I just bought a book to help me get better at test driven development (TDD).  So far so good.  I really like the pragmatic programmer series of books.

I spent my Saturday morning learning about jQuery and CSS selectors with folks from my local Ruby user group ATLRUG. To tell you the truth, I expected it to be more complicated.  I found jQuery to be fairly intuitive.  Regardless of which javascript framework you choose for your projects, I highly recommend you check out local user groups and meet-ups in your town.   You won’t regret it.

I love my Macs.  Rarely do I have seriously annoying issues like the one I am about to describe.   I have discovered a situation that happens a lot when waking my mac mini from sleep mode.  The mac mini is unable to browse the internet in any browser.  I can ping websites by name in the terminal, but browsers don’t work.  The mac mini is running Snow Leapord, just like the rest of my macs which don’t have the problem.  Weird right?  For a while now, I’ve been working around the issue by rebooting. Gross.

Anyway, the solution is to run the following command in the terminal:

sudo killall mDNSResponder

I hope that saves you some time, should you experience the same issue.  I had to google search for a while to find the answer.  It seems I am not alone in experiencing this issue.  Hopefully Apple will fix this with a future update.

It turns out you have two options if you want to backup your posts.  There is an official mac client here.  I’ve tried this one and it seems to work well.  Another option, which I haven’t tried yet, is this web tool.

I’m working on my personal blog project using Ruby on Rails and Heroku.  It doesn’t have a location yet or a name, but the code is underway.  One of the features I want for the site is syntax highlighting so that I can post code snippets.  My initial attempt at this feature will use CodeRay.  I stumbled across a how-to video on Railscasts that showed how easy it was to setup.  I’m going to give it a try and see how it goes.

On another note, the appropriate ASCIIcast could be useful as well, should you also be interested in trying CodeRay.

If you haven’t read the tutorial at railstutorial.org, then you should.  Its the best one I have read so far.  I already knew quite a bit about Rails, but I learned so much from it.  It is a well rounded tutorial that goes thru more than just Rails. Test Driven Development (TDD) and RSpec are covered, as well as Heroku and Git.

Test of the tumblr app