Date: November 21, 2011

A Sinatra authentication example using sessions, BCrypt for password hashing with salts, and HAML templates. Demonstrates signup/login flow with in-memory user storage for prototyping, showcasing Sinatra's simplicity for building micro web apps suitable for hosting on platforms like Heroku.

Date: November 14, 2011

A guide to migrating SVN repositories to Git while preserving complete commit history. Uses git svn init and git svn fetch to import with all history, then git svn can be used to continue pushing back to SVN if needed, allowing gradual transition while maintaining compatibility.

Date: November 10, 2011

Ruby example using Amazon Web Services SDK to publish messages to Simple Notification Service topics. Demonstrates getting SNS interface, finding topic by ARN, and publishing messages which can be delivered as SMS or emails, perfect for form-based notifications in Ruby applications.

Date: November 02, 2011

Travel diary of anniversary trip with wife to London and Edinburgh. London highlights include Stonehenge, Doctor Who Experience, and Trafalgar Square. Edinburgh became a favorite destination featuring Royal Mile tours to Edinburgh Vaults and Mary King's Close, Edinburgh Castle with daily cannon firing, and Holyrood Palace with hike up Arthur's Seat. Noted iPad 2's suitability for travel.

Date: September 12, 2011

Introducing CoffeeScript as a cleaner pre-compiled JavaScript alternative inspired by functional programming talks at No Fluff Just Stuff. Shows how CoffeeScript's concise syntax transforms Project Euler 001 solution into elegant functional code with range comprehension and arrow functions, compiling to clean JavaScript output.

Date: September 05, 2011

Solving Project Euler problem 001 in multiple programming languages to maintain skills. The problem asks for sum of all multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000. Includes solutions in JavaScript (both original and ES6), Ruby, Groovy, and Python, with plans to add Clojure solutions for cross-language functional programming practice.

Date: August 24, 2011

An exploration of NoSQL databases as 'apophatic' term meaning databases without SQL interfaces. Compares document-oriented CouchDB and MongoDB, plus key-value Redis, with real-world adoption examples from major sites. Discusses MongoDB's BSON and sharding versus CouchDB's HTTP/RESTful API and replication, concluding with preference for CouchDB due to being 'built of the web'.

Date: July 13, 2011

Step-by-step installation guide for Scala, an object-oriented and functional programming language on the JVM. Covers downloading via curl or browser, verifying MD5 checksum, extracting with tar, moving to /usr/share, creating symbolic link for version management, updating .profile with SCALA_HOME and PATH, and verifying installation.