'Best Advice'

https://www.linkedin.com/channels/best_advice?trk=prod-inf-bestadvice-0225-cutline
http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140224234557-269697626-best-advice-this-poem-tells-you-everything-you-need-to-live

Ruby: decorators, modules

http://kresimirbojcic.com/2011/12/01/decorators-in-ruby.html

Computer Programming in 5 minutes & Tiny-Robots

I have wondered several times how I would introduce 'programming' to someone who has never done it, not even a little bit.

Below is Larry Wall's take on it. He is the creator of Perl programming language.



The rest of this post is based on an idea from the above video - the idea of robots being at your disposal to do certain tasks.

We can probably explain programming-constructs, by :

• asking the student to imagine that each programming-construct is actually a tiny-robot. So, for e.g., a for-loop, is actually a tiny-robot that is capable of just doing a 'loop'. Similarly, we can imagine a if-then-else tiny-robot, print-to-screen tiny-robot, etc
• Notice that I modified 'robots' to 'tiny robots' so as to convey the idea/feeling that a tiny-robot can do a 'tiny' task
• This idea might work because everyone knows that robots need to be instructed what to do i.e. robots need to be given 'commands'.
• And it is also easy to add that the commands have to be very specific, otherwise the robot will not understand what to do. We would have introduced concept of 'syntax' by doing that.

And that is probably half the battle won right at the start.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
More complex point that can be introduced after a couple of programs -

• We can ask the tiny-robots to give commands to each other. 

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Example:

PROBLEM:
Print numbers 1 to 100 on screen

TINY-ROBOTS AT YOUR DISPOSAL:
1. LOOP tiny-robot
2. PRINT-TO-SCREEN tiny-robot

Info about the LOOP tiny-robot -
obviously since it is a robot, we have to tell it exactly how many times it has to loop;
once we give tiny-robot this number, it stores it and starts looping; it keeps track of how many loops it has completed, how many are remaining, etc; the LOOP tiny-robot is quite smart in this aspect.

Info about PRINT-TO-SCREEN tiny-robot - 
this tiny-robot does nothing but print to screen whatever you give it.

SOLUTION:
Instructions from us (programmer) to the tiny-robots will be:
"LOOP tiny robot -  please loop 100 times"
"During each loop, since you keep track of how many loops you have already done, give that number to the PRINT-ON-SCREEN tiny-robot, and ask it to print that number on screen.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(In the above example, I have tried to tackle the 'loop' construct, which is a slightly advanced concept for an absolute beginner.
Have to try and add IF-THEN-ELSE construct example;
If idea seems good, perhaps, I will try to create examples for all the main programming-constructs.
In the worst-case, it can be a good way for me to try out while trying to understand new concepts)

Google Hangout for Remote Workers

http://singlebrook.com/blog/google-hangouts-for-remote-worker-telepresence

git add -p

http://johnkary.net/blog/git-add-p-the-most-powerful-git-feature-youre-not-using-yet/

If you use git, you've used the command git add. But do you know about git add's "patch mode" using git add -p ?

Patch mode allows you to stage parts of a changed file, instead of the entire file. This allows you to make concise, well-crafted commits that make for an easier to read history.

10-signs-that-you-are-an-awesome-web-developer

http://tutorialzine.com/2014/02/10-signs-that-you-are-an-awesome-web-developer/

Above link seems to have some useful links.

sqlfiddle.com

http://sqlfiddle.com/#!2/cd1eb/3

Google Charts: removing padding

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4271390/remove-padding-in-google-chart

options.chartArea = { left: '8%', top: '8%', width: "70%", height: "70%" };

https://developers.google.com/chart/interactive/docs/gallery/piechart#Configuration_Options

Google Charts - Playground

https://code.google.com/apis/ajax/playground/?type=visualization#full_dashboard

Rails: Turn off assets precompile

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18935784/disable-assets-precompile-function-in-rails

config.assets.enabled = false

We would want to do this in Dev environment. 

Sticky toastr

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17411171/toastr-how-to-prevent-fade-out-with-sticky-toast-on-mouseover

http://blog.decayingcode.com/post/Better-JavaScript-notifications-with-Toastr

toastr.options = {timeOut: 0, extendedTimeOut: 0}
(observe that 'O' in timeOut is upper-case)

MySql: find out which tables contain a certain column

To search for a column 'rank' in a database 'mydb':

select * From INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS Where column_name like '%rank%' and TABLE_SCHEMA = "mydb"

XSS, Browser Exploitation Framework, Alice & Bob & Eve & Mallory, Rails & XSS

Cross-Site Scripting - Persistent, Non-Persistent (Reflective)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_scripting

Who are Alice and Bob and Eve and Mallory ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_and_Bob

Browser Exploitation Framework
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeEF_(Browser_Exploitation_Framework)

Rails & XSS:
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/security.html#cross-site-scripting-xss

ScoreCleaner app

Security related

https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Ruby_on_Rails_Cheatsheet

There are links to Cheatsheets for .Net, HTML5, Javascript, iOS, etc. also in the above page.

Ruby: Get/set an object's property using a string/symbol

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12136262/ruby-get-set-an-objects-property-using-a-string-symbol

car.send("name=", value)

drive.draw.io - mockup tool

https://drive.draw.io/

Ruby: yield

From https://rubymonk.com/learning/books/4-ruby-primer-ascent/chapters/18-blocks/lessons/54-yield

Ruby: inject

http://ruby-doc.org/core-2.0/Enumerable.html#method-i-inject

inject( initial )  { |memo, obj|      block  }  → obj

Example: https://rubymonk.com/learning/books/1-ruby-primer/problems/144-sum_of_cubes#solution4782

def sum_of_cubes(a, b)

  sum = 0

  (a..b).inject(sum) { |sum, x| sum + (x*x*x) }

end

What does it do ?
-- Combines all elements of enum
-- by applying a binary operation, specified by a block

For each element in enum -
- the block is passed an accumulator value (memo) and the element
- the result becomes the new value for memo.

At the end of the iteration -
the final value of memo is the return value for the method.

Variation:
-------------------------
inject  { |memo, obj|     block  }  → obj

What is the initial value for memo ?
- If you do not explicitly specify an initial value for memo, then the first element of collection is used as the initial value of memo.

F# - Getting Started tutorial

http://www.tryfsharp.org/Learn/getting-started
http://www.trelford.com/blog/post/fs4vb.aspx

http://sachabarbs.wordpress.com/1406-2/ - F# for beginners