crunchlife: Tag crunchlife

One Year and Counting

Ryan Baxter — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 15:05:00 -0700

July marks the one year anniversary of this website. I didn’t think I’d keep up with it this long, but throughout the past year, crunchlife.com has become a springboard for ideas and a wonderful source of reference. Just as other programmers, I have found that maintaining a blog helps crystallize my thoughts. It also has the added benefit of documenting my fixes and failures for not only myself, but the rest of the community. It has been very gratifying reading everyone’s comments. Keep them coming.

While reminiscing, I thought I’d list my top five most viewed posts.

Review: Linksys NAS200 - By and far the most popular post on crunchlife.com. This article has accounted for over 70% of my web traffic from July 2007 to July 2008. I had no idea it would become that popular and if I could duplicate its success on a daily basis I might consider quitting my day job. Not really.
IE7’s Inanimate GIF - Explains how to reanimate hidden animated GIFs in IE7 with a little JavaScript.
Samba Network Shares with Nautilus in Hardy Heron Part 2 - This time I posted a solution to a problem I was having in mounting SMB shares on my NAS200 using Nautilus in Ubuntu, Hardy Heron. The solution worked well and I’ll be posting a follow-up soon.
rake aborted! No such file or directory - /tmp/mysql.sock - Provides a fix for the much hated “rake aborted! No such file or directory - /tmp/mysql.sock” Ruby on Rails error.
Temporary Identity Impersonation in ASP.NET - If you’d rather only use ASP.NET Identity Impersonation when you want to then this article can explain how it’s done.

Many projects in the 9-to-5 grind of a programmer seem endless and are not gratifying in the least. Seeking fulfillment, developers often work on side projects. I have found this to be an extremely rewarding way to satisfy my inner programmer and push my career in new directions. So without a doubt, my favorite posts have to do with the stuff we all love – source code.

Ruby Fractal Library - Just last week I posted a fractal generating library for the Ruby programming language. I’m rather proud of this one. The “zooming” functionality caused a lot of grief, but once it starting rendering the Mandelbrot set all became right with the world.
Samba Network Shares with Nautilus in Hardy Heron Part 2 - Most old *nix salts will tell you that any problem can be solved with a Bash script. They are right. This script improved my WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) tenfold!
Genealogy Data for the Future - Not exactly source code, but solving problems with a few small tools can feel nearly as good.

The last twelve months have been great and I’m sure the next will be even better.

So Long Bradford, and Thanks for All the Fish

Ryan Baxter — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 15:42:00 -0800

I’ve spent the last six years living in Bradford, Pennsylvania. It’s not the largest or most interesting town, but now that I’m leaving I can’t help but feel that I’m going to miss it. Many people recognize Bradford from having owned a Zippo lighter. Zippo Manufacturing Company is the largest employer in Bradford and has provided me with an internship and 5 years of employment.

As a programmer at Zippo I was never hindered by technology. Programmers there are are encouraged to get the job done using whatever tools are available. As a Web Developer I was involved in developing websites in ASP, JSP, and ASP.NET. I authored the Zippo Framework, wrote development guidelines, and developed the company’s Continuous Integration system.

As of Monday, I’m an employee of Primus Technologies Corporation. Primus is a leading circuit assembly and electronics manufacturing company. They are responsible for battlefield communications, aircraft electronics, missiles, shipboard and submarine guidance and tracking, surveillance, homeland security, IFF and integrated combat systems.

Primus has been great so far. Just today I completed training sessions in ISO9000/AS9100 and Electrostatic Discharge (ESD) safety. I must admit that I look smashing in my blue ESD smock (pictures coming soon).

My wife and I (mostly my wife) have finished unpacking most of our belongings and are looking forward to life in a new town. Thanks to those that helped us move! With a tinge of sadness I must say, so long Bradford, and thanks for all the fish.

@!#?@!

Ryan Baxter — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 11:32:00 -0700

I’ve been layed up in the hospital looking sorta like Q*bert for a couple of days. More to follow.

Code Snippet: Ruby Word Masher

Ryan Baxter — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 13:54:00 -0700

I can be extremely indecisive about things. So much, in fact, that I even wrote a script to help me choose a name for this website. Is it strange that a random number generator can make me feel better about making decisions? My wife thinks I’m crazy, but she also calls domain names, donames. Besides, I think there is something novel in a computer choosing a name for itself. Anyway… Given some user input, the code below will read words from a file and then mash them together to provide unique combinations. Here is a words.dat file to help get you started. Happy mashing.

#!/usr/bin/ruby

words = Array.new
i = 0

def mash_words(words, mash_count)
  new_word = ''

  1.upto(mash_count) do
    new_word += words[rand(words.length)]
  end

  return new_word
end

begin
  puts 'How many mashed words would you like to create?'
  word_count = gets.chomp.to_i  

  puts 'How many words would you like to mash?'
  mash_count = gets.chomp.to_i  

  input_file = File.new("words.dat", "r")
  while (line = input_file.gets)    
    words[i] = line.chomp    
    i += 1
  end  

  1.upto(word_count) do    
    puts mash_words(words, mash_count)
  end  

  input_file.close  
rescue => err
  puts "Exception: #{err}"
  err
end

New Section for New Software

Ryan Baxter — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 09:12:00 -0700

I’ve added a projects section on the right-hand side of the site. Projects will appear here as they either become eligible for contribution or reach release status. Each project will be given a page containing repository URLs, dependency information, and other resources. I’m also working on a separate portal for project management activities and will make an announcement when that is available. Maybe YOU can help.

If you’re itching to try your hand at Rails or have a good sense of design, then you’re welcome to join. Experience isn’t a requirement. I’ll follow up with more information soon.

By now you’ve probably glanced at the new section and noticed a project called 1024px. 1024px is the magnificent theme you see displayed here on my weblog. If you’re a Typo user and you’d like to use this theme then check out its project page for download information.