Choosing client-side or server-side Google geocoding affects quota usage, especially in cloud hosting where shared IPs can exhaust fixed daily limits.

Mobile browsers ignore autoplay on <audio> and <video>; playback usually requires a user gesture, but an initial tap can unlock further sounds on the same element.

Out-of-band work lets long-running tasks run outside the request/response cycle without blocking clients, reducing request latency and avoiding garbage-collection pauses.

Color theme files for RubyMine, Sublime Text 2 and other editors; install by copying intellij-themes/*.xml into ~/.RubyMine40/config/colors and restarting RubyMine.

syslogd can report “no such file” for an existing log file when /etc/syslog.conf contains trailing whitespace or spaces; Solaris requires TAB separators.

System Ruby can interfere when switching between projects that use RVM; setting a default Ruby version makes RVM ignore the system installation for everyday use.

Run a Capistrano command across every known deploy target, including staging and production, with geordi cap or geordi capistrano shortcuts.

Authenticated pages can be benchmarked with ab by supplying the right session cookies; otherwise login-protected requests fail or measure the wrong content.

Determining usable horizontal width on mobile is unreliable because device pixels, CSS pixels, and orientation differ across platforms. effectiveDeviceWidth() normalizes screen size with window.orientation and devicePixelRatio.

Temporary Git changes are hard to identify when stashed frequently; git stash save lets you label them with a custom message.

Tempfile may absorb a supplied extension into its generated name, leaving the file without the expected suffix. Passing the basename and extension as an array preserves the extension.

Socket.gethostname returns the current machine’s hostname in Rails or Ruby; hostname is a fallback on Unix-like systems, but may include trailing newline or FQDN.

Consul avoids unnecessary queries when a power selects all records, speeding up permission checks for admins. power can now define multiple powers in one block.

MySQL FULLTEXT tokenization is hard to tune and can split terms unexpectedly, such as at periods. Normalizing input or moving to Solr can avoid parser limitations.

A gem can break on newer Rake versions when it calls desc on Rake::Task; upgrading the gem or pinning rake to 0.8.7 avoids the error.

Rails with recent Rack versions can emit a session cookie security warning when no secret is configured; locking Rack to 1.4.1 works around the issue.

Make Mac apps enter full screen from bash scripts by calling a small helper script; requires Accessibility access and only works with apps that support full screen.

Calculates CSS selector specificity for a given selector, helping diagnose why one rule overrides another in the cascade.

will_paginate can page plain Ruby arrays, returning a paginated array-like object with total_entries and the same pagination controls as ActiveRecord scopes.

Font Awesome 3.0 adds 40 new icons, CSS animation-based spinning, and a smaller file size; the font can be subset to include only needed icons.

Preparing an existing Rails app for Rails 4 involves updating deprecated APIs, dependencies, and configuration before upgrading the framework.

A cozy place to find a short, catchy name for a product, company, or domain.

Ruby on Rails 4 adoption will require updates for many web applications. A 31-day series prepares developers for a smoother upgrade.