Caleb / March 8, 2010, 5:26 pm
I’ve been using the console a lot more on my windows machine here at blenderbox, and I find myself typing in the unix command ‘ls’ to display the directory listing over and over. Each time I want to display the directory, I end up having to type in two commands. I finally decided to do something about this today and created a batch file for ls to run the dir command. To do this,
- Open a new text file, type:
dir
- Save as
ls.bat in C:\Windows\System32\
Now whenever I type ls by mistake, it runs the dir command, giving me the directory listing. Sweet yea?
Heather / October 19, 2009, 12:05 pm
Blenderbox is thrilled to announce this year’s W3 honors — two Gold awards in the Tourism and Homepage categories for Downtown Brooklyn Partnership’s “It’s the Moment” campaign site, and one Gold award in the Beauty and Cosmetics category for the Renée Rouleau Skin Care site!
This awards cycle received
nearly
3,000
entries
from
ad
and interactive
agencies,
in‐house
creative
professionals, web and graphic
designers, and other
web
enthusiasts, and less
than
10%
of
all
entries
were
selected
as
Gold
Winners. We are truly honored to be counted among these highly talented agencies.
“We were incredibly impressed by the quality and creativity of this year’s entries. W3 winners continue to set the bar in Web development and design, push the limits of web advertising creativity and advance the use of web video. We are thrilled to have reviewed such a diverse and respected pool of work” said Linda Day, the executive director of the IAVA. “On behalf of the entire Academy, we congratulate this year’s W3 Award winners as they continue to advance Internet creativity and greatly contribute to the robust and ever-changing online community.”
Nathan / August 31, 2009, 5:45 pm
I took the release of Snow Leopard as an opportunity to do a clean wipe and re-install of Leopard and Snow Leopard. As usual, Dan Benjamin has a great series of articles on getting the latest and greatest setup.
I aggregated these articles into a bash script to automate installing MySQL, Ruby, Rails, RubyGems and Git.
Prerequisites
As Dan mentions, the prerequisites for this script are:
- Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard
- The latest Xcode Tools (from the Snow Leopard DVD or downloaded from Apple — the 10.5 version won’t work)
- Confidence running UNIX commands using the Terminal
Caveats
- This has only been tested on a completely fresh install of Snow Leopard, not recommended for upgrades
- This will overwrite your existing ~/.profile
Instructions
- Download and extract the following gist: http://gist.github.com/178699
$ sudo sh
bootstrap_snowleopard.sh
When finished you will have 64-bit versions of MySQL, Ruby, Rails, RubyGems, and Git.
BONUS! Get the installers for Firefox, Adium and Textmate http://gist.github.com/178773
Nathan / August 27, 2009, 5:27 pm
When writing unit tests I tend to 1) use factories instead of fixtures and 2) keep my factories in synch with model validations. As such, I like to write a test to ensure that out of the box a new instance of a factory object will be valid. Here is a macro to help out with that:
class ActiveSupport::TestCase
def self.should_be_valid_with_factory
klass = self.name.gsub(/Test$/, '').underscore.to_sym
should "be valid with factory" do
assert_valid Factory.build(klass)
end
end
end
Put this in your ActiveSupport::TestCase definition and it will be available in all your tests. Simply call it by name with no params:
class BuildingTest < ActiveSupport::TestCase
should_be_valid_with_factory
end
Naming for this method was inspired by a similar method in Dan Croak's Blitz plugin.
Heather / March 19, 2009, 4:14 pm
When Blenderbox first engaged with the Hewlett Foundation to redesign their existing site, Hewlett wanted to be sure that their site’s users would stand to benefit first and foremost. So Blenderbox developed beta.hewlett.org, allowing the Foundation to gather feedback from the site’s users that could be used to gauge their level of satisfaction with the new design and influence the ultimate re-launch of hewlett.org.
After receiving initial user feedback, the site’s new design is a rousing success! New sections like “What We’re Learning” have been met with remarkably positive feedback, and many users are applauding the Foundation’s user-friendliness and transparency as well.
Since 1967, the Hewlett Foundation has been making grants to solve social and environmental problems at home and around the world. For more information about the Hewlett Foundation’s mission and work, and to check out the Beta redesign, head over to beta.hewlett.org.
Nathan / December 12, 2008, 4:52 pm
One of the things I like most about TDD, and shoulda specifically, is that if a thought pops up of something I need to add I can add a deferred test and come back to it later. In shoulda you can do this with:
should_eventually "do something"
#or just leave off the block
should "do something"
This works great for models/controllers, but I also wanted a way to integrate a miscelanious todo list into the flow that would pop up in autotest or when running the whole test suite. To accomplish this I’ve been keeping a TodosTest in the integration tests directory:
require File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../test_helper'
class TodosTest < ActionController::IntegrationTest
context "TODO:" do
todos = [
'add the jquery rounded corners plugin',
'add the jquery dropshadow plugin',
'scope actions in application.js to specific pages'
]
todos.each do |todo|
should_eventually todo
end
end
end
The output of this is:
* DEFERRED: TODO: should add the jquery rounded corners plugin.
* DEFERRED: TODO: should add the jquery dropshadow plugin.
* DEFERRED: TODO: should scope actions in application.js to specific pages.
Since this isn't really an integration test I usually add a line for this in the .gitignore.
Also - this is a handy bash alias to print the todo's without the deferred/should language:
alias todo="ruby test/integration/todos_test.rb | grep TODO | sed -e 's/DEFERRED: TODO: should //g'"
The cleaned up output is:
* add the jquery rounded corners plugin.
* add the jquery dropshadow plugin.
* scope actions in application.js to specific pages.
Iain / October 20, 2008, 4:39 pm
This past weekend was the Rails Rumble and a team of intrepid blenderbox developers hunkered down in our Brooklyn headquarters and, in a mere 48 hours, produced a slick new web app: Compost.
Compost is the simple way to post, share, and present your design comps.
More than just a slideshow, Compost allows you to control your presentation and your message. Now your clients see what you want them to see, when you want them to see it.
Sharing comps is easy:
- Post. Give your gallery a name and upload your comps. Upload as many images as you need – all at once.
- Share. Invite people to view your new gallery. Emails are sent to your clients with a unique URL for their gallery.
- Present. Control your viewer’s experience in real-time – remotely! With complete control of your presentation, you decide when, and for how long, each image appears on-screen. The viewer – your client – sits back and watches the show.
Try it yourself.
Nathan / September 4, 2008, 10:12 am
Download from github:
http://github.com/npverni/rails-boilerplate-script
After running it in the root of a new Rails app you’ll be setup with:
- Authentication via restful-authentication
- the rspec plugins for BDD
- the jRails drop-in replacement for using jQuery instaed of Proto/scriptaculous
- A ‘welcome’ controller
- A application.html.erb layout
Matt / June 25, 2008, 12:32 pm
Khoi Vinh on getting good ideas out faster by collaborating closely:
TimesPeople is the result of a tight collaboration between a small team of our technologists and designers and, for a new feature on our site, they managed to launch it in something like record time. It was actually a lot of fun bringing it to life, but the really important thing is the try-it-and-see approach that drove it. Rather than spend months and millions on creating the ‘perfect’ social networking addition to our site, we decided to take a good idea and get it out as quickly as possible. It’s certainly not perfect, but we’re hoping to learn as much as we can about how social networking makes sense in the Times environment.
From “People Wanted” (subtraction.com)
