The closing plenary of the Personal Democracy Forum — an hour long — was a great discussion between Cory Booker, Arianna Huffington, RNC tech chair Saul Anuzis, PDF founder Andrew Rasiej, NYT Times tech writer Nick Bilton and Tim O’Reilly. Cory Booker was by far the highlight. This man is inspiring. “The biggest thing we’re …
Category Archives: tech
rake task for extracting database contents
This is the inverse of db:fixtures:load. I modified the version I found to take the FIXTURES environment variable as a parameter. Saved as gist 440058. # extract_fixtures.rake # by Paul Schreiber <paulschreiber at gmail.com> # 15 June 2010 # # I got this from Peter Gulezian <http://metoca.net/> # Looks like another version is here # …
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TIFF file dimensions in Ruby
Using Ruby, I wanted to get the dimensions of image files without using a full-on image library. I found handy code for PNG, BMP, GIF and JPEG and adapted the JPEG code for TIFF. Saved as gist 431893. # TIFF.rb # by Paul Schreiber <paulschreiber at gmail.com> # 09 June 2010 # # Based on …
Handling Rails errors: custom error pages, logging, notification
I wanted to improve error handling In my Rails applications. Specifically, I wanted three things: a custom error page that matched the site's design the errors to appear in the error log (production.log) email notification of server errors Note: these steps are for Rails 2.3.2–2.3.8. Other versions may require different instructions. Custom error page Normally, …
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Disc name as user interface
I recently installed Windows 7. Having installed Snow Leopard many times, I was curious to see how it would compare. Before you even get started, you see an example of the little details Apple pays attention to, but Microsoft is too lazy to care about. Insert the disc in to your drive. The Mac OS …
Xcode and the run-on sentence
Last night, I ran Software Update and updated Xcode. Here’s the description Apple provided: Xcode 3.2.2 is an update release of the developer tools for Mac OS X. This release provides bug fixes in gdb, Interface Builder, Instruments, llvm-gcc and Clang optimizer, Shark, and Xcode and must be installed on Mac OS X 10.6.2 Snow …
DNS weirdness
smokinhotprogressives.com was changed from 204.15.194.116 to .118. The change hadn’t propagated yet. $ host smokinhotprogressives.com smokinhotprogressives.com has address 204.15.194.116 smokinhotprogressives.com mail is handled by 50 shrub.ca. $ host secure.smokinhotprogressives.com secure.smokinhotprogressives.com is an alias for smokinhotprogressives.com. smokinhotprogressives.com has address 204.15.194.118 smokinhotprogressives.com mail is handled by 50 shrub.ca. $ host smokinhotprogressives.com smokinhotprogressives.com has address 204.15.194.118 smokinhotprogressives.com mail …
Aperture batch export AppleScript
While in Australia and New Zealand, I shot a ton of photos. Normally, my photos sit on a hard drive and no one sees them. I wanted to make sure that didn’t happen this time. First, I grouped the photos in to folders in the Finder. Then, I created a new project in Aperture and …
Privacy by Design
The latest CDT Policy Post discusses the importance Privacy by Design. They extensively reference Anne Cavoukian (Ontario’s kickass Privacy Commissioner and author of Who Knows). The seven principles of Privacy by Design are: Proactive, not Reactive; Preventative, not Remedial Privacy as the Default Privacy Embedded into Design Full Functionality – Positive-Sum, not Zero-Sum End-to-End Lifecycle …
MAPLight’s awesome Money Near Votes tool
If you haven’t heard of MAPLight.org before, here’s what they do (which is fantastic): MAPLight.org, a groundbreaking public database, illuminates the connection between campaign donations and legislative votes in unprecedented ways. Elected officials collect large sums of money to run their campaigns, and they often pay back campaign contributors with special access and favorable laws. …