Deploying Static Websites With Net::SCP
I recently had a couple of projects that consisted of a few static HTML files and a couple images. I could have used a blog or lightweight CMS, but those were overkill. I could use scp, but remembering the scp command every time I made a small change proved to be a hassle. I could have used Capistrano, but that too, felt overboard for my simple needs. Lucky for me, in addition to Capistrano, Jamis Buck wrote Net::SCP which was the perfect tool for the job.
Programming Politics
Could you imagine, for a moment, what the political scene would be like without the social media giants Memeorandum, Reddit, Twitter, Digg, and Youtube? What about the old media websites that started as an experiment, required a registration and charged for access to content? Yes, it’s hard to imagine, but it was only four short years ago that none of these social websites existed and the old media websites were merely second class citizens to their broadcast counterparts. Meanwhile, while we’ve been caught up in the infinite streams of information, there has been a small, but highly motivated community of hackers opening up government in a whole new way, providing APIs ripe for mashups and experimentation.
MacRuby: The Path Forward
Automating Rick Rolls with launchd
Lets face it: Your coworkers can be a real pain in the ass sometimes. What better way to remind them of this than automated Rick rolls? They’re likely to never know what hit them.
Widgets the YUI Way
Why are there so many lightbox implementations? Why are there numerous “versions” of widgets? Do you know which fork is the latest and greatest? Probably not, and for good reason. The current system sucks.
I'm Officially a Portland Local
2,300+ miles, 3 1/2 days and 10 states later, we’ve completed our move from Memphis, TN to Portland, OR.
Your Momma's So Fat...Prototype vs. JQuery Edition
The time has come once again to clear the air of fallacious statements by the myriad of people comparing Prototype to JQuery. I’m all for comparison; I believe it’s healthy to have choices in life. The problem usually isn’t Prototype or JQuery, it’s the article comparing them.
Dealing with Asynchronous Queries in Adobe AIR
Nearly all the methods of Adobe’s SQLConnection class are asynchronous. While this is nice when your running expensive operations (your interface won’t hang up), it can be quiet tough to deal with considering we come from a land where database operations have always been synchronous.
Understanding Scope and Binding in JavaScript
At the heart of binding, it’s merely a means to control execution scope—Function x executions in the scope of object y. It can be tough to grasp at first, but with the right amount of ninja references, anything can be explained so someone can understand it.
Alternate Idea: Encytemedia Reincarnated
If you’ve stumbled here and haven’t already read this post, please do so now to understand what’s going on. In short, I’ve moved Encytemedia.com to AlternateIdea.com and have some new branding.
Lighthouse Is Live
I’ve been waiting a long time for this moment, but we’ve finally launched Lighthouse, our issue tracking system primarily targeting developers. In addition to that, we were interviewed on the Web 2.0 show if you’re into audio.
The Final Straw
I’ve had enough. Run as far away from Registerfly as you can. Thats exactly what I’ll be doing over the weekend. I’m moving this domain to a different registrar because Registerfly, whom I’ve been a loyal customer for some years now, is sinking faster than a new Milli Vanilli record and causing 10 kinds of hell in the process for it’s customers. That includes me.
Scripting Photoshop With JavaScript and Ruby
You might not be aware of this, but Photoshop has had scripting support for some time now. It even comes with it’s own JavaScript debugger that adds a reflection interface. It has well documented support for JavaScript, AppleScript, and Visual Basic, all of which have their own set of problems. Thanks to the efforts of Apple on RubyOSA, we can now use Ruby to script this behemoth of an application.
Introducing Active Reload and Lighthouse
It’s great to be blogging again! I don’t think I’ve went this long without blogging since I began back in April of 2005. Well, I’ve been really busy and have some exciting news. I have just co-founded Active Reload with Rick Olson of the Rails Core team and we’re on the heals of our first product release dubbed Lighthouse.
Prototype 1.5 Released and Documentation Site Live
We’ve worked really hard getting the official Prototype site up and running and it’s finally here, not to mention we’re also releasing 1.5!

