• Uncategorized

    Tip o’ the Day: eTapestry and NuSOAP 0.9.5

    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)

  • On Life and Love

    Chewing on Granny Squares

    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…

  • On Life and Love

    Weekly Linkage: The Long Edition

    At some point in the last 2 weeks, I had 0 unread items in Google Reader. It was a short-lived, joyous experience, but this is the result of my web branching: HCG Diet Dangers: Is Fast Weight Loss Worth the Risk? – MSN Health & Fitness – Healthy Living – "But the so-called hCG diet is either a weight-loss miracle or a dangerous fraud, depending on who's talking. The plan combines drops or injections of hCG, a pregnancy hormone, with just 500 calories a day." I don't even have words for how stupid this sounds. And how unhealthy. "Yeah, I'm going to shoot up with a hormone and engage in…

  • On Life and Love

    Deployment Automation with Fabric: Bee’s Knees

    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…

  • On Life and Love

    Weekly Linkage: Web Work Everywhere!

    This week’s internet cruising: A reason to UI test, or “How to fill in the gaps” – "My stance: We unit test the ever-living raccoons out of the app now (thanks in no small part to Jukito). And we do have a UI testing process that was used for major features. While I agreed that we should have more, I was leery that it would make us any more productive. And I doubted it would help us discover any more issues than we already were…" Guide to CSS support in email clients – Articles & Tips … – A nice set of tables covering CSS support in various email clients.…