Entries by Dan
I like to listen to records. I also like to listen to my records when I code. So recently, I said to myself, “How can I easily pipe audio between rooms in my house using my network and open source software?” The answer: FFmpeg! For the unfamiliar, FFmpeg is a complete, cross-platform solution to record, [...]
So you want to authenticate users using the Github API on your next Ruby and Rails project? Using Omniauth this is very easy to accomplish, however I set out to make it even easier by building a Rails skeleton for just this task! First thing you want to do is create a new application on [...]
Django leverages Python’s ability to use decorators extensively. Decorators in Python are defined as: A Python decorator is a specific change to the Python syntax that allows us to more conveniently alter functions and methods. In layman’s terms, decorators allow us to dynamically alter functions without having to actually change the function itself. Sounds pretty [...]
If you are unfamiliar with HipChat, its a persistent chat room used for team collaboration. With its abundance of features, one that stands out is the ability to utilize the HipChat API to send notifications messages to your team rooms. Notifications are great for letting everyone on your team know an event of significance has [...]
I’ve always had a fascination with Vim. For the unfamiliar, Vim is a text editor that disowns the mouse and challenges the user to put those 8th grade typing classes to good use. That’s right folks, you are now doing life on home row! My fascination with Vim started back in college during my experimentation [...]
The Twitter API utilizes a 3-legged OAuth authentication process where an authenticated Twitter user can authorize a Twitter-based application to interact with their account and data. This is useful for applications that desire this ability, however what about a Twitter application that doesn’t care about other users and just wants to get down and dirty [...]
UPDATE (02/08/2013): Facebook has deprecated the offline_access token, so this method no longer works! See this post on Stack Overflow to learn how to extend an access token to 60 days. I’ve been working on a few scripts that performed some minor data collection using the Facebook Graph API as a data source. Ideally, I [...]
I recently upgraded one of my laptops to Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal” and I have had the pleasure opportunity to explore the new Unity user interface for GNOME. Immediately I was annoyed when I noticed that my keyboard shortcuts for switching workspaces (ALT+F1, ALT+F2, etc) were defaulted to several dedicated commands in the Unity shell. [...]
Batman relied heavy on his tool belt whenever he was in a pinch. So should you! Below is a list of some tools that I’ve found very useful when working on projects: toggl – Time tracking that works. Free and paid options available. Bitnami – Wide array of development stacks (think LAMP/WAMP) that are a [...]
Searching for files using find on the command line is a powerful tool that most developers should be familiar with. Searching for strings inside files using grep can be even more useful for developers, especially if you are working in a unfamiliar code base. While both these commands are great to use individually, they really [...]
I just recently finished up a project at work that required float-point number comparison and initially stumbled into the float-point comparison pitfall displayed below: if (float_a == float_b) // compare evaluates true. else // compare evaluates false. Of course, my team lead quickly pointed out my mistake while reviewing my code and I promptly smacked [...]
Welcome to Operator Error! I learn a lot of random things everyday between my job and my personal interests. I figured a blog would be a good place for me to capture these learnings and then in turn, share them with the world. That being said, I have no actual focus for what topics this [...]
