MyFunnyDev

Here is the list of talks & presentations which inspired me in some ways:

1. Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement Address

2. David Heinemeier Hansson at Startup School 08

3. Web 2.0 Expo NY: Gary Vaynerchuk

Please let me know if you run into any interesting talks I will keep adding them here.

Looks like the number of frameworks/libs/tools available for “realtime” web apps is growing. I’ve been following them since socket.io appeared for the first time. Below is the list of tools I ran into in the past. I will try to keep this list up to date.

1. socket.io
2. nowjs
3. faye
4. juggernaut

Jasmine is a behavior-driven development framework for testing JavaScript from Pivotal Labs (I believe Rajan Agaskar was/is the original author). I’ve been using Jasmine for a while now to test my JavaScript code. Today I ran into interesting situation where I wanted to test events bound to jQuery element. Basically by writing code like this:

I wanted to know if element $(‘#el’) had any events attached to it. I looked around but couldn’t find any predefined matchers in jasmine or jasmine-jquery to accomplish it. I realized that it’s pretty easy to extend jasmine and define my own matchers (which is pretty cool).

Here is how you can do it:

First define your new matchers:

Then in your spec add your handlers inside beforeEach:

That’s it! Now you can use your new matchers inside your spec. In this case I was able to use it like this:

Often I have to login to different machines. It’s annoying to always type the full hostname and then password. So here is what you can do to avoid typing too much:

1. On your local machine create a private and public key:

by default 2 keys will be created (id_rsa, id_rsa.pub) under ~/.ssh

2. Create config file under ~/.ssh

3. Add your connection information to config file:

4. Create .ssh folder on the remote machine from your local machine (you will be prompted for the password):

5. Finally append your new public key id_rsa.pub to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on your remote machine (you will be prompted for the password one last time):

That’s all! Now every time you want to login to your remote machine you can type:

and you should be able to get in.

More about gemcutter & jeweler can be found here.

Here are the steps how to publish patched gem cloned from github:

1. Append username to gem name in .gemspec or if you use jeweler open Rakefile and edit Jeweler::Tasks section save it and run:

rake gemspec

2. Build gem with:

gem build

3. Push new gem to gemcutter

gem push

Tonight I found a plugin to auto escape html in order to protect from XSS attacks. I’m not sure why rails doesn’t do it out of the box (you have to use h() helper). Anyway the plugin is called xss_terminate and it can be found here. The cool thing about it is that now you can forget about h() .

Check out how Whenever gem can simplify cron configuration.