Company Profile

There isn't a single command in subversion to remove external plugins from your application so I figured I would post this to help the next person save 10 minutes of reading docs.

Make sure you are in the root of your app and do:
svn propedit svn:externals vendor/plugins

Just delete the line(s) of the plugins you no longer want.

If you get the following error then you need to set your environment variable.
svn: None of the environment variables SVN_EDITOR, VISUAL or EDITOR is set, and no 'editor-cmd' run-time configuration option was found

You can set your SVN_EDITOR to use TextMate like so:
export SVN_EDITOR='mate -w'

With Christmas around the corner I have started looking at all the things I don't need but really, really want. A couple of months ago I bought an HD TV and armed it with an HD TiVo. I promised myself (and my wife) that I would stop there but secretly knew that a regular SD DVD player was an embarrassing item to have in my entertainment center. In my search for more HD goodness, I started looking at HD DVD players and Blu-Ray players. I have always hated the idea of using a format created by Sony because of the cost to the consumer (ie, PlayStation Memory Cards) so my searching was more HD DVD oriented. Today I found the one feature that beats Blu-Ray one million times to one.

That's right. Season One of the Original Star Trek in HD. Only available in HD DVD format. What more could you possibly need to convince you that HD DVD is the format to have?

We use page caching in Rails to speed up sites and improve performance. This is a great feature of Rails but can get cumbersome when trying to keep up with which pages to sweep and when. To make life easier we use a separate directory to house the cache. This solution is great for files that end in a .html extension but for other file types you need a new rewrite rule for mod_rewrite. The example below is for caching dynamic images.

I am rewriting any request for a .png to have the cache/ added to the beginning of the url. I am also checking to make sure the url hasn't already been rewritten otherwise Apache gets stuck in a loop rewriting the url. Depending on the application, you may need to add a slash in front of cache like so:

While playing around at lunch today I stumbled across Parsed.org. It is a code geek snippet repository that uses OpenID as a method of authentication for it's users. I found Random Rows from SQL interesting since I recently did something very similar.