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
Keeping Ruby on Rails running at Dreamhost
Update 1/12/07: This solution has reduced my 500 error rate down to less than 0.2% but it’s still not perfect. I continue to plug away at this… Update 1/24/07: I’ve finally solved my Dreamhost 500 error problems with a different … Continue reading
Posted in Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Systems Administration, Web
4 Comments
The Rails Way delivers the goods
I had a piece of data import code in Wind and Tides that I just knew could be cleaner and more elegant. Last week I submitted it to Jamis and Michael who write the Rails Way blog and their refactoring … Continue reading
Posted in Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Software Engineering
2 Comments
Tab completion and history with irb and script/console
One thing I love about Ruby (and really miss when working in Java) is its interactive command line interpreter irb (or script/console if you’re using Rails). I really wish irb had tab completion and saved history configured by default out … Continue reading
Posted in Java, Ruby, Software Engineering
3 Comments
Hello Newshutch, goodbye Bloglines
I’ve been a Bloglines user for a long time. However, after hearing about Newshutch on the Web 2.0 show podcast Episode 26 I’ve made the switch and couldn’t be happier. It sports just the right amount of Ajax, good keyboard … Continue reading
Posted in AJAX, Blogging, Ruby on Rails, Web
Comments Off on Hello Newshutch, goodbye Bloglines
Comparing Amazon EC2 with VPS and dedicated hosting
I’ve been reading all the great things about Amazon EC2 (or Elastic Compute Cloud) and lots of pricing comparisons with VPS and dedicated hosting. I finally got an EC2 account and tinkered a bit and there’s a big difference between … Continue reading
Posted in Database, FreeBSD, Linux, MySQL, Systems Administration
9 Comments
Ajax enabling crusty legacy webapps with Prototype
With all of the hype around Ajax it’s easy to think you might need an MVC framework with baked in Ajax support like Rails ActionPack or JBoss Seam to make Ajax easy. However, libraries like Prototype (which is what Rails … Continue reading
Posted in AJAX, CSS, Javascript, Software Engineering, Web
1 Comment
Javascript debugging in Internet Explorer
It always drives me nuts when I get a Javascript error in Internet Explorer that I can’t reproduce in Firefox because I’m used to debugging Javascript in Firefox with Firebug. I finally had to buckle down and figure out how … Continue reading
Posted in Javascript, Software Engineering, Web
2 Comments
Instantiating and populating a list or collection
In Java it always irks me when I have to create a collection and then populate it in separate steps as follows: List states = new ArrayList(); state.add(State.CA); state.add(State.WY); Then today I read about using an anonymous subclass with instance … Continue reading
Posted in Java, Ruby, Software Engineering
12 Comments
Using Ruby’s timout to keep the user experience snappy
On a my Ruby on Rails based San Francisco Sailing Weather website I make calls out to flickr.rb to retrieve photos.
Posted in Ruby on Rails, Software Engineering, Web
Comments Off on Using Ruby’s timout to keep the user experience snappy
Upgrading to Spring 2.0 and Hibernate 3.2
Tonight I just completed the upgrade from Spring 1.2 and Hibernate 3.1 to Spring 2.0 and Hibernate 3.2 for work. I was expecting a rough upgrade but was pleasantly surprised how easily it went.
Posted in Database, Java, Software Engineering
3 Comments