I don’t like visiting sites for something really simple. Reading a single tweet is one of them. If I link to a tweet, you shouldn’t have to go to Twitter to view it. It’s just 140 characters. So what did I do? I added some codes to my blog to pull those tweets in. If I link to a tweet, I can go off to Twitter, pull in the tweet and set the ‘title’ attribute on the anchor tag so when you hover over the link, it shows the tweet text. Yay! From thi…

I use swfobject to embed videos because, as I explained back here, just blindly copying the embed code doesn't work that well half the time, and videos end up being different sizes, etc. I was getting kind of fed up with having to go back and remember how to do it every time though. The format is pretty straightforward, but I don't embed videos often enough to actually remember the exact syntax, so I found myself going back to posts with videos …

The folks at Thoughtbot have a Ruby community survey online, and you should all go take it. Well, as long as you are a ruby developer. Otherwise it doesn't really matter. Anyway, I wanted to throw out what I do for ruby style (and general programming style in some cases). I hate the 80 character limit. Get a real monitor would you please? I don't align assignment operators. I don't indent private/protected keywords. I keep the code after private…

If anybody needs a last minute gift idea for me, this is it. Are you kidding me? One coat of this stuff and I can turn a wall into a whiteboard? Not only a whiteboard, but one of the highest performing whiteboard surfaces ever? Nice! This stuff comes with a warranty too, so they aren't even kidding. When I get an actual house that I care about and can have my own little room with my computers and whatnot, this is what's going on the wall. IdeaPa…

The folks at BioWare have put together an amazing auction for charity. They’ve got a ridiculous collection of Dragon Age: Origins goodies, including a freaking shield. A shield! Are you kidding me?! No, I am not: The auction, which is on none other than eBay, can be found here while original blog post is here. Check it out even if you can’t participate, and pass it along. More money to help out the kids the better!

FeedBurner has a new feature out, since Google announced their URL shortener. I originally had logic to shorten the permalinks with tr.im, then post to Twitter, but since FeedBurner can do this now, I'm not going to do it. I like to outsource that kind of stuff, which I'll talk about in a later post. Also in the news today, Github is having some problems, but they'll be back soon, so don't you worry. All in all, this is more of a test to see how…

In case you missed it, the Coding Horror, Stack Overflow and Haacked blogs died in almost a literal fire. Well I don't think there was an actual fire, but basically they all hosted their blogs in virtual machines on the same physical server, and the backup process never backed up the virtual machine files since they were always in use. The backup process was managed by the hosting company and silently failed on these files. Oops. While I'm fairl…

Yehuda Katz's slides from SD.rb on Rails 3. I can't wait! Vaporware To Awesome from Yehuda Katz

I wish I could see this guy speak. I learn so much just reading his slides and other writings, I can't even imagine what I'd learn if I was actually there. Debugging Ruby from Aman Gupta