What are Google’s plans for turning WebM into a genuinely open standard, one that is based on consensus like the rest of W3C’s HTML5 effort? Would Google fully support such an effort? Even the WebM project’s domain is controlled by Google. Google chose to release WebM under the Creative Commons license which would theoretically allow a standards body to use the specification as a basis for a truly open standard. Would Google agree to adopt the specification and changes that would emerge from an open process in a timely and robust manner? Wha...

Protect files with AES-256 encryption via openssl enc, using a long passphrase file and secure deletion to limit recovery of the original data.

rm leaves file data recoverable; shred overwrites files before deletion, while wipe handles directories. Flash storage still needs disk encryption for reliable erasure.

A Rails 2.3.10 to 2.3.11 upgrade can reduce maintenance risk and keep an older application on a supported patch level.

dumple creates a database dump from a project directory on local machines or application servers, including deployment-time use.

XML files can fail schema checks silently in Ruby; Nokogiri validates documents against XSD and returns syntax errors for reporting.

Sometimes you want to run a command forever, e.g. to compile a haml to html file on the console. Use this:

$ while(true) do haml index.haml index.html; sleep 1.5; done

Cucumber can fail with little or no visible error output; a backtrace, verbose formatter, or debug mode can expose the underlying cause.

Bulk file renaming on Linux is error-prone with shell wildcards; Perl rename can change extensions or strip filename prefixes in one command.

Run database migrations during deployment with cap deploy:migrations to restart an application after schema changes, but task hooks can make the sequence unsafe.

In order to bring up a textual description of a Capistrano task you can say

cap -e taskname

... where taskname is the name of the task you're not sure about.

Hiding the default Flash video player's controls keeps the skin from staying visible during playback. Set skinAutoHide to true in the component inspector.

Cucumber steps can verify that a form select contains or excludes a specific option, without checking the currently selected value.

If you run specs or your application and get an error like:
ActionController::MissingFile in 'ProductsController#show, should render PDF'
Cannot read file /some/file.pdf

You may be missing the HTMLDOC binary on your system. Install it like this on Debian/Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install htmldoc

Get the Linux distribution name and version from release files with a single command.

Javascript that implements client-side hyphenation of HTML-Documents.

When you try to remove a non-existing index using remove_index, the migration will incorrectly pass without an error. The schema will not be changed, but the migration will be considered migrated.

Since this might be fixed in the future, you cannot mend your database by adding another migration on top of the faulty one. You should manually alter the database schema to the previous migration on all machines that migrated the faulty migration (inform your fellow developers), then delete the faulty migration from the repository.

Networked message queues often encourage overengineered systems and operational headaches, adding latency, hidden complexity, and 4AM incidents instead of solving communication problems.

Firebug Lite brings Firebug-style DOM inspection to Internet Explorer and other browsers, including older IE versions, using a JavaScript bookmarklet.

The idea is this: you take a job that you'd rather not do manually, and describe it to babushka using its DSL. The way it works, babushka not only knows how to accomplish each part of the job, it also knows how to check if each part is already done. You're teaching babushka to achieve an end goal with whatever runtime conditions you throw at it, not just to perform the task that would get you there from the very start.

jQuery plugin to register callback functions to keyboard shortkuts. Keyboard events in vanilla Javascripts are super-painful to work with, so hopefully this library can help.

The difference between .bind(), .live(), and .delegate() is not always apparent. Having a clear understanding of all the differences, though, will help us write more concise code and prevent bugs from popping up in our interactive applications.

Need access to only a few methods from another module without exposing them all; module_function makes selected methods callable externally while keeping the rest private.

Ruby arrays can be split into fixed-size groups or a chosen number of groups with ActiveSupport, padding or omitting leftovers as needed.