Bryce Kerley

Generating an X.509 Cert in Ruby

2008-10-22T18:40:49-04:00

Ruby's openssl module has basically no documentation because all its methods are added on dynamically or something.

Rails Debug Bar

2008-09-21T10:54:37-04:00

Saw a Django Debug Bar yesterday, decided I wanted to try to build one for Rails. Ridiculously incomplete right now, but it's not too hard to expand.

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Special Development Mode Behavior in Rails

2008-09-16T15:19:06-04:00

  def create
    if RAILS_ENV == 'development'
      session[:url] = params[:url]
      redirect_to homepage_path
      return
    end
    store = OpenID::Store::Filesystem.new(RAILS_ROOT + '/tmp')
    consumer = OpenID::Consumer.new(session, store)
    oid_req = consumer.begin params[:url]
    realm = request.protocol + request.host_with_port
    return_to = session_url
    redirect_to oid_req.redirect_url(realm, return_to)
  end

Twitter since 2008-09-12

2008-09-13T00:01:04-04:00

BonzoESC at 13:07:43: Coworker is loud-bloggin' an ruining lunch.

BonzoESC at 20:18:58: My TV has some fast-loading feature-incomplete firmware that loads before the slow-loading feature-complete firmware finishes booting.

Twitter since 2008-09-11

2008-09-12T11:19:54-04:00

BonzoESC at 19:55:09: @chockenberry CHOCK LOCK W A S T E S _ S O _ M A N Y

BonzoESC at 19:55:16: FUCK IT

BonzoESC at 19:55:44: About to twitter the crap out of my blog.

BonzoESC at 20:45:32: @chockenberry millions of them? for free?

BonzoESC at 22:45:45: Watching airplane crash videos on youtube while I wait for laundry.

BonzoESC at 23:21:11: @danielpunkass they're only the biggest threat because nobody else makes ads that want to waste that much of my time.

BonzoESC at 23:27:21: @danielpunkass this and your reaction to Palin's speech: trolling?

BonzoESC at 23:30:03: OK this is surreal enough for now: http://tinyurl.com/4vz2oz

Twitter since 2008-09-09

2008-09-10T23:03:16-04:00

BonzoESC at 19:45:57: @bmf Latin is the most logical language in existence because you can write totally sweet mottos in it.

BonzoESC at 21:27:47: @natetrue do they have to do /everything/ you tell them to?

BonzoESC at 21:28:03: If there is not a drink called the "Publix Tea Party" I am inventing it fyi.

DEFCON 16

2008-08-26T23:35:41-04:00

DEFCON, THE FINAL FRONTIER

Yeah, it was almost three weeks ago, but this year's DEFCON still rings strongly in my memory.

I didn't really go to Vegas with any plans, except for hanging out with Tampa & Melbourne friends, and maybe rambling about some Prolog stuff I had been playing with at work the days prior.

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The Tipping Point

2008-08-04T21:02:35-04:00

Many web development tools and frameworks provide plugin or other dependency-adding interfaces. Using these is a tricky interplay between two undesirable extremes:

Building your application entirely from prefabricated components and the barest minimum of glue code, so you're on the hook with a dozen or so different plugins to keep their extensions and hacks in order.
Reinventing the wheel at every chance you get, producing hundreds of lines (in Rails that's actually a lot) of unnecessary code that requires new tests and maintenance.

"Well, Bryce, there's obviously the titular "Tipping Point," where you pull in plugins as needed but keep your own code working, right?"

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Switch it on 'em

2008-06-08T14:48:46-04:00

It's been a busy summer so far, but quitting your job and moving across the state tends to do that to you.

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Twitter Digest in Ruby

2008-05-24T22:15:23-04:00

I wanted a customizable tool to turn my daily Twitter stream into a single daily Atom entry for self-explanatory reasons.

The result is on github, and isn't terribly difficult to use:

Get the one file.
Make sure you have the prereqs (rubygems, twitter4r, activesupport, builder).
Edit the source to point at your twitter account, and the selection of updates that you want to get.
Run it and redirect the output somewhere fun/useful.

Un-hanging OmniWeb

2008-04-12T07:20:45-04:00

When using the OmniWeb browser, sometimes it'll get really unresonsive and crummy to use. Here's one way to fix it:

Quit OmniWeb.
Go to ~/Library/Application Support/OmniWeb 5 in Finder. In my case, this is /Users/bkerley/Library/Application Support/OmniWeb 5
Drag HistoryIndex.ox and the .log and .lock file (if they exist) into the trash.
Re-start OmniWeb.

My guess (an educated guess, thanks to Activity Monitor's Sample feature) is that this index of history items gets corrupted, and OmniWeb gets stuck in a tight loop trying to read or make sense of it. The index re-generates from History.plist pretty quickly on modern systems, so deleting it is no real loss.

Movie Title Pun involving "Chronicle"

2008-03-22T17:03:18-04:00

Added a couple features to Chronicle for your reading pleasure.

An Atom feed is in place. Use the link above, or hit http://brycekerley.net/rss to see it. It's going through feedburner for stats, so don't be surprised at the redirect.
Page caching, thanks to the Rails Caching Tutorial by Rails Envy. Includes sweepers!

More features forthcoming, been busy with the new Smash Brothers. (Verdict: controls weird, graphic design awful (the stage select screen has six words in four different fonts), still fun).

Chronicle

2008-03-18T22:11:42-04:00

Things look different around here.

Mephisto was kind of hard to tweak and hack on, because of its heritage as both a weblog and CMS for people who might not necessarily know how to write webapps. Hence the complicated theme system, liquid plugins, &c. that exist to make it usable for a wide audience. However, this made it strange and unfamiliar to me.

This is "chronicle", hacked together from scratch in not much time. I'm not open-sourcing it for now because it's seriously basically the barest-bones possible weblog system you can write in Rails, without any useful features like Atom feeds or publishing support.

It also doesn't support comments. Suck on that, spambots. If you want to comment, just email me (and get past the filter).

Wrong Turn in Saskatoon

2008-02-13T02:51:42-05:00

Scott and I were in the back of the car chatting excitedly about a week in Fulda, occasionally looking at the map we had been given charge of. Grandpa was at the helm of his mighty white land yacht, captaining our trip back to Calgary from the Lueke homestead. Somewhere in the excitement, we realized that we had missed the turn on to the correct highway in Saskatoon (Saskatchewan 7, Alberta 9), and were now Southward bound to Moose Jaw.

The drive from Saskatchewan to Calgary is a long one, nine hours, which is about as long as you can drive in Florida without leaving Florida, provided you start at an end and not in the middle. Adding two hours on to the trip is probably something you don't want to do. However, nobody really felt like turning around and admitting fault, so we soldiered on.

Over the next several hours, we changed drivers a few times, ate at a greasy spoon somewhere east of Medicine Hat, and really, when you really come down to it, had a good time together, driving across Canada.

And I will forever pay attention to the map.

Writing a Postfix Calculator in Erlang

2008-01-06T02:59:17-05:00

I've been messing around with IRC bots in different languages on and off for the last year, including a couple in Ruby (public broadcast messages for USF CTF 2007 and a stevenote countdown timer), and more recently, "tostada," a multifunction one in Erlang, which now contains a full-blown programming language implementation.

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