Jon Kinney Blog

Intridea Blog Posts

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 01:41:39 GMT

I’ve been blogging lately, just not here :) If you want to see some of my lastest posts check them out at http://intridea.com/about/people/jon. You can see the “Published Posts” section after my bio.

Here are direct links to what is posted to date (I’ll try to keep this updated).

New job, new office, new Mac... it's all good!

Tue, 18 May 2010 05:26:36 GMT

I'm very happy to say that I started my new job as a Senior Engineer at Intridea today! I look forward to working with some of the leading experts in the Ruby development community and hope to grow my skills as a developer along the way.

Using save_and_open_page to open failed cucumber scenerios in a browser with images and CSS

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 05:00:00 GMT

I've been doing a lot of Cucumber testing lately and have really been liking it, but there is one thing that is hard with Cucumber... debugging errors. That is until I found out about the save_and_open_page method that webrat provides for opening a browser to the page the cuke puked on from Bodaniel Jeanes over on his blog.

The only problem was that the page didn't look very nice. I could have left it (it was working after all) but then I ran across an init script for cuke in a gist from Duff that allowed for the rewriting of the paths to the local image, JavaScript and CSS files so they at least could be referenced properly. While this worked, most of my images were specified as backgrounds in my actual CSS files so if I wanted to be able to see the page as it was intended I would need to find a way to change the paths in the actual CSS files as well.

Easily convert a has_and_belongs_to_many to a has_many_through in Rails (for: MS SQL Server)

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 06:00:00 GMT

One of the things that bugged me about Rails when they made the move from only having has_and_belongs_to_many (HABTM) to also including the has_many_through (HM:T) join model option (which is now the preferred way to go), was that you needed to write your own code in the model to get the associations to work properly. With the old HABTM implementation this was handled for you.

Bluepill init script for Monitoring Delayed Job on Linux openSUSE

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 06:00:00 GMT

I recently moved a long running request in my application to delayed job (the collectiveidea fork) and it went really well. However, after some time the delayed job process died and my users couldn't use an essential part of the application. I knew it was time for a process monitor. I probably should have put one in to begin with, but I was new to delayed job (really to background processing in general) and the though hadn't crossed my mind.

Change locale on os x snow leopard for FreeTDS functionality

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Recently I've been trying to get my new unibody macbook pro connecting to SQL Server 2005 with FreeTDS. I was following the great guide from the Ken Collins the author of the rails-sqlserver activerecord adapter that I use but no matter what configuration settings I edited I couldn't get my machine to connect to the SQL Server.

BDD: My quest to become a professional tester

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Now I’m not saying that I only want to be a tester of web applications. After all, creating them is what I enjoy the most. However, I believe that to be a professional coder, you need to test your applications. Now I’m not talking about that day or two at the end of a project when you run through the application in your browser and hope that nothing breaks. No, I’m talking about real testing. Testing that is done alongside the code, if not before. To me, testing is a tool that I’m integrating into my coding stack that is simply going to become part of how I write an application.

Web Design for Developers: A Programmer's Guide to Design Tools and Techniques

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 05:00:00 GMT

I recently had the privilege of tech reviewing a great book about how to create standards compliant, accessible, and attractive web designs. The goal of the book is to cover web design with the programmer in mind. Brian Hogan, the book's author, does this by taking the reader on a journey to build the next great social recipe sharing website "Foodbox". To me this book helps arm application developers with the knowledge to help blur the line that some companies try to arbitrarily place between a design team and a development team. After all, just because someone is a "coder" doesn't mean he or she can't create an attractive and usable site!

My first full studio album finished!

Fri, 15 May 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Well... when I say *my* I mean the first album that I've produced and mixed. My original album is my next studio project and should be a lot of fun. The album I just finished, however, was for The Innocent Men a 7-man all male a cappella vocal band from UWEC. They rocked pretty hard on this album and I was happy to be a part of it.

Deploying to multiple server environments with cap

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Most anytime I develop a web application I need to deploy to multiple server environments. For me this used to mean maintaining two separate deploy.rb scripts, and I would rename one while deploying to staging, and then rename the other when I needed to deploy to production. After about three deploys I said, the hell with this! And I figured out how to allow the specification of your deployment at the command line during the cap deploy task.