Jan 13 ’08
Who doesn't love chocolate?
That's what I thought. Nobody raised their hands.
I love to make desserts that finish a meal in style, and this chocolate mousse certainly fits the bill. The best part is that it's very easy to make.Read the rest …
Jan 10 ’08
GRRRRR!
Sometimes stupid software bugs just burn my bu**.
For one of my clients, I designed a 8.5x11" flyer that's going to a real printer. It's a full-bleed piece, so the printer requested that I give them an eighth-inch bleed, with trim marks. I thought, "Oh. No worries. I'm using my brand-spanking-new-hot-off-the-presses copy of CS3, which will surely be able to handle this sort of thing. Well, you can see where this is going — it doesn't. If you make an 8.5x11" documentin Illustrator CS3, and then save it as a PDF with the appropriate bleed size and trim marks, you don't get what you wanted. Illustrator crops the document at the artboard limits, which are 8.5x11".
Some quick googling turned up a discussion of the problem, but not the solution I wanted.
But there is a work-around. I'll give you a hint: it doesn't involve CS3's new crop area tool.Read the rest …
Nov 19 ’07
NOTE: This tutorial has been superseded by a newer version that takes advantage of the newly-released Intel Mac version of the Oracle InstantClient. The new version is much, much simpler, and causes far fewer headaches.
Updated (12/11/07): The ruby-oci8 library just went to full 1.0.0 release. I've updated that section to reflect the new file names.
Updated (5/5/08): The oracle adapter installation has been on-again-off-again with successive Rails releases, but there's an easy fix for it. I've updated the relevant section.
At my new job, I'm using Ruby on Rails to connect to multiple databases — multiple Oracle (10g) instances, as well as MySQL and FileMaker. There's a lot of challenges to doing this, so I'm going to post some of the less obvious solutions as they come up.
The first challenge I had was to get RoR to talk to Oracle. There isn't a lot of information about this online, because the people who tend to use Oracle are not the people who tend to use open source software like Rails.
Nov 13 ’07
This one's real easy. Leopard ships with a default Rails installation (/usr/bin/rails), but overriding it is quite simple, since it's just a gem.
Aug 29 ’07
Really, twice. First was at the end of June: I completely forgot to note it here. I took a photo of Erythronium montanum at the top of Larch Mountain outside of Portland. It was a rainy day, which usually doesn't make for good hiking, but we were under a thick understory for most of the hike so it worked. There were vast numbers of these very delicate avalanche lilies waiting for us near the top of the mountain, all covered with droplets. They are quite charismatic.Apr 18 ’07
Every time I get frustrated with an aspect of Rails, it turns out that it's just my idiocy and not actually something to do with Rails.
Most recently, I wanted to code this algorithm:
If on the current page show <a href="blah1">link 1</a> else show <a href="blah2>link 2Read the rest …
Mar 05 ’07
Feb 04 ’07
My upstairs neighbor gave us some macha: Japanese powdered green tea. The Japanese are the only people on the planet who still drink this stuff — it's a very primitive form of tea, and when brewed it's quite bitter. They eat it with sweets that are too sweet, alternating bites of too-sweet with sips of too-bitter, and it all balances out.
I like drinking macha, though; but I'd rather make delicious tasty desserts with it, like this one which I made this afternoon. The recipe is based on the "Rich roll cookies" from Joy of Cooking.Read the rest …
Jan 18 ’07
Brent Miller is the owner and principal web designer of Foliosus Web Design LLC in Portland, Oregon. He enjoys food, plants, and the color green. If you are interested in hiring him for web work, please contact him.
Marah oreganus (Cucurbitaceae); Manroot
Avalanche lily