Techiness

I'll clump web design talk and gadget talk here, I guess.

  • On Life and Love

    Brain Twist: .NET MVC 3, Entity Framework 4.1, and TDD

    9/8/2011 /

    Talk about taking a large bite. In the interests of pushing my .NET knowledge, I began migrating the Geist character sheet project that I’d started in Django to .NET MVC 3. I hadn’t done MVC in .NET since MVC 1 was beta’d, but hey, MVC is MVC is MVC. Right? So in the interests of making things more interesting and more testable, I decided to dive into the Entity Framework 4. My beginning read of POJOs in Action, along with my previous experience with .netTears–I mean, .netTiers–had me generally familiar with the concepts of entities, contexts, and repositories. Kicker is, POJOs is just a book (and one I’ve barely dived…

    Read More
  • Uncategorized

    Tip o’ the Day: eTapestry and NuSOAP 0.9.5

    8/26/2011 /

    This is my first usage of NuSoap, and in crafting up my current eTapesty API integration project, I kept getting the following WSDL error: wsdl error: XML error parsing WSDL from https://sna.etapestry.com/v2messaging/service?WSDL on line 1: Not well-formed (invalid token)

    Read More
  • On Life and Love

    Chewing on Granny Squares

    7/15/2011 /

    My knitting colleague E. made the (arguably) goofy decision to refresh her crocheting skills by taking on a granny squares blanket. It’s a great idea for using up a ton of scrap yarn. It’s not a great idea if you enjoyed the level of sanity you had when you started. She quickly ran into the classic self-randomizing problem: given 20 different colored yarns of different weights, how do you put 3 different ones in each square while trying to keep the colors as random as possible? Sounds easy enough, but after 15 or so squares, it gets tricky. If you’re aiming for randomization, the last thing you want is a…

    Read More
  • On Life and Love

    Deployment Automation with Fabric: Bee’s Knees

    4/4/2011 /

    One immensely valuable thing I learned at Skookum was the value of automated deployments. I worked with a gent who took the time to work up Capistrano scripts for each staging and production environment of the whale of a project I worked with him on. I appreciated it during development, but I didn’t appreciate it until we were deploying single tweaks out to production on Amazon EC2 in rapid cycles. I haven’t worked with EC2 since then (second half of 2009), but let me tell you, deployments were for the birds. With his scripts though: run the script, enter your SSH or git password(s) a few times, and you have…

    Read More