Idle Hacking

It’s been a busy few months, following the release of the stickers store we have launch a new Jewelry store for JJ Singh – JJ Singh Jewelry.

Let me know what you think!

Life at work, Software

We have just announced our new stickers store Wall2Wall Stickers.  Check it out, let me know what you think.  I would love to know if you see any glaring issues.

To date we have had modest traffic and a few purchases in only the first 3 days of making the site available – we’re optimistic about the site. We built it on the spree e-commerce platform and have made some fairly major changes, but all in all have been very happy with the platform and are very much looking forward to the latest from Spree Edge.

Life at work, Software spree

The ruby bindings for Gnome are really nice.  I’m amazed at how easy this was.

Sure it’s not Chrome, but not bad for an embedded browser.  Oh and check out how simple this is:

require 'webkit'
win = Gtk::Window.new
wv = Gtk::WebKit::WebView.new
win.add(wv)
win.show_all
wv.open('http://www.google.com/')
Gtk.main

Try it out!    The bindings are on github.

Software

I keep running into this when I need a httpdate.  Make sure to always require ‘time’

e.g.

Time.now.httpdate -> raises exception

and

require ‘time’

Time.now.httpdate ->Tue, 26 Jan 2010 22:10:45 GMT

Life at work

Our new business and our new website.  We build websites, market websites and make it easier for businesses to sell their goods online.

Check us out.  Let me know what you think of the design and anything else!

Life at work

While experimenting with canvas tag today I needed a good way to take a hex value and convert it to RGBA. I went searching and found some solutions, but nothing that really seemed complete. I wanted a single function that didn’t call eval or pollute the environment with globals… Maybe I could have looked harder but here is what I came up with.

I know hex values don’t include the alpha value in rgba – this function gets you the RGB values so you can mix in the alpha value.

Update:
Duncan posted this solution that is much better than mine!

Software

Here’s an example of why I really enjoy using curb. Curl::Multi.get interface is just so easy.

Software