Blog Posts
Debugging Ruby 1.9
I finally decided it was time to start working with Ruby 1.9 on all new projects. It's flexibility with character encoding was to much of an advantage for this particular project. It was worth any problems that might come up. read more...
Keyword visualization
I discovered a fun tool called Wordle. This tool takes a blog feed or a block of text and visualizes it in a word cloud. This can be very useful for showing you what the keywords and messages on your website actually are. some of the words that come up may surprise you.
Here is the word cloud from the home page of http://forrestzeisler.com
Active Merchant patch for BeanStream
Smibs used BeanStream as a merchant provider for all our billing. The only problem is that there wasn’t currently any Ruby code for interacting with the BeanStream persitant accountsAPI. Most Rails developers will be familiar with the ActiveMerchant plugin. It provides a common interface for connecting to merchant providers. Unfortunately, ActiveMerchants Beanstream support only performs one-time transactions. We needed something which could connect to their “Vaults”. read more...
Smibs on code: Upgrading to Git article written for Smibs Blog
A few days ago, our code repository server froze. Nothing a restart couldn't solve, but this was the fourth time this month. The computer has been running continuously for a couple years, with a few developers constantly committing and pulling changes, uploading files, etc., and it had apparently had enough. read more...
New technology is always fun! article written for Smibs Blog
The new interface is up, and we've all had a chance to catch our breath from an exciting update. I thought it would be a good chance for me to talk about some of the neat technology that has been added to the Smibs Network and Doorbell. read more...
Smibs on Code: Filtering user data II article written for Smibs Blog
In my last post for "Smibs on Code" I discussed the tradeoffs between pre-filtering and post-filtering user data in a web application. I also mentioned that Rails is focused on the post-filter approach, while I prefer pre-filtering. This week I'll show you a plug-in we put together to perform the filtering for our Smibs Network and Doorbell. read more...
Smibs on Code: Filtering user data article written for Smibs Blog
There is a major security concern when it comes to displaying text provided by a user. Ruby on Rails does a good job of keeping your MySQL code sanitized, but web browsers are still a source of concern. It is VERY easy for a hacker to write HTML or JavaScript into a text field. You don't want them to be able to execute arbitrary code on other users machines. It could do all kinds of nasty stuff, like reading the session key, sending it to a different server, and letting a hacker hijack your secure connection. It could scrape data off your screen or prompt you for additional data, in an attempt to get your credit card information. The point is, displaying user data without any kind of read more...
Smibs on code: JavaScript lines article written for Smibs Blog
This is going to be another short post where I share some code, and much more importantly provide a demo to play with. There have been a number of times when our team has an idea that would require some creative drawing & lines in a browser. This is traditionally Flash territory. There has been lots of work with canvases to allow drawing in Javascript, but these are still exploratory and are not really ready for the lime-light. read more...
Smibs on code: JavaScript windows article written for Smibs Blog
This is going to be a short fun post. It's about a JavaScript library that I wrote a month ago. We wanted to see how easy it would be to develop multipurpose JavaScript windows to run inside the browser. The goal was to create a simple window model that could handle all the windowing functions. read more...
The IE6 Rant!!! article written for Smibs Blog
It's no big secret that large organizations are slow to change. Especially with their technology. But I am constantly amazed by the number of people who are still being forced to useInternet Explorer 6 (IE6) by their work environments. IE6 was initially released in 2001. That's 8 year ago! read more...