It's been a few months since my last post around these parts. I've mostly been keeping busy with fitting into the whole West Coast lifestyle and, of course, busy at the job. Although I do miss New York City from

Well, after writing in my last post [http://www.dennmart.com/2010/01/26/no-rest-for-the-unemployed/] a month ago that I was officially unemployed, I was blessed with acquiring a new full-time job just four days later. Best of all, it's where I

After two years, yesterday was my final day of being a developer for BarterQuest [http://www.barterquest.com/]. As anyone living in expensive New York City in the same situation, I have been focusing part of my energy looking for a new gig. I&

As many other developers, I've been experimenting with the different "NoSQL" data stores. Most of them are really great, like Redis [http://code.google.com/p/redis/], Tokyo Cabinet [http://1978th.net/tokyocabinet/] and CouchDB [http://couchdb.apache.org/]. My

In my development blog [http://development.dennmart.com/2009/10/08/mongodb-and-mongomapper-the-future.html] , I previously wrote that MongoDB [http://www.mongodb.org/] was the future of database storage. I might reconsider my decision, now that I've discovered Redis [http://code.google.com/

Recently, I've been looked over two different job opportunities. That's nothing new, and nothing that will bring me down. However, the reasons behind why I was looked over annoyed me a lot. Apparently, these companies were looking for people from

Today I stumbled upon a site which shows how to create a 'magical' user registration form, using a little bit of CSS and jQuery [http://jquery.com/] magic. Go ahead, play around with it once [http://9lessons.net63.net/jquery_css.html]

It seems like the current hotness is Twitter [http://twitter.com/], with tons of publicity about how their growth in the past couple of months has been staggering. Of course, as with any other service on the Internet, with more awareness about the product,

I had some time to spare during the weekend, so I decided to have some fun with my MacBook Pro. Now, I've been more or less full-time Mac user for the past year (I use Ubuntu Linux [http://www.ubuntu.com/] from

Ever since I bought my MacBook Pro a few months ago, my poor ol' Mac Mini has been alone and lonely. I really didn't have much use for it, since I transferred all important work files to my new laptop. So

For the past few years, I've more or less kept the same RSS feeds in my reader for all that time - TechCrunch [http://www.techcrunch.com/], Signal Vs. Noise [http://www.37signals.com/svn/], Seth Godin's Blog [http://sethgodin.

Note: Unfortunately, due to some lack of time, plus a large amount of spam comments being targeted at that site, I decided to take it down. Hopefully in the near future I'll be able to continue this small side-project. I recently deployed

One of the not-so-joyous moments of being a web developer is the fact that we still need to support browsers that are ancient (by technological standards). Specifically, I'm talking about Internet Explorer 6.0. A quick look at the site statistics of

Yesterday morning, someone posted a comment on a post I wrote at the blog of the company I work for. This person, named 'Tom', said that our site was filled with lies, and that we had false advertising all over the place.

Today I had a pretty frustrating moment. I made some new changes in the morning, which included the addition of a new column in the database. This field wasn't required, but I needed to limit the amount of characters a user could

Today I noticed that whenever using some of the Prototype Helpers [http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Helpers/PrototypeHelper.html] in Rails (such as link_to_remote or remote_function), it was setting by default the evalScripts parameter to true. For those who don&

I just stumbled upon a script that MySQL includes nowadays called mysql_secure_installation [http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/mysql-secure-installation.html]. It runs a series of steps to remove some of the default installation options that MySQL installs, like an

On a recent Rails project, I was asked to verify if the visiting user's browser has cookies enabled, and display a message on top of the screen if they don't. While I don't want to get into the

I was having a quick tech discussion the other day on a non-tech message board I visit on a daily basis. I had mentioned how frustrating it is to have to spend hours developing for good ol' obsolete Internet Explorer 6.0, and

Yesterday afternoon, I had the urge to get a new Rails book, so I went to Amazon and ordered The Art Of Rails [http://www.wrox.com/WileyCDA/WroxTitle/The-Art-of-Rails.productCd-0470189487.html] . This post isn't about the book, but I'll

Last night I was in the mood to just review some of the stuff I already work with on a daily basis. I've been reading up on a lot of new stuff that I'm dying to play with, so a

I'm pretty damn excited by the long-awaited public launch of Dropbox [http://www.getdropbox.com/], an online file storage service. Well, it's more than that. It's a service that allows you to store, share and synchronize your files,