Code Badger (Brad Tutterow's Blog)

Ruby on Rails Presentation

brad — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 17:37:00 GMT

Here's a nifty Ruby on Rails presentation that I gave for a Lunch 'n' Learn here at work. It is accompanied by an even niftier Rails website demo. Interesting that the PowerPoint file is larger than the entire Rails website.

Download presentation and demo

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Sadistic Popup Question

brad — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 19:42:00 GMT

If there was a contest to design the most annoying popup message, I would submit this one.

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iPhones and Telephone Hyperlinks

brad — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 18:56:00 GMT

It seems that iPhone can't be avoided even while developing on Windows using Visual Studio. Our client recently asked us to make sure that their telephone number was clickable for iPhone users.

This being news to me, some quick research confirms that indeed, Apple Safari running on the iPhone magically recognizes telephone numbers and turns them into hyperlinks. Clever. Apparently, the hacking community is even more clever though because a Google search for "iphone telephone hyperlink" comes up with a result for a security hole in Apple's approach. It's been fixed though, so no need to panic.

But back to the real story ... the website we are developing has a phone number on the home page alright, BUT it has letters in it, not numbers. This makes it easy for people using regular phones, but not so much for the iPhone users since iPhone Safari can't figure out that the letters are part of a phone number.

You can force iPhone to recognize a telephone number by wrapping it in a <a href="tel:1-800-000-0000"> tag but then that confuses every browser that is NOT iPhone Safari. So that's out unless you are developing a web site specifically for iPhone.

SO .... now we have a letter-based phone number for regular phone folk and a number-based phone number for iPhone folk. I'm totally putting "iPhone Developer" on my resume.

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Bribes to Use Live.com Search

brad — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 23:03:00 GMT

Live Search is mounting a campaign called "SearchPerks" that gives you points for web searches! For 1100 tickets (where one ticket = one search), you can get a t-shirt.

If we place the value of a t-shirt at $10-11, this mean you get paid about 1 penny every time you use Live Search. You can earn a maximum of 25 tickets a day, or about 25 cents in real money. You get 500 tickets just for signing up, so you can earn a t-shirt in about three weeks.

Or ... you can take quarters out of your coworkers desk every day for three weeks, buy the same t-shirt, and keep using Google. Maybe I'll sign up for SearchPerks, raid coworker desks, and get two t-shirts!

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What was the web missing? Not animated favicons.

brad — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 21:24:00 GMT

I noticed today that DHL has an animated favicon when viewed in Firefox. I'm not entirely sure that another thing moving in my peripheral vision is what the world wide web really needed. I have my fill of that with flash-based animated ads and still have cold chills remembering the blink days.

So now what's the web missing now? An extension to disable animated favicon's in Firefox of course.

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Measuring Scope Creep

brad — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 21:05:00 GMT

Size of scope document plotted over time probably isn't the most scientific method of measuring scope creep, and I'm sure it's not PMP-approved, but I think it works.

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Live Search vs Google Search on "dot net"

brad — Mon, 05 May 2008 18:14:00 GMT

Only one search engine is bright enough to figure out that "dot net" is another way of referring to the Microsoft .NET Framework, and it's not Microsoft's search engine. Despite my best efforts to like Live Search, it seems Google is always several steps ahead of them.

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Why Are VS 2008 General Settings So Hard?

brad — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 13:17:00 GMT

Using the "General Development Settings" for Visual Studio 2008, building is [CTRL + SHIFT + B] and renaming is [CTRL + R, CTRL + R]. For C#, these two are simply [F6] and [F2].

Either folks using General settings are not using keyboard shortcuts, or they are replacing their CTRL keys more frequently.

You can download the C# settings poster from Microsoft.

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Ruby On Rails Bathroom Remodeling

brad — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:19:00 GMT

I thought I'd take the plunge this weekend and jump onto the Ruby On Rails bandwagon. It's still hip and trendy,right? Someone please tell me if it's not.

Bad timing, I guess, to pick the date they are having domain hosting issues. But that's okay. I'm accustomed to Microsoft and .NET confusing me, so why not Ruby on Rails as well.

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What Does Visual Studio Mean?

brad — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 14:32:00 GMT

This one made me stop for a minute and try to figure out what I had just asked Visual Studio to do.

Had I asked it to calculate my salary? Nope, too many digits for that. Maybe I had asked it to pick lotto numbers for me. Maybe Visual Studio just had too many numbers in memory and had to flush some of them to a dialog box.

Or maybe, just maybe, this is Visual Studio's way to tell me I need to take a break. Good old Visual Studio -- always keeping my best interests in mind.

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Vista SP1 Confuses Home Server

brad — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 13:16:00 GMT

As you can see from this screenshot of my console, Home Server is mightily confused as to the operating system of my newly "service packed" laptop. Before applying SP1 to CASPIAN, Home Server was right on top of things, identifying it as "Windows Vista Ultimate Edition". After the Service Pack, things are a bit more up in the air, it seems.

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The Day Enterprise Library Stopped Logging

brad — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 17:25:00 GMT

Here's a fun one! Our Enterprise Library exception handling logging mysteriously quit logging to the Application event log yesterday at 6:00 PM. It was still logging to files, still handling all of the other exception handling rules, but just not logging to the event log.

After rolling back config changes, logging in as admin, rebooting (twice), pacing, etc. for about an hour, I found the obscure culprit.

It turns out the default setting for the event log is to only keep 512K of data around, and in the event of more entries exceeding that, to delete entries older than seven days.

Well, what if you have more than 512K of entries in the last seven days? Yep ... it can't get rid of anything more, it can't exceed the 512K max, and therefore ... logging mysteriously quits.

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Windows Live Maps Traffic Has Black?

brad — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 20:54:00 GMT

Until our recent snowstorm, I thought red was as bad it got when it comes to Live Maps traffic. But I guess it can get much worse.

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Surprised By Good Design

brad — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 22:50:00 GMT

It's nice to be surprised by good software design. For example, my Windows Mobile phone rang today while I was listening to music. Upon answering the call, Media Player paused playback. After I hung up, it resumed playback.

Seems simple, yes, but I know I would have never thought of that. If I had designed a phone operating system, your BradMobile phone would just keep playing Hannah Montana full blast while you tried to talk to your wife.

I guess the fact that good design surprises me would be a topic for another day. But that's a bit too pessimistic for a Friday.

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St Louis C# User Group March Meeting: Patrick Smacchia

brad — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 15:44:00 GMT

The St Louis C# user group has Patrick Smacchia lined up for their March event. Patrick is a Microsoft MVP, creator of NDepend, and author of several .NET books.

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