Credit card data read from magnetic swipe card readers can be parsed using PHP’s preg_match and regular expressions. Learn how in this tutorial.
10 Steps to Capistrano and Plesk Subdomains Deployment
Plesk and Capistrano for subdomains is easily handled in this 10 step setup tutorial.
RailsConf Retrospectives, Part 1: Testing
The Thunder Data dev team was represented at this year’s RailsConf in Las Vegas, and we learned quite a bit. We’re starting a series of RailsConf Retrospectives to delve into some of the topics covered at the conference. Testing One of the most pervasive themes at RailsConf was that of…
Show Something Useful
As a developer, it’s easy to get buried in code and forget how people actually use what I’m writing. An interface element or workflow that seems intuitive to me can often lead to confusion and frustration in the casual visitor. If I want to transform my code into an application,…
Catch-all Routes in Rails
On one of our projects we were porting over a legacy application written in PHP to Rails. A lot of the application’s users accessed the site with bookmarked pages. So we wanted to redirect users when we saw specific words like “buy” or “.php”, so customers were not left staring…
Use CSS to Mark Fields as Required
Curious on how the pros handle marking required fields on their forms? Wonder no more! Below I’ll describe a technique I employ on my own forms to make marking required fields a simple and straight-forward process. I will assume you have at least a basic working understanding of CSS, but…
Testing, shmesting, who needs it?
Now that I’ve been here for a couple months, I guess it is time to post a blog, but about what? Since, in large part, testing is new to me, (and an important part of developing Thundertix) I thought I’d start there. So read on if you want to hear…
Feeling Lucky
Nicholas writes clean, elegant code. Paul contributes beautifully to interface interaction. Scott is a master of programming languages, and Manish and Manasi possess an enviable stick-to-itiveness attitude. Then there’s me. Fumbling as I am in learning Rails and attempting to pick up Scott’s reigns, I realize that I have been…
no left turn
Today was an interesting day for debugging. We’ve developed a flash application for a client that didn’t quite work right in IE6. Today the client called and said this is really going to be a problem as most of the people who will be using the application haven’t upgraded to…