About Me
I live in San Francisco and am the Co-Founder of Two Bit Labs where we develop iPhone, iPad, and Android mobile apps for our clients. I love the mix of team leadership and working as a hands-on contributor. My technical passions include Swift, Kotlin, Ruby, Cloud Computing, and open-source software.
I also love to sail and my wife, daughter, and I sailed out the Golden Gate in 2007 on our 38 foot Hans Christian cutter (sailboat) on a 3 year cruise. Read about it at http://sailsugata.com.
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Recent Posts
- Backup your Gmail
- Naming your business or product, forget the domain
- Storing Git repositories in Amazon S3 for high availability
- Acceptance Testing non Ruby web applications with Cucumber
- Code readability through conciseness
- Mac OS X gem cleanup failing
- iPhone development the easy way
- Production MySQL performance tuning
- Selenium Continuous Integration Runner
- Standalone Migrations: Using Rails migrations in non Rails projects
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Category Archives: Technical
Implementing CRUD HTTP style
I’m amazed by how often DHH can keep coming up with newer, simpler, and more elegant approaches to web development that really make you think. In his recent blog entry/keynote he discusses using HTTP’s PUT and DELETE methods to more … Continue reading
June San Francisco Ruby Meetup
I attended the June 12th, 2006 San Francisco Ruby Meetup at CNet which was my first. There was quite a turnout, I’d guess maybe 80-90 people. The presentations focused more on process and lessons rather than in-depth technical sessions. Here … Continue reading
Posted in Ruby, Software Engineering
3 Comments
Configuring MySQL sql-mode in Ruby on Rails
In my previous post I wrote about setting MySQL to a stricter sql-mode to make it behave like most other databases, however, I recently ran into a case where I couldn’t set the global sql-mode without breaking some legacy applications. … Continue reading
Posted in MySQL, Ruby, Software Engineering
1 Comment
Creating subversion repositories for just about anything
I’ve been using Subversion for just about everything I work on including keeping my documents synchronized across multiple computers, backups, source control, etc… I got the idea a while back from Martin Fowler’s Bliki who uses it for a similar … Continue reading
Posted in Source Control, Systems Administration
Comments Off on Creating subversion repositories for just about anything
Modeling enumerated types in the database
Let’s say you have an Employees table and you want a column to track the status of an employee such as [’employed’, ‘resigned’, ‘retired’, ‘terminated’, etc…]. You have a couple of options including: Using your database’s custom enumeration data-type if … Continue reading
Posted in Database, Ruby, Software Engineering
3 Comments
When installing MySQL always set the sql-mode
As I’ve described before, MySQL has some appalling out of the box settings which will thwart your attempts at good data integrity! They’ve clearly seen the light though and at least give you an option to achieve good data integrity … Continue reading
Posted in MySQL, Systems Administration
1 Comment
Running Ruby on Rails with Apache 2 and mod_fcgid
My hosted Linux server runs Debian Sarge 3.1 with Apache 2. As most Ruby users have heard Apache 2 is rumored to be problematic with FastCGI. This evening I’ve been working on putting up a new Ruby on Rails site … Continue reading
Posted in Ruby, Systems Administration
Comments Off on Running Ruby on Rails with Apache 2 and mod_fcgid
Use env to ensure a script will work in cron
I’ve often written scripts only to discover once added to crontab that it relies on an environment setting such as having the java command in the PATH or having CVSROOT set. To avoid this I now run scripts I’m developing … Continue reading
Posted in Systems Administration
1 Comment
Avoid hard-coding the path to the interpreter in your scripts
In general when trying to write portable scripts don’t start them with #!/bin/bash , instead start them with #!/usr/bin/env bash . The only caveat is that you DO NOT want to do this for critical security scripts because it opens … Continue reading
Posted in Ruby, Systems Administration
4 Comments
Creating database test fixtures and the rails export fixtures plugin
Being able to quickly and easily create test fixtures for your database is important yet it’s not always easy. There are basically 3 approaches I’ve seen used: 1. Use a MySQL or PostgreSQL dump that gets imported before the tests … Continue reading
Posted in Database, Java, MySQL, Ruby, Software Engineering
3 Comments