On the Floor

In a Mac environment, one of the favourite text editors for development is Textmate.  Some people around the office have migrated to Vim, but I'll let them address that in their own posts. I've been finding most of these shortcuts by accident. Read more...

One of my first challenges as a new developer here at factor[e] has been to create a Rails application that runs on an existing database which is also the back-end for another php-driven website.  Since Rails favours naming conventions in tables and keys this means a lot of translational code in the models.  However, following inspiration from slide 20 of this presentation, I solved this using conventionally named views on the MySQL database. Read more...

One of my other nerdly pursuits is playing and designing boardgames, and so naturally I found myself wondering the other day, "Can you make a hexagonal map purely in html and css? It turns out you can, of a sorts, though there are a few problems associated with it. Note:  I designed this using Chrome, and briefly looked at it in Firefox and Safari, but as for IE YMMV. Read more...