The Ominous Badger

pow.js — Algorithmic sunburst generator

April 2nd, 2012

This post is extra special, because the background image is a canvas-generated sunburst.

Check out the live demo.

You can do a lot of clever stuff with canvas, CSS and data URIs. This only scratches the surface, I think. Canvas could potentially be used to generate CSS background images that would otherwise be too big to load over the network.

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Categories: Uncategorized. Tags: canvas, css, data uris, javascript, and jquery.

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Git adoption advice

March 31st, 2012

One of the things I like about git is how much shared git knowledge can be found on the web. The culture surrounding git adoption, on the other hand, is noisy. Mentions of git in tech circles unfailingly produce vigorous head-nodding, which may or may not be backed by actual understanding. Nobody wants to be seen as behind the times, and I don't blame them.

Notwithstanding its popularity among the 'cool kids,' however, we seem to live in a world of subversion experts trying to wrap their heads around git. Maybe that will change within a year or two, but my experience leads me to guess that right now, git adoption is a pain point for lots or teams.

If you're a git expert, do the world a favor. Don't be fooled by the vigorous head-nodding. Don't assume git is easy to make sense of the first or second or fifth time it's explained. Don't idealize git as a perfectly-designed, perfectly-intuitive tool. Git competence is hard-bought. Be willing to explain things over and over. Help your teammates understand git's underlying model, because only then will it not suck to use.

If you're a git newbie, also do the world a favor. Don't wait for someone to explain it to you, and don't float along with a minimal understanding. Read the manual, read all the tutorials you can find. If a tutorial doesn't make sense, stop and read a different one. Throw away everything you know about subversion, because it's useless. Most importantly, when your git repo gets "out of whack," don't just keep blasting ahead. Stop and ask teammates for help. Better sport a sheepish grin now than suffer the wrath of your whole team when their repos get into a bad state.

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Categories: Uncategorized.

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Death to pixels.

March 24th, 2012

As an experiment, the CSS for this site has been stripped of almost all references to the 'px' length unit. All dimensions are now purely relative to the viewport, rather than the native pixel grid. Resize your browser to see what I mean.

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Categories: Uncategorized.

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Internal vs. External Redirects in Hoxy

May 27th, 2011

Redirects are an example of something you'll probably want to do with Hoxy. Two plugins make this job a lot easier: @internal-redirect() and @external-redirect(). The difference between the two is that with external-redirect, the user sees the URL change in their browser's location bar, whereas with internal-redirect they don't.

#user sees the url change
request: if $aurl eq 'http://microsoft.com/', @external-redirect('http://yahoo.com/')
#user doesn't see the url change
request: if $aurl eq 'http://google.com/', @internal-redirect('http://apple.com/')

At the HTTP level, external-redirect just sets a 302 status with a Location: header, whereas internal-redirect fetches the content from the given URL and feeds it back to the browser as if it came from the original URL.

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Categories: hoxy. Tags: hoxy plugins, http, proxy, qa, server, staging, and test.

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The Hoxy Ghost Server

May 18th, 2011

Hoxy has a nifty plugin called @ghost-server(), which lets you serve files out of your own local filesystem, as if they'd been served from the destination server's. You accomplish this by mirroring parts of the destination server's document root in your own "ghost" root.

For example, suppose acme.com is a typical static file web server, with this tree under its docroot:

http://acme.com/
|-- index.html
|-- products/
|   |-- index.html
|   |-- anvils.html
|   |-- bombs.html
|   `-- ladders.html
`-- assets/
    |-- banner.jpg
    |-- acme.js
    `-- acme.css

Now suppose you want to browse acme.com, but using your own JS and CSS. So you create a folder locally called /home/wcoyote/acme.com which mirrors a subset of acme.com's docroot:

/home/wcoyote/acme.com/
`-- assets/
    |-- acme.js
    `-- acme.css

Then in your rules config you say:

request: if $hostname eq 'acme.com', @ghost-server('/home/wcoyote/acme.com')

Now you can reload acme.com and see your local JS and CSS changes as if they were live on that server. The way it works is, when ghost-server intercepts a request, it looks at the request path (ignoring the query string) and if that path exists and is readable locally, it serves that file instead of passing the request along to the destination server.

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Categories: hoxy. Tags: ghost-server, hoxy plugins, http, proxy, qa, server, staging, and test.

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