As web designers or developers, we likely all have to write our fair share of HTML. And while this is not the most difficult task, it can often feel a little boring or repetitive. HTML is also static, which means that if you want to display dynamic data (fetched from an API, for example), you invariably end up with a mishmash of HTML stings inside JavaScript. This can be a nightmare to debug and to maintain.
I have an old Sony XPeria S phone (from 2012) which has long since been abandoned by my carrier. It no longer receives any updates and is stuck on Android 4.2, which kinda sucks….
So I decided to take matters into my own hands and get an up-to-date version of Android, by flashing the phone with a custom ROM. While this didn’t prove to be that difficult, I did hit a few stumbling blocks along the way, which I wanted to document.
This post will serve two purposes. Firstly, it will provide detailed instructions on how to install a custom ROM on an Xperia S. Secondly, it will also outline the general process of flashing an old Android phone and offer a high-level overview of the concepts involved.
Inspecting the Apache error logs informed me that a segmentation fault had occurred and that I may have encountered a bug in the Ruby interpreter. This was accompanied by a 5,000 line stack trace.
In the following quick tip, I’m going to show you how to open a modal window on a web page after a short time deay. This might be useful to highlight a particular call to action, such as signing up for a newsletter or for getting likes on Facebook. Some sites also use this technique to display advertising.
This quick tip describes how to have your browser remember the state of checkboxes once a page has been refreshed or a user navigates away from your site to come back at a later date.
It might be useful to persist checkbox checked state if, for example, you use checkboxes to allow your users to set site-specific preferences, such as opening external links in a new window or hiding certain page elements.
Running Apache on my local machine helps me speed up my web development work. It means that I can use root-relative urls, server-side programming languages (such as PHP) and interface with a database — all without having to upload anything via FTP.
The only problem comes when you are working on multiple projects at the same time. If you create different directories for different projects within your web root (which defaults to /var/www/html), then the root-relative urls will break, as will any server-side includes you are using.
This is where virtual hosts come in. They allow you to create a separate domain for each of your projects, such as http://project1/ and http://project2/.
I’ve spent all day trying to get Devise and nested attributes to play nicely together. This and giving the user the ability to update parts of their profile without providing a password proved kind of tricky. Here’s how I got things working.
Last year I wrote about installing rbenv on Linux Mint 16. Back then the installation process as described on the project’s Github page didn’t work for me and, after much frustration, I ended up installing an older version of rbenv from the repositories.
Recently, I had to reinstall my operating system (upgrading to Mint 17.1) and decided to give the rbenv installation process another try. I’m happy to say that it worked entirely as expected and within a matter of minutes I had two Ruby versions installed on my system and could switch between them at will.
Rails is database agnostic, meaning that it can talk to different databases with little more than a couple of configuration changes. Here’s how to install PostgreSQL on Linux Mint 16 and configure it for use with Rails.
