Recent Blog Posts

• Quick & Dirty Image Resizer with Ruby and RMagick

  2 Aug 2012 · #ruby #threading #multiprocess #script #shell

  I needed to resize a folder of images the other day. So I wrote this handy script: Update (08/10/12) — I had a conversation about shaders and threading with a SIGGRAPH attendee on a flight from LA back home. As a result of that conversation I've decided to multi-thread this script in an effort to make it faster. In the process I beat the crap out of my MacBook Pro but it took the beating like a champ. Thankfully this made me realize that the Ruby garbage collection wasn't working fast enough. So I added some code to free the image resources when they were no longer being used. This had an added benefit of speeding things up even more. I found the Parallel gem which made the multi-threading part of it insanely easy. See for yourself below.

• Updated Adium Spotify Xtra

  8 Nov 2011 · #music #download #adium #plugin #spotify #im

  I have made some improvements to the Adium Spotify Now Playing Xtra. I added a fast-fail when the application isn't running. If for some reason any errors occur the script will return an empty string....

• My Custom Demandware UX Studio Icon for OSX

  4 Oct 2011 · #design #Demandware #iconography #IDE

  I am so super impressed with Demandware at this point. I haven't seen much but I like how everything fits together. The only thing that didn't fit - on my Mac at least - was the icon for the IDE. (A plugin library on top of Eclipse) So I remedied that situation: My Demandware logo inspired icon for Demandware UX Studio Demandware Logo Inspired Icon for Demandware UX Studio Now to set the app's icon in the two places that matter.

• Complex Default Values with Rails 3

  5 Sep 2011 · #ruby #Rails

  I needed an extensible way to default values for new models in Rails 3.0.5 so I went Googling. I ended up finding a great question on StackOverflow. (of course) So I got started with the help of the answers on that question. I first tried the before_create callback but soon realized that it only fires when you save a new record. I needed the model (A) to auto-generate associated models (B) when a new instance of the model (A) is created. So the correct filter for that is after_initialize. I called my callback method set_default_values() and used it on my abstract super class (A) and the classes (C,etc) that inherit from it.

• Updated Classic ASP TextMate Bundle

  16 Aug 2011 · #Classic ASP #TextMate #Bundle #download

  I really need the symbols to be correctly identified. So I updated the bundle to include public & private methods of classes in the list of symbols.