alex brie . net

I used to be a pathetic iPhone user with only a few tricks down my sleeve. Really now, I even hated listening to music on it, since I had to get it out of the pocket and unlock the screen every goddamn time I wanted to go to the next song.
However, all of these [...]

This is going to be brief one: iRead.ro, one of the projects I’m working on during my spare time, was giving me major headaches lately – 2 weeks ago, it took like 15 seconds to render a page. In the last couple of days, it was taking somewhere around 100 seconds to render it; obviously [...]

Am promis sa povestesc cum mi-am upgradat iPhone-ul de prima generatie, de la firmware 1.1.4 la 2.0 si cum l-am “jailbreak” ca sa-l pot folosi
Nu a fost deloc complicat, odata ce am trecut de temerile initiale.

Other blogs about Ruby or Rails have already touched some of the tips I’m going to show, but it never hurts to remind you these small recipes aimed at Ruby novices:

If, like me, you had been using Ultimate Warrior Tags (UTW) to assign Technorati-compatible tags to your article, then you must have been as annoyed as I was when upgrading to Wordpress 2.3.2 or Wordpress 2.3.3. All of the sudden, Wordpress acquired tagging capabilities but disabled UTW along the way.
Don’t get me wrong, I love [...]

Brief Enghlish version
Go create a Wordpress theme (I’d suggest a design for Sandbox, for instance), upload it to wordpress themes websites after having added your link in footer.php, then patiently wait for people to download and use it – easy Page Rank and Technorati Authority boost.
Longer Romanian version:
Stiu, nu dai doi bani pe autoritatea Technorati. [...]

Last time I discussed Ruby and metaprogramming, I was trying to stay DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) while coding some very similar-looking methods. The solution, then was to use class_eval to dynamically add methods into the current class, the way attr_accessor and it’s peers already do.
Today I was having a similar, yet more difficult problem: the [...]

I keep having the following problem when dealing with svn: I frequently find myself wanting to add to my own SVN repository stuff(javascript libraries, rails plugins) retrieved from some other svn repositories. The inevitable outcome of my bold attempt is that SVN starts complaining that the new folders can’t be submitted, that they already are [...]

Ruby is so powerful it scares me. I’m far from even grasping how powerful it is. Whenever I discover something cool to do with it, I have the urge to tell it to the world.
First, here’s the context:
I’m currently working my way through building a Rails browser game in the style of these ones. For [...]

I’ve started and (rather) successfully managed around 7 blogs until now. Each attempt has been a bit more successful than the previous one, each building on the shoulders of its predecessors. So, since nothing beats a little bulleted list, here they are – top ways to bring traffic to your freshly launched blog:

My assignment this week, as senior Ruby on Rails developer for TrexGlobal (an US startup with some cool online apps for real estate investors that help you save lots of dollars on your taxes) was to add tests for some of the controllers in place.
Yes, I know, we should have used TDD(Test Driven Development) [...]