http://derekdevries.com Mon, 11 Aug 2008 05:59:18 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en End-user documentation has always been a thorn for many developers. We'd much rather be writing working software than explaining how that software works. It is especially difficult working in an agile environment where things change so quickly that writing extensive end-user documentation just slows down application development. One real benefit ... http://derekdevries.com/2008/05/07/auditing-user-experience-with-documentation/ I ran into a few small errors when installing Sphinx on my Mac Book Pro. I'll share my install instructions along with a couple troubleshooting tips for others that may have the same problems. Let's start with the instructions for installing the latest version to /usr/local. If you're not familiar ... http://derekdevries.com/2008/04/05/configuring-sphinx-on-os-x-leopard/ I got really excited about the Apple Time Capsule when it was released. I had two 500GB duplicate external hard drives chained off of my Mac Book Pro to backup my rather large collection of media. I typically use rsync to copy files to the drives and keep them in ... http://derekdevries.com/2008/04/05/syncing-to-time-capsule-from-terminal/ Today I did a presentation on Ruby object inheritance for the Tech Valley Ruby Brigade. Here are the slides. Some of the presentation is based off material in the first chapter of Advanced Rails. http://derekdevries.com/2008/03/26/the-upper-class/ Mike and I have been diligently converting PHP methods to Ruby for our freshly released Rails for PHP Reference. This section is an extension of the reference found in our book -- Rails for PHP Developers. The book covers the language reference, while this reference aims to translate as many ... http://derekdevries.com/2008/03/21/rails-for-php-reference/ As a follow up to my article on Minifying Your Rails Javascript, let's take a look at a new feature in Rails 2.0 that makes packaging your assets into a single file much easier. Enabling Cache We use asset helpers such as javascript_include_tag and stylesheet_link_tag in our layouts ... http://derekdevries.com/2007/12/13/rails-asset-cache/ More and more web developers are using OS X as their development tool of choice these days. It's hard not to with excellent tools like TextMate, and the ability to run in a Unix style environment. As much as we'd like to give IE the boot, we know that the ... http://derekdevries.com/2007/03/26/rails-ie-and-parallels/ While Prototype and Scriptaculous prove to exceptionally useful, they both have a pretty substantial footprint. The current stable Prototype (v1.5) is 69K, and the Scriptaculous Effects library is 36K. This puts us at over 100K to include these Javascript libraries. This number can be cut down a little bit with ... http://derekdevries.com/2007/02/05/minifying-your-rails-javascript/ Testing is encouraged and expected in Rails, but most people fall short on good coverage of their Javascript code. We'll go over how the Scriptaculous Unit Testing library provides a nice solution to testing custom classes you have written using the Prototype library. Installation The Scriptaculous unit testing library can be ... http://derekdevries.com/2007/01/08/testing-javascript-in-rails/ Note: Examples make use of Joe Hewitt's Firebug extension for Firefox. If you do not have this software, feel free to follow along by replacing console.log(msg) with a much less elegant option such as alert(msg). Now that Ajax has reared its ugly head, developers are awakening to the powerful behavior that ... http://derekdevries.com/2006/12/21/creating-classes-with-prototype/