Tags
android apache awstats beans clearcase clearquest dev dreamhost dvb eclipse ffmpeg gradle htaccess html http java javascript jni licensing linux mac macfuse mpeg mysql mythtv network networking openoffice php random root ruby samba scripting soap spring sshfs ssh linux sudoers requiretty touch tr ubuntu vpn vsftp WOL xmltv
Author Archives: Adam
Responsive 2D table
For WeatherSupermarket I need to layout a grid forecasts for five days for up to six providers, Met Office, AccuWeather etc. I have the providers vertically, each with the location, and a dropdown box to change the location. The days … Continue reading
CSS spriting using RMagick
I wanted to give CSS spriting a go – i.e. one large image montage and then using background-position to ‘see-through’ to the correct image. The best off the shelf solution looks like SmartSprites but this requires you annotate your CSS … Continue reading
Assorted IE8 polyfills: forEach, trim, placeholders
I ended up using all of the following during recent development of weathersupermarket 2.0 and another site. Array.prototype.forEach() implemented using a for loop and fn.apply if (typeof Array.prototype.forEach !== ‘function’) { Array.prototype.forEach = function(callback, context) { for (var i = … Continue reading
Rails, active record, concurrency and scaling
Coming from a Java background I’m confused by ruby’s poor support for concurrency The problem… I’m rewriting weathersupermarket, a screen scraper for weather forecasts using Rails. This is the basic logic of server forecast service. user requests forecast for location … Continue reading
“unknown compression method” with open-uri
In my local build of ruby 2.1.1 I see “unknown compression method” when calling open on certain URLs… net/http/response.rb:357:in finish’: unknown compression method (Zlib::DataError) It looks like open-uri adds the header saying it can accept gzip and deflate (Accept-Encoding: gzip;q=1.0,deflate;q=0.6,identity;q=0.3) … Continue reading
Posted in geek
Leave a comment
Simulating a server with netcat
Note use of \r\n. and echo -n, i.e. no automatic new line and -e escape chars echo -ne “HTTP/1.1 200 OK\r\nContent-Encoding: gzip$(echo hello-world | gzip)\n” | netcat -l 4000
Posted in geek
Leave a comment
jQuery building array selector
I’ve just been working on code to dynamically show/hide columns in a horizontal table to fit the width of the browser, i.e. show 1 column on 320px mobile, but all on desktop etc. To support this I need to animate … Continue reading
Posted in geek
Leave a comment
HTTP 503 from IE6 on dreamhost
It seems that dreamhost somehow returns HTTP 503 if the user agent is exactly “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)”. This is from the modern.ie IE6 windows XP build. wget –user-agent “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; … Continue reading
AJAX contact form with Ruby CGI backend
In 2013 I vowed never to write a line of PHP again, it’s dirty and bad for your CV. When it came to implementing a basic AJAX form for a small campaign website I decided to use my new friend … Continue reading
Thunderbird: “The server may have gone down or there may be a network problem” [SOLVED]
Bizare issue on OS X 10.6 effecting both Mail and Thunderbird. Mail simply fails to download inbox, silently without error – helpful. Thunderbird reports “server email@example.org has disconnected. The server may have gone down or there may be a network … Continue reading
Posted in geek
Leave a comment
