Odds and Ends

I’ve been doing a lot of Rails development lately(as you could probably guess by my Rails wallpaper from a few days back), and as it was almost my first experience in Rails, I built an online store. The online store has seemingly become the advanced “Hello World” for Ruby on Rails. I have continuously been adding on to it, and when I wanted to build upon my existing checkout method, I decided that I would try to add Paypal as a payment option. Here are 3 easy libraries to do this with.

Continue reading Paypal For Ruby On Rails

Here are some HTML Entities that might help if you are writing mac oriented tutorials or posts.

1. Command- ⌘ Entity Code: ⌘
2. Right Arrow- →Entity Code: →
3. Left Arrow- ←Entity Code: ←
4. Up Arrow- ↑Entity Code: ↑
5. Down Arrow- ↓Entity Code: ↓
6. Control- ⌃Entity Code: ⌃
7. Shift- ⇧ Entity Code: ⇧
8. Option- ⌥Entity Code: ⌥
9. Backspace- ⌫Entity Code: ⌫
10. Escape- ⎋Entity Code: ⎋

Apple is going to to launch 4 new products next month-according to ars technica- speculated to be NAND-flash-based evolutions of both the iPod video and iPod nano product lines.

Also rumored is an iPhone Nano. While I doubt this product ever becoming a reality, it seems everyone is pointing to The Steve’s own quote from the company wide business meeting June 28th, where he said that if there is going to be cannibalization of Apple’s products, it should be by Apple. This does make sense from a business perspective, no matter how uneasy it makes you. As companies struggle to match Apple’s intuitive user interface and features, Apple delivers another punch with more features, and perhaps no ATT exclusivity. The copycats are forced back to the drawing board, losing money, or launch a product that is inferior to Apple’s.

Here’s a pic that was requested (by Apple’s Legal Department) to be taken down off of 9 to 5 mac’s website:

A quick glance at the picture shows that it is a photoshop file, called nano-flower. Whether the entire picture was created in Photoshop is not apparent, so it is assumed that only the arrangement of the iPods was created in Photoshop. I personally do not think the new iPods will look anything like this. I think they will have click wheels, but then again, Apple has gone to far with multi-touch to take a step back.

Although a little late, the latest edition of the tech blog carnival is upon us.

Continue reading The Tech Blog Carnival- August 8th Edition

I’ve made a Marvin on Rails desktop wallpaper for your enjoyment, available in 1024×768, 1200×800 for the Macbook owners, and 1280×1024. It’s my first wallpaper, so it’s nothing fancy, and I’ve figured out that white isn’t a very good background color. I’m working on a black version of this wallpaper, but unfortunately that means having to go through with a 1px brush and manually give Marvin a black matte(there doesn’t seem to be a transparent picture of marvin on the web).

Pick it up at the goodies page.

At first, I didn’t want to do a post on this topic because there are so many nice ones already. However, this post focuses on the non geek portion of people with Wordpress blogs, who want to incorporate recognition of authors into their blogs. The way this post works is in 3 steps. Before we start anything, however, you’ll want to make sure you have access to edit your theme in some way. If it is FTP, fine. If you’re using the built in wordpress editor, that is also fine.

Continue reading Author Comment Highlighting For N00bz

This is a common question asked by web designers in forums and emails. The most common resolution is changing, and unfortunately there are few reliable ways to get statistics on browser display resolutions. One of the few reliable sources is the W3Schools website. Here are some statistics gathered from the logs of W3Schools. (note: the statistics may not be entirely accurate; because W3Schools is visited mainly by people with a web development interest, there probably is some bias toward higher resolutions.

Continue reading What Resolution Do I Design For?