James Riley

Ruby, Javascript and Friends. Part of the Snapppt team. Living a life of learning. Join me.

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2017

Apache 2 - A dance with Slowloris

This blog post kicks off a series of ‘war stories’ that I’ll be sharing, where I’ll be covering my thought-process on tackling interesting issues - in a bid ...

You are not a robot

“it’s dangerous to go alone, take this…”

2016

Day 39 - I guess it suggests I'm having fun

Wow the days have flown past, almost as quick as the guilt has grown for not blogging. I had tonsillitis about a week back, which knocked me out for a few da...

Day 20 - I came, I saw, I understood... nothing

Today was somewhat of a breakthrough, all triggered by the generous actions of a cousin-in-law (whom I shall refer to as cousin going forward). As stated pre...

Day 17 - Now, Repeat After Me

Got caught up with life over the past few days, but have kept to a regular daily Anki review. This will be a short update, but I’m still on the case, and ser...

Day 10 - Look Ma... no hands!

I heard the rumours. I go a few days without an update and the streets start talking. They say I gave up. They say the flame fizzled out. They were wrong. Al...

Day 6 - All Good Things

All good things do not come to those who wait. They come to those who put work in. A busy weekend meant little in the way of study, but with the MangoLanguag...

Day 3 - Handy Anki

Have told nearly everyone I come across of my plans to learn Malayalam - with many pulling the same expression that I remember seeing when telling people as ...

Day 2 - Please Be Seated For Departure

The ship is departing from the dock, rocking precariously as it stabilises itself upon the water. Basically the learning is underway!… and I’m pretty reassur...

Day 1 - The Malayalam Ambition

I’m visiting the seemingly beautiful Indian state of Kerala in a few short months from now - and I’ve decided I’m going to have a go at learning the language...

My favourite Web Dev tools of 2015

One of my favourite aspects to meeting fellow developers is having a rummage through their toolbox - discovering the tools they use, the workflow they follow...

2012

Simple Google Maps Example with Coffeescript and jQuery

I’m working with the latest version of the Google Maps API (V3) and the demo in the developers guide guide screams out for a dose of Coffeescript and jQuery....

Easy toggle fade with fadeToggle()

The jQuery toggle() function is great for easily switching an element to hidden or not. Today I was working on something where I wanted to toggle with a fade...

Pow Server for Rails Applications

Many Rails developers have many apps and think nothing of switching between them as necessary with the trusty rails server command. Each morning cosists of t...

Ruby Koans Scoring Project

Ruby Koans has sat on my todo list for almost as long as I’ve been a Ruby developer and this week I’ve finally taken it upon myself to tackle it. Expectedly,...

Settle for excellence

Today was spent away from my desk, but I was reminded of a great quote by George S. Patton, an American officer during World War 2. Now, I can’t vouch for hi...

Haml helpers Succeed and Preceed

With Haml, placing a full-stop or comma immediately after a link, for example, can be confusing. Sure, we have the whitespace removal functionaliy removal th...

Geolocation for Amazon Link Localising

This post starts a 30 days experiment. I’m not alone in starting a blog with every intention of keeping consistent, only to find weeks fly past without so mu...

2011

Easy HTML Table Pagination and Sorting with DataTables

DataTables is a powerful jQuery plugin that easily turns a standard HTML table into one that is sortable, paginatable, searchable and highly customisable. Ha...

Solution for osx lions wi-fi problems

My story is like many others out there: Having purchased a new Mac in the last few weeks, arriving pre-installed with Lion, I had a few days of bliss before ...

Nginx Error: no such file to load -- rack/commonlogger

Despite a lack of experience with server administration, I jumped in the deep end this week by grabbing a VPS from slicehost. With it, you start from scratch...

Mac hanging at grey screen after deleting lib files

Is your Mac failing to boot past the grey screen, thanks to deleting some important system files? The example below is specific, but the general method to re...