Sup Internet, I'm Lance Ennen you can contact me here.
I blog here, and you can find my resume here.
I'm on GitHub and Twitter.
My main interests right now are Ruby, Rails, BDD, CoffeeScript, Sass, and Haml.

This blog has moved

http://lanceennen.com/blog

BuiltInChicago aims to sprout more Groupons

I’m currently helping builtinchicago.org, which is a Social Networking site for the tech community here in Chicago. I will soon have more to report about the work I’m doing, but for now check out this article in Sun Times. BuiltInChicago aims to sprout more Groupons

Obtiva Geekfest - Real-time view of server traffic and events using OpenGL and SSH - By. Bodaniel Jeanes

Bo, demos a real-time visualization of server traffic to Obtiva’s geekfest using his 2010 rails rumble project: desksnear.me

Obtiva Geekfest - Programming for business users - By. Brain Marick

Awesome interactive role-playing explanation of programming for business users by Brain Marick. See it yourself at the upcoming Agile2010 conf! I filmed this with my iPhone 4, and clipped it together using iMovie on my iPhone.

Obtiva Geekfest - Programming for business users - By. Brain Marick from Lance Ennen on Vimeo.

GrouponCon

This past weekend, I went to grouponcon which was an Open Space format conference for groupon and obtiva. At 9:30am, we began our Open Space facilitation and determined the direction for the day. 

The first talk was a career retrospective of the man: Ward Cunningham. We discussed hypercard, which was his inspiration for wiki. Signature survey where Ward Cunningham talks about writing throw away scripts, and learning by reading the signature of the script. Fit, and finished with a quote by Ward Cunningham ”work effectively on the right thing in a visible way”. 

Next we discussed scaling groupon the issues discussed were traffic spikes, high volume requests, expenses requests on card authorization, and collections. We focused on card authorization issues, and came up with ideas to pre-authorize good standing customers, based on number of purchases on there credit card. Tools were discussed such as Memcached, fragment caching, REE, upgrading mysql, LRU.Query cache, CDN, resque, upgrading hardware, cache render views, sphinx, profiling benchmarking.

After lunch I joined Matt Puchlerz for an HTML5 discussion. Matt suggested, if you haven’t read Dive into HTML5 that you start. He also pointed out html5shiv which makes IE recognize HTML5 elements. Matt, showed off Blowing up HTML5 video and mapping it into 3D space. This really showed off the power of HTML5. We finished the discussion with westciv and discussing 3D transforming in webkit.

I finished the day up with a discussion on how groupon used Mustache to develop a new secret beta version of groupon that everyone will soon have. Very cool!

Thanks to everyone at Groupon for having me!

Passenger, VMWare, and Windows for testing sites

I’ve been using Passenger for my Rails projects for the past year. When it comes to testing my Rails apps for browser compatibility I like to use crossover for ie6 (on OSX), and Windows 7 for ie7 and ie8 using Internet Explorers Developer Tools. I run Windows 7 using VMWare.

When I need to test an app that’s using Passenger in VMWare in the past I’ve updated my hosts file (/Windows/system32/drivers/etc/hosts) with my current IP address. This has become a pain, and time consuming.

The solution since we can not use 127.0.0.1 for a hostname. Run this command in your Terminal “ifconfig vmnet8” and grab the ip address next to inet. Take this ip address and update your hosts file on your Windows VM. Don’t forget to copy your hosts file from your Mac to the Windows hosts file.

Fixing Select Drop down issues in IE using jQuery

Firefox does auto width on data in select drop downs automatically, but IE doesn’t. This is a quick example of how you can use jQuery to fix this width issue, and allow your web visitors access to all the data in your drop downs the same in all browsers.

You can either use the input name, ID, or class. In this example I’m assuming you have an input name on your select field.

Resetting a cycle tag in Jinja

At my current client I’m working on a platform that uses Django, and a templating system called Jinja.

I had to use Jinja to change the CSS class to modify the background color for each dynamic data returned in each loop.

This seems straight forward after looking at Jinja’s documentation using the cycle tag.

So, the code looked like this:

and then the class in each loop look like this:

Each loop… that’s when I ran into an issue. We had more than one loop on one page, but we needed to have the class change, and increment by 1.

It was incrementing by 1, but not resetting after each loop. So, if 3 were in the first loop the next loop would start with 4, and not reset until after 5.

So, here is an example of resetting a cycle tag in Jinja:

By calling the cycle and using .reset() this returns none, and resets the cycle.

You will noticed I have commented out {{ row_class.reset() }} without comment tags this will render “None”. So, the hack is to just comment this out.

99 beers on the wall! FOR FUN!!!

Custom form with Validations using Rspec and Story Runner

This is a custom Contact form with Validations without ActiveRecord. This works nicely without the use of the database or ActiveRecord model. It’s quite easy with a gem called Validatable.