Linear CSS3 Gradients – Mozilla

With the recent launch of Firefox 3.6, Firefox finally got support for CSS3 gradients (albeit vendor-specific). Safari (and other webkit based browsers) have had support for CSS gradients for a wee while now, and I will hopefully post about those in more detail in the near future. Today though is going to be exploring the [...]

Twitter Developer Nest

Tonight the London Twitter Developer Nest #6 is happening at the Sun Microsystems building. We will be showcasing our new twitter application from the Dynamic50 labs: Birdpie. Birdpie is an automated bookmarking service that looks through your twitter feed and stores the URLs you tweet. Entrance is free and there are over 100 people attending. [...]

MongoMapper state machine? just use active model's state machine

MongoMapper Active Model State Machine So you want a state machine for you mongo mapper? Active model now comes with a nice looking state machine; I really like the multi parameters you can send to the on_transition methods; class StateMachineSubject state_machine :chetan_patil, :initial => :sleeping do state :sleeping state :showering state :working state :dating event [...]

Sitemap Generator for Ruby on Rails Applications

Follow these steps if you wish to add a sitemap.xml generator to a rails application. The idea is to generate a sitemap.xml for selected records from the database, in this case they are Articles and Categories. This sitemap is pinged to popular search engines like google, yahoo, bing and ask. Step 1: Add a sitemap.rb [...]

Birdpie Launched on Rails 3.0

We have just released Birdpie, a small twitter application for storing and managing the urls that you tweet. Birdpie utilises Twitter auth in order to simplify the sign up process and is Dynamic50′s first experimentation with Rails 3.0 pre.Once a user is signed up, Birdpie fetches all previous bookmarks (or as many allowed by Twitter). [...]

3D Secure Transactions using SagePay Gateway and ActiveMerchant Plugin

Introduction What is 3D secure? 3D Secure is a latest initiative for fraud prevention launched by Visa and MasterCard. 3D Secure adds additional password authentication step to complete the online transactions. A detailed introduction is available at http://www.sagepay.com/developers/industry_knowledge/3d_secure.asp. This tutorial is a guide to set up a Ruby on Rails test environment for 3D Secure [...]

Textmate Gitbundle and Snow Leopard

Ever since installing Snow Leopard on my machine, I’ve had problems using some of the commands with the Git bundle on Textmate. One of the more annoying ones was with ‘Pull’, whereby it would spit out some error message along the lines of… /Library/Application Support/TextMate/Bundles/Git.tmbundle/Support/tmvc/lib/ruby_tm_helpers.rb:70:in `basename’: can’t convert nil into String plus a whole load [...]

Creating you own internal DNS server

Recently we have been having problems with DNS not resolving with our companies broadband provider. I looked at some open source DNS services, the best one being OpenDNS, but despite them having a couple of boxes in Amsterdam the lookups are still somewhat slow. So the solution? Create our own DNS server :-) This is [...]

Moving your git repos and all branches to a new remote repository

Recently I have been moving a lot of our old repositories into our local gitosis from github. There seems to be no quick an easy solution for moving all of the remote branches across too, so this is how I am currently doing this. Below are the commands I have been using to do this: [...]

How we used Amazon Cloudfront as a CDN with Rails assets

Amazon Cloudfront is a great way of serving your assets for your site from localised buckets. Firstly you need to set up a new distribution from your amazon CloudFront console here. Associate your distribution with a current bucket, or alternatively with a new bucket name, but if you do this you will need to create [...]