Dennis's Corner of the Internet

I've been noticing a trend about programming news on social bookmarking sites like Digg and DZone lately. There are a lot of posts floating around indicating the so-called "warning signs" of imminent software project failure. There are even posts with titles like

One of the reasons I went exploring into Rails was because of Capistrano, a utility that greatly helps deploying Rails sites into production servers, by automating many of the tedious setup steps needed to deploy new changes into production. I know I can't be

You Americans (and British, Australians and any other English speakers) have it easy. When you need to create a web application, all you need to use for your text is the basic English alphabet, only 26 different characters and 10 digits. The rest of

Following my small rant yesterday about not logging enough programming time, I cleared my schedule completely this afternoon and evening (with a rest or two to catch the awesome G4 show Code Monkeys) to catch up with some things. It also didn't hurt that

Well, it's been week two with my nice little VPS, and it's working like a charm. I'm loving this system. I've been playing around with it, tweaking it to squeeze a bit more out of the limited RAM I have, or just to learn

If you've been to this site before, you'll notice a whole lot has changed since the past week. I decided to make some changes, not only to the site, but to the entire architecture running the site as well. The first major change I

I'm sure most of us have had that 'special' kind of boss. You know, those who don't listen to you, who only think their ideas are the correct ones, who under-estimate your knowledge over their "infinite wisdom". I'm sure we've all had

During these past months, as I've been learning Rails and getting my feet more and more wet with all the integrated AJAX goodness that's inside Rails, I've found it increasingly frustrating to debug erroneous AJAX code. With regular web development, most of the times

It's been ages since I last updated this blog. I've been pretty busy for the past month or so, ut it's due to something that I didn't want to do in the first place. Let me tell you a quick story about it. Earlier

A couple of weeks ago, I purchased the book "Dreaming In Code" by Scott Rosenberg, after spotting it in my nearest Borders bookstore. I had read a bit about this book from Joel Spolsky's site, and I was very interested in the

It's certainly been a very interesting week for me. First, I was infected with the dreaded Pink Eye early last week, which prompted me to stay indoors from Tuesday to Friday. I finally got completely cured on Sunday night. Too bad it was just

Before starting this post, I want to thank whoever posted my previous post about using the Digg API with Ruby and Rails to dzone. It recently made their front page, and a good amount of traffic headed this way. I hope someone found a

Note: This site has changed a lot over the last year. I'm not using Rails anymore on the site, so there's no place where I'm currently using the Digg API. However, I'll leave this post intact, as it might help others with something similar.

Well, it's been a while since I last posted. Maybe it was due to the fact that I received so many damn spam comments that Akismet seemingly didn't block. I'll look into that when I have some free time to check it out. For

I set up a small server using some spare parts at my apartment, which I leave up and running 24/7. I connect to that server via the small router I have (only opening the ports I want to have open, obviously) whenever I'm

A couple of weeks ago, CodingHorror (an awesome and wildly popular blog) wrote about the fact that programmers can't program. Like I mentioned in my previous post, this can't be any more true. But in reality, I think this is more of an issue

I'm currently at work, and I seriously needed a break, which is why I'm here, writing something for my blog. Why? It's a long story, but I'll keep it short. My boss decided to start using part of our program that hasn't been modified

Note: I noticed that this is the most-viewed in all my blog, thanks to this appearing in Google search results when people search for "Puerto Rican Porn". Sadly to say, there is absolutely no porn on this site, so if that was

I finally finished the minor remodeling of my personal page, as I transferred the old, plain HTML files to Ruby on Rails. It didn't take too long, since the site is all static (for the time being). Just in case you're wondering, I moved

A new version of Wordpress, the awesome blogging software used to power this very blog (and millions more out there, as well) is out!. It's actually just a bug-fix release, but it's still news, isn't it? This will be a quickie post, just to

I just read this comic and found it hilariously funny. While this comic depicts a database administrator, this could very well be any single part of the IT chain. Programmers can say they haven't done a module, architects can say they haven't designed a

I recently came across this blog post, where someone compared various implementations of Ruby, specifically to check the speed of each. When I read this post, I wasn't surprised at the results. I was totally surprised at how many different Ruby implementations there are.

I've been learning Rails with great success these past two weeks. I've learned so many things during this period, much more than I've learned in a similar time frame for other languages / technologies. While there is still much, much more to learn (and memorize)

Last year, after a friend of mine lent me here Macbook for a week (I want one for myself so bad!), I discovered the most amazing programming software I had ever found, called TextMate. I'm sure many of you have heard about this program.

It's been a while since I last used any Linux operating system full-time in my own computer. Back when I was in college and still had tons of free time, I would always try to get the latest and great Linux distribution just to