Author Archives: lorien

Typus Custom Authentication

We really like Typus at Blazing Cloud, and we end up using it in most of our Ruby on Rails projects. It provides good enough UI for a lot of our data entry needs, and is very quick to set-up. We also use Devise for authentication, and frequently end up with both in the same [...]

Multiline document.write

I was just refactoring some HTML and needed to move some of my markup out of the HTML file and into a JavaScript method so I can re-use it in multiple HTML files. Using document.write, I didn’t want to put all of the HTML on one line, and also didn’t want to have to add [...]

SVG Scripting with JavaScript Part 1: Simple Circle

I recently embarked on the task of converting an interactive Flash widget to SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) and DHTML. The incentive for this project is primarily to make this widget work on the iPad which does not support the Flash player. SVG has been supported in all major browsers except for IE including mobile browsers [...]

What's weird about floats in objective-c?

Aright, what’s up with this? This code using a double works just fine: double myDouble = 2.2; NSLog(@"myDouble %f", myDouble); [self testDouble:myDouble]; - (void) testDouble:(double)myDouble { NSLog(@"testDouble %f", myDouble); } This code prints: myDouble 2.200000 testDouble 2.200000 No surprises there. But the same code using a float behaves very strangely: float myFloat = 3.3; NSLog(@"myFloat [...]

What’s weird about floats in objective-c?

Aright, what’s up with this? This code using a double works just fine: double myDouble = 2.2; NSLog(@"myDouble %f", myDouble); [self testDouble:myDouble]; - (void) testDouble:(double)myDouble { NSLog(@"testDouble %f", myDouble); } This code prints: myDouble 2.200000 testDouble 2.200000 No surprises there. But the same code using a float behaves very strangely: float myFloat = 3.3; NSLog(@"myFloat [...]

Finding Ada Through… Danielle Wheeler!

In Honor of Ada Lovelace Day I would like to highlight the hard work and accomplishments of Danielle Wheeler, a Software Engineer I had the pleasure of working with at Laszlo Systems. Danielle came to Laszlo straight out of college, and quickly became a key contributor to a large production code base. She picks up [...]

Test Driven Development for iPhone

UPDATE: Check out the project source code at: http://github.com/blazingcloud/iphone_logic_testing Here at Blazing Cloud we really like Test-Driven Development (TDD). We try to use it for all of our development projects, and we recently learned how to do it for IPhone development. The unit test tool available for Cocoa development is more like JUnit for Java [...]

How to include a block in a soap4r request

Here at Blazing Cloud we recently had to write some Ruby code to integrate with an external service via. SOAP. I cringed a little at the thought of working with SOAP, but I was pleased to find that the soap4r gem is fairly easy to use and works pretty well. Getting Started with SOAP4R is [...]

How to include a block in a soap4r request

Here at Blazing Cloud we recently had to write some Ruby code to integrate with an external service via. SOAP. I cringed a little at the thought of working with SOAP, but I was pleased to find that the soap4r gem is fairly easy to use and works pretty well. Getting Started with SOAP4R is [...]

Test Driven Development: Why it's awesome

I have been programming Ruby on Rails for about 3 months now, and have been following a fairly strict Test Driven Development (TDD) methodology using rspec for the duration of that time. Using TDD has been a great experience, and now that I’ve been doing it for a while I never want to go back [...]