tail -f development.log

Late last night I was *lucky* enough to be included in a mass mailing from a *recruiter* who was looking to fill some Ruby on Rails positions.

From: Pradipta Archiputra

I have a couple of Ruby on Rails position, wanted to know if you are interested?

Max Archie
Technical Recruiter
Prodigus Source
Cell: 219-669-9216
Phone: 312-235-2365
Max@prodigussource.com

In and of itself, this email is not unfamiliar to most of us, but the interesting (annoying) thing is that the email was sent to about 500 people all in the TO: field of the email, not via the BCC: fields.

Personally, I clicked the REPLY button and told Max (Pradipta) that I wasn’t interested in working with someone who couldn’t use his email client properly and to remove me from his list. I didn’t think much else about it and went to bed for the night

Naturally though, it was only a matter of time before some noob person clicked REPLY TO ALL and sent the following message to all 500 recipients.

From: Zach C***** <****@******.com>

What are the positions?

That simple REPLY TO ALL set off one of the best spontaneous email threads I have read in a long time and when I woke up this morning I had about 50 replies to read and laugh at.

The list started off bashing the Bangalore HR scene for creating an Epic FAIL and then morphed into a very friendly and humorous discussion where people started introducing themselves like we all had been including in some kind of special Rails developer club for a reason.

Next a suggestion was raised to start a Google Group and the call when out for appropriate names. At about 1:30 AM EST, the Pradipta’s Rolodex group was launched complete with fancy logo.

Fittingly, the last email on the original thread was the following:

From: Matt S****** <********@gmail.com>

Hi Max,

I am a recruiter who has an opening for a top-tier recruiter such as yourself. I need someone who can unwittingly set off the fury of *at least* 400 people, while ignoring all basic email etiquette. Would you be interested? If not, do you know anyone else who is currently looking for such an opportunity?

Sincerely,
Thanks for the mile long email thread out of freakin nowhere

If you are like me, you do quite a bit of connecting to remote servers via SSH. Well, here is a quick timesaving hint to save you a few keystrokes.

Instead of having to type

ssh username@hostname.com

from the command line to connect to your server each time, wouldn’t it be nicer to just type something like this

ssh foo

Well, if you edit your ssh config file you can add these aliases. You should most likely find your ssh config located in your user directory at ~/.ssh/config . If the file doesn’t already exist, go ahead and create it.

To add aliases you simply add new Host entries in the following format

Host aliasname
HostName your.domain.name
User your_ssh_username
Port 1234

Just give the alias you want to use and supply your server and username credentials. The Port line is optional if you are using the default SSH port (which you shouldn’t be for security reasons, but that’s beyond the scope of this post). Once you add those entries to your config file you can simply do the following and save yourself some typing:

ssh aliasname

The latest version of WordPress has been released. You can download version 2.6 while it’s hot (or you can wait a few days until it cools off a bit if that’s your style). I’ve been using 2.6 on a few projects for the past few weeks and it seems pretty nice. My FeedCache plugin is already WP 2.6 ready as well.

Here is a quick video preview of the major enhancements in WP 2.6.

I just recently came across an issue where I couldn’t figure out why my list items <li> tags where being indented in IE6. My CSS file had the proper margins and paddings set and, naturally, it worked fine in every single other browser except IE6.

Well, it turns out one simple CSS rule was causing my problem and if you are having the same issue, you might want to check if you have the “offending” rule in your CSS as well.

list-style-position: inside;

Simply remove the list-style-position rule and the indentation behaves like you expected.

To those of you out there still using IE6, please, please, please help save the developers.

I ran into a situation today while working on a client project that was resulting in some “funky” output.

I’ve been using Bob Aman’s standard FeedTools library to grab and parse some RSS feeds for output in a WordPress site.

Now, it was obvious to me this had something to do with character encoding issues so I dug in to find out the problem. It turns out FeedTools converts the feeds it parses to UTF-8 encoding, which is great, but can result in some strange characters in the string depending on what the original feed encoding was.

Viewing the native feeds in a feed reader I could see they were simply quotes, apostrophes and ellipses characters. I needed a way to either convert these character strings into ASCII printable characters or simply discard them altogether.

I didn’t want to go through the process of setting up a translation table for every possible character code that might possibly show up in a feed title, so I simply chose to discard the “unprintable” strings completely. I came across this post by Obie Fernandez and decided his simple method would work for me.

require 'iconv'

class String
  def to_ascii_iconv
    converter = Iconv.new('ASCII//IGNORE//TRANSLIT', 'UTF-8')
    converter.iconv(self).unpack('U*').select{ |cp| cp < 127 }.pack('U*')
  end
end

Ruby’s built-in Iconv library can be used for charset conversions. I extended the String class to include a new to_ascii_iconv method. This method creates a new Iconv converter that will convert from UTF-8 encoding to ASCII encoding. The IGNORE and TRANSLIT flags tell the converter to ignore errors and transliterate accented chracters to an appropriate charcter in the ASCII charset. Next, I use the newly created converter to do the conversion and then strip out any characters with decimal values higher than 127 (non-ASCII printable characters).

The results are exactly what I needed. No “funky” characters in my output.