Archive for 2011

  • New look for Rambling Labs!

    December 30, 2011


    This post was originally published in the Rambling Labs Blog on December 30, 2011.


    As you may have noticed, our logo, our favicon, and our site and blog have a new look. We have added a pretty Home page, a cool Contact page and an informative About us page. Also, the blog has moved from it’s original location at the root of the ramblinglabs.com domain to ramblinglabs.com/blog. Every old blog post link and blog tag link has been taken care of and redirects to the new location.

    The site is gonna be used as our portfolio site, and will be our first thing to show to our customers. We plan to use it as the center of our developed products and projects. But, hey, don’t worry, we won’t stop blogging!

    How the site came to be for the first time…

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  • jQuery Rambling Slider v0.3.0 released!

    December 28, 2011


    This post was originally published in the Rambling Labs Blog on December 28, 2011.


    Version 0.3.0 of the jQuery Rambling Slider is out! Well… it’s been out for a while now (a couple of weeks), but I haven’t had the time to write the post for it :/. You can download it from GitHub.

    Basically added a lot of tests and some transitions. I also removed and/or changed some of the transitions, so I will be updating the documentation soon (wiki). This release includes these features and fixes:

    • Changed file combining order logic.
    • Migrated the styles to Sassy stylesheets.
    • Tweaked theme method to change it for all containers as well.
    • Fixed glitch on image to flash transitions.
    • Fixed 'this' is not a function issue for flash transitions.
    • Fixed slider…

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  • Using RVM within a cron job

    December 16, 2011


    This post was originally published in the Rambling Labs Blog on December 16, 2011.


    Long time no post! I’ve been really busy these days with some projects. Yet, here I am again, so here it goes.

    A couple of days ago, I started working on a big story in one of those projects I’m currently working on. It’s one of those things that needs to be run a couple of times a day… yeah, a scheduled background job.

    Basically, what it need to do is check some database records, check their expiration date against the current date, and take some actions for each one of the expired ones. Simple enough, right?

    I went ahead and wrote a rake task that would do the heavy work. Something like this:

    task :check_expired_records do
      Record.where('expired =…

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  • CoffeeScript: The '=>' operator

    December 16, 2011


    This post was originally published in the Rambling Labs Blog on December 16, 2011.


    As you may know, I’ve been playing around with CoffeeScript for a couple of months now.

    One of CoffeeScript’s jewels that I haven’t talked about yet and that I’ve been using lately on the jQuery Rambling Slider codebase, is the => operator. It is basically a custom function definition, which binds that function to the current context. That is, it ties the this value of the outer scope to the this value of the function being defined.

    How many times, writing JavaScript, have you done something like this:

    var outerFunctionWithCallback = function(options, callback) {
      /* Do something with options */
      callback();
    };
    
    var theFunction = function(){
      var self

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  • jQuery Rambling Slider v0.2.1 released!

    November 30, 2011


    This post was originally published in the Rambling Labs Blog on November 30, 2011.


    This one, as opposed to version 0.2.0 is mostly tests added, refactoring and one bug fix. Also, changed some parameters order to have a more consistent API, for the transition extensibility. You can download it from GitHub, browse the tags and read the project’s wiki for documentation.

    This release includes:

    • Fixed the flash flickering before initializing.
    • Added tests for ‘slideUpDownSlices’, ‘foldSlices’ and ‘fadeSlices’ (#6).
    • Added tests for ‘slideUpSlices’ and ‘slideDownSlices’.
    • Added tests for the ‘animateBoxes’ helper.
    • Added ‘sliceFade’ to the transition groups.
    • Changed the parameters order for the ‘animateSlices’ helper.
    • Added tests for the ‘animateSlices…

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  • Extending the jQuery Rambling Slider

    November 30, 2011


    This post was originally published in the Rambling Labs Blog on November 30, 2011.


    One of the core features added in version 0.2.0 of the jQuery Rambling Slider is the ability to customize the transitions between images, between flash elements and between an image and a flash element.

    As it is described in the Adding and Overriding Transitions page in the project’s wiki, in order to do this you have to something like this:

    $(window).load(function(){
      $('#slider').ramblingSlider({
        imageTransitions: {
          /* Add a 'fadeInSlices' transition */
          fadeInSlices: function() {
            /* ... */
          },
          /* Override the 'sliceUpRight' transition */
          sliceUpRight: function() {
            /* ... */
          }
          /* ... */

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  • jQuery Rambling Slider v0.2.0 is out!

    November 28, 2011


    This post was originally published in the Rambling Labs Blog on November 28, 2011.


    It’s been a long way to this one, but I’m proud to announce that version 0.2.0 of the jQuery Rambling Slider has been released!

    So far, the most stable release had been the version 0.1.2 and its patches. But I assure you that this is now the most stable one :).

    Be free to download it from GitHub and test it out.

    You can also browse the tags, and submit any issue or feature request to the project’s issues on GitHub.


    UPDATE For documentation on how to use, you can read the project’s wiki, which has been updated for these changes.


    This release includes:

    • Updated readme information.
    • Added support for jQuery 1.7.1.
    • Changed the ‘effect’ setter to return…

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  • Set up ssh public/private key for no password prompts

    November 23, 2011


    This post was originally published in the Rambling Labs Blog on November 23, 2011.


    It’s been a while since my last post. I’ve had a busy couple of weeks. But here I am again :).

    Last week, I was setting myself up for a couple of features that I have to add to a project. I had ssh access (which is a good thing), but I was getting tired of typing in my password each and everytime I tried to connect to the server. The solution to this is fairly simple.

    • First, be sure to have your public ssh key in hand or generate your own with:
    ssh-keygen -t rsa -C youremail@yourdomain.com
    

    Be sure to generate it with no passphrase (remember that our goal is never get prompted when connecting through ssh).

    • Then, on the server, make sure that there…

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  • IE and the flash "wmode" madness

    November 23, 2011


    This post was originally published in the Rambling Labs Blog on November 23, 2011.


    One of the reasons that didn’t allow me to release version 0.1.3 of the jQuery Rambilng Slider earlier this week was a really ugly bug with IE, flash and transitions from and image to a flash element and viceversa.

    The problem: There are some transitions on the slider that require an image (or several) to be on top of the flash, so that it fades out and reveals the flash. This works fine on Firefox and Chrome, but when the time arrived, it just didn’t work with IE.

    I did a lot of googling and the only thing that I found over and over again was to include a param tag inside the object tag, with a name of wmode and value of transparent or opaque and to add…

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  • jQuery Rambling Slider v0.1.3 is out!

    November 23, 2011


    This post was originally published in the Rambling Labs Blog on November 23, 2011.


    Yes, it took me a while, but the jQuery Rambling Slider v0.1.3 is out!

    You can download it from GitHub, test it out and report any issues you find. Go ahead and checkout all the tags.

    You can also see the project’s details on GitHub or read the project’s wiki.


    UPDATE 1 Unfortunately there was a critical bug with the links containing images/flash. But hey, it has been fixed already on v0.1.3 patch 1, available on GitHub.


    UPDATE 2 There was another ugly bug with the caption not showing. This has been fixed already on v0.1.3 patch 2, available on GitHub.

    END UPDATES


    The main functionality added includes flash support (find more about it on the wiki

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