Categories: Rails

Paperclip: Adding an annotation to an uploaded image

This is a little late-night hack for my late-night project I’m doing for a friend. I’m using Paperclip for uploading image attachments, and one of the requirements was to add some text (watermark or annotation or whatever you call it) to an image to indicate the website as the source of the image.


Categories: SAP

IDE, the ABAP way

Lately I have been musing (contemplating, meditating on) the term “IDE” or “Integrated Development Environment”. What is it that makes it integrated? Well, you have of course an editor, a compiler and a debugger (or any other combination of tools) integrated into one program. However, the program itself is still pretty much standalone. It is usually not integrated into anything else. So much for “integrated”. Tsk, tsk.


Butchering a mesh with Python in Blender

It seems that I am on this trip with scripting. My last post also relates to scripting. (Aren’t scripting languages wonderful? They should be the future of the enterprise! – and by that I don’t mean the Starship Enterprise) One of my hobbies lately has been to play around with 3D modeling and animation in Blender. As a result of that playing around, I wrote a Python script that takes a given mesh and creates a new mesh from each individual face.


Categories: SAP

Mass change your SAP passwords

The short version: Here is a script to automate changing your SAP password across many systems. The long version follows…


Netbeans 6.0 M9 – now with Ruby + Rails support!

Oh boy, it seems everyone is jumping on the bandwagon! I’ve just been over to Netbeans, where I saw that there is a preview release (M9) of Netbeans 6.0, and lo and behold – Ruby and Rails support! Mind you, I never bothered to check whether someone had created Ruby/Rails plugins for Netbeans, so I’m not sure whether this is the culmination of long-term work from another project. It sure comes as a surprise to me!


The pain of PHP debugging

You would have thought by now that I am up and running with a good PHP development environment and coding away furiously. Nothing could be further from the truth. I got stuck on debugging PHP. The main problem is this: I am too thrifty (some would say cheap) to invest in a proper PHP IDE. Instead, I have spent much time looking around for open source alternatives, or failing that, anything that is free.


What makes a platform?

Some time ago I was contemplating the concept of a platform. It is a term that is bandied around quite a bit, but I’m not sure if a formal definition exists (other than something flat on which you can build or place something). I am speaking of course of platforms in the software world; perhaps the right term to use would be “application platform”.


Understanding MVC

I am in the process of creating a website from scratch, which is proving to be my first real encounter with PHP. For a while, I was looking at several PHP frameworks out there, but decided that I would rather get to know the language first than attempt to learn a framework.

One of the things I got hung up on was how I could redirect to a particular page depending on the logic of the currently executing page (by doing a redirect on the server). An example would be if you access a particular page for which you need to be logged in. At this point, you would want to redirect the user to a logon page. I searched all over and found people asking the same question, even someone asking how to redirect in PHP the way one does in Struts, which I realize now is not a very sensible question, as Struts is a framework, and PHP is a language.