats creates a Proposal for Improving Mass Assignment
DHH on how 37signals commonly avoids Mass Assignment vulnerabilities. Should be used in addition to attr_accessible.

The 10 Rules of a Zen Programmer

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 22:14:42 -0600

The 10 Rules of a Zen Programmer:

Seriously Zen. Topics include:

Focus

Keep your mind clean

Beginners mind

No ego

There is no career goal

Shut up

Mindfulness. Care. Awareness

There is no boss

Do something else

There is nothing special

I already see myself improving from some of these values.

Rails Went Off The Rails: Why I’m Rebuilding Archaeopteryx In CoffeeScript What’s the waiter...

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 13:00:06 -0600

Rails Went Off The Rails: Why I’m Rebuilding Archaeopteryx In CoffeeScript
What’s the waiter doing with the computer screen?
Skim Fat-free client-side templates with Slim and CoffeeScript
“Crazy Deep” Rails 3.2 Example Apps and Tutorials
Chaplin - “Chaplin is an example architecture for JavaScript applications using the Backbone.js library. The code is derived from moviepilot.com, a large single-page application.”

Mou

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 08:37:00 -0600

If you use Markdown, stop what you’re doing and check out Mou.

Biggest features is as you type preview window, but it’s full of awesome features like custom color themes, fullscreen mode, and exporting to html.

Converting flac to alac using ffmpeg

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 19:45:00 -0600

In my last post I showed how to convert flac to mp3 using the lame encoder. In this post, I’ll show how to convert your flac audio files to alac (Apple Lossless Audio Codec). The main reason to convert flac to alac is to preserve lossless audio files in iTunes and even play them on your iPod/iPhone, natively. All that you need is to install ffmpeg, via Homebrew:

$ brew install --use-gcc ffmpeg

This can take a couple minutes as it installs all of its dependencies and compiles. Note that the --use-gcc flag is used because as of this writing ffmpeg does not compile with LLVM, and there are several issues already open about it.

And then to change a directory full of flac files to alac, run this bash one-liner:

$ for file in *.flac; do ffmpeg -i "$file" -acodec alac "`basename "$file" .flac`.m4a"; done;

This process didn’t take long at all. It appears that there isn’t any transcoding happening, more likely just a repackaging of data.

I found several other solutions of interest like Fluke to play flac files in iTunes but you would still need to convert them inside iTunes to alac, and, as of this writing, Fluke does not work with iTunes on OS X 10.7 (Lion) in 64-bit mode. You can how ever bypass that by running iTunes in 32-bit mode.

Another tool I found was XLD but I did not test this option since the ffmpeg option was so simple and easy.

Bash one-liner to convert a directory of flac audio files to mp3 V0

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 07:00:00 -0500

$ for file in *.flac; do flac -cd "$file" | lame -h -V0 - "${file%.flac}.mp3"; done

V0 just because `-b 320` can be rather silly.

On a Mac using Homebrew, just do the following:

brew install lame flac

"The reason I don’t have a plan is because if I have a plan I’m limited to today’s options."

Sat, 27 Aug 2011 23:32:26 -0500

“The reason I don’t have a plan is because if I have a plan I’m limited to today’s options.”

- Sheryl Sandberg profiled in The New Yorker (via garychou)

100% agree. It’s the same reason why I don’t like to schedule meetings in advance. I much prefer to do them on the fly because there are a million variables in a day that change constantly.

What appears to be organization is actually just a restriction on the most valuable thing in the world: time.

Reblogged for truth! Why settle for anything...

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 19:06:41 -0500

Reblogged for truth! Why settle for anything less?

onceuponamanda:

If I could hug a quote, I would.

startupquote:

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.

- Steve Jobs

Matt explains why you should keep your SSH keys on a new installation

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 09:36:59 -0500

Matt J.: it's like you have a specific call that you use to bring your falcon back to your arm
Matt J.: but then you go and buy a new jeep to get to the aviary
Matt J.: just because you have a new jeep, your falcon doesnt need a new call
Matt J.: he still knows the same call

giant robots smashing into other giant robots: 2011 Rubyist's guide to a Mac OS X development environment

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 09:04:28 -0500

giant robots smashing into other giant robots: 2011 Rubyist's guide to a Mac OS X development environment:

thoughtbot-giantrobots:

It’s been two and a half years since my last laptop. It’s neat to look back and see how much has improved since then for setting up a Ruby development environment.

Of particular note, Homebrew, RVM, and Bundler did not exist back then.

Here’s how I set up an OS X 10.7 (Lion) thoughtbot laptop…

About this video: In early 1984 the Imagine team were working...

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 10:39:00 -0500

About this video:

In early 1984 the Imagine team were working on a spectacular project known as Bandersnatch. The game was to come in an A4 sized box containing around 30 ‘goodies’ including a required additional piece of hardware for your Spectrum computer. The retail price of Bandersnatch was expected to be around £40 and it was to be a completely new concept in computer games. Apparently 10 professional artists were working on the graphics alone. Bandersnatch was never released. On the 9th of July 1984, Imagine went bust after only 18 months of operation. Interestingly, its demise was documented by a BBC television program.

This is an incredible piece of game industry history. A must watch.

kung fu grippe: The (Imperfect) Art of Sending Sensitive Stuff

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 22:44:42 -0500

kung fu grippe: The (Imperfect) Art of Sending Sensitive Stuff:

merlin:

Securer file sharing with Dropbox « practically efficient

Zip your files

Put the zip file in your Dropbox ‘Public’ folder

Email the file link, not the file

Great advice on sending sensitive stuff via Dropbox . And pretty close to what I do. With this handful of paranoid additions…