Decluttering with Craigslist

Visiting my mom’s house, I saw quite a bit of space was taken up by books that no one in our household was planning to be read again. So I scheduled a time for my mother, sisters and I to get together and go through them all. We put all the books we were definitely … Read more

New Rails Project breedmapper.com

Working on a new website, breedmapper.com. It’s an app to help people select dog breeds. Basically, I was trying to find dog breeds that might be good for me (never owned a dog before) and found it really difficult to research different breeds, filter, etc. So I’m making an app for it to help myself … Read more

Scraping tools

selectorgadget nokogiri

jQuery HTML5 Background

Cool plugin for an html5 video background. You can use vlc media player to convert to all the formats. http://syddev.com/jquery.videoBG/

Interesting Post on Unpaid Interns

The author brings up that unpaid internships make it so only kids of people with means can break into certain sectors. This is why it’s important to build for-profit enterprises around activism that can afford to pay living wages. http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2011/oct/30/unpaid-interns-charity-sector

Cool design links and jquery tutorials

http://trevordavis.net/blog/jquery-one-page-navigation-plugin http://www.brizk.com/ http://graphicdesignblender.com/awesome-jquery-tutorials-to-make-your-one-page-portfolio-shine

SEO Links

http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en/us/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf http://www.cancelbubble.com/search.php?q=seo&category=1&submit=Search&category=1

Free top shelf ui kits

http://www.noupe.com/tools/20-free-top-shelf-ui-kits-for-web-designers.html

Interesting Rails Posts

http://aslakhellesoy.com/post/11055981222/the-training-wheels-came-off   http://practicingruby.com/articles/shared/ozkzbsdmagcm   http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/web-design/web-2-0-design-style-guide/   http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/web-design/web-2-0-design-style-guide/   https://github.com/joshuaclayton/blueprint-css/wiki  

Emacs Rails Configurations

The guys over at vilabs have a great walkthrough on installing emacs 24 and getting it configured to be productive for ruby on rails.   I just read Batsov’s post on Emacs 24 and followed it to his Emacs dev kit. It’s a nice set of emacs extensions for development all in one place. https://github.com/bbatsov/emacs-dev-kit … Read more

Setting up for Rails development on Windows

Came across a road block while setting up for rails development on windows: rvm doesn’t work! I usually do rails work on windows only when I’m required to use windows 7 (as opposed to osx when working with windows-only software for clients). Rather than try to deal with other gem workarounds, I’ve decided to install … Read more

Emacs Setup For Ruby on Rails

This post goes over how I’ve set up emacs for Ruby on Rails development on my development machine (a macbook pro running windows 7 and snow leopard). Background: I’ve been getting back into Ruby on Rails development this past week and converting from vim to emacs in the process. Nothing against vim, I recently got … Read more

Setting up a home office in India

India is quite a bit different from the United States, and it’s been hard for me to make the adjustment. Things can take longer here and even the simplest things take lots of follow up. There were two major holidays in the past two days, Eid and Ganipati, and as a result, a lot of … Read more

Lisp Vocabulary Explanations

LISP – LIST Processing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_%28programming_language%29) CONS – CONStruct memory objects with hold two values or pointers to values (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cons) Use CONS to stick things together in a list CAR (Contents of the Address part of Register number) Use CAR to get the first member of the list CDR (Contents of the Decrement part of Register … Read more

Manage It! Notes

Software Project Life Cycles, and how they manage or don’t manage risk Lifecycle Type – Serial – Waterfall, phase-gate. Often unsuccessful. Requirements change and/ or things take longer than expected and the whole project gets pushed back. Iterative – Spiral, evolutionary prototyping. Manages technical risk. Allows for evolving requirements. Incremental – Design to schedule, staged … Read more