Most web applications require some form of user authentication. If you have ever developed a Ruby on Rails (RoR) application, it is likely that you have used an authentication gem such as Devise to handle user authentication. However, with the growing popularity of client-side MVC frameworks such as Ember.js, how... [Read More]

I feel like I have to re-learn dynamic linking in C about once a year, so I am documenting it here. The comments in the Makefile describe the process. Makefile: # these are variables CC=gcc CFLAGS=-Wall # label: dependency1 dependency2 ... dependencyN all: libhello main libhello: # -c means compile,... [Read More]

If you configure an XBee module to sleep for long duty cycles, it can be difficult to reconfigure it using X-CTU. The trick is to wait until the XBee asserts its clear to send (CTS) signal before entering command mode. Once in command mode, you can disable sleep mode. The... [Read More]

I recently added product categories to my website. I wanted to create a few top-level categories with some more specific sub-categories. I decided that a parent/child relationship would be suitable for this. First, I had to add a foreign key to the model for parent_id. I added a belongs_to relationship... [Read More]

Welcome to my simple web blog. It is powered by a tool called Jekyll which generates static websites. These static websites can be hosted on Amazon S3 or GitHub Pages for little to no cost. I am typing this blog post in a lightweight markup language called Markdown, which Jekyll... [Read More]