Posts on Brandon Dimcheff

How I stopped being an incidental NIMBY and started living my values

Sat, 23 Jul 2022 09:22:27 -0400

I was a NIMBY. Not on purpose. I had never even heard the term until a couple of years ago. But, I was one. Here’s the story of how I changed my mind.

a2council.vote

Sun, 17 Jul 2022 16:15:08 -0400

This is a statement that I read aloud at Council on Monday, July 18, 2022 announcing

I’m here to announce a new community project to provide more accessible information about the actions of council. It’s available now at a2council.vote. Many recognize that Legistar is difficult to navigate, and it’s impossible to see a summary of the votes that took place at a council meeting. In fact, Councilmember Nelson has been providing summary information and voting charts for some time, but I think there are two problems with a sitting Councilmember being the provider of this service. First: being a Councilmember is not a permanent position, and at some point Councilmember Nelson will no longer be on council. This sort of service should outlive the term of any single councilmember. Second: even though the voting charts and reproduced agendas are factual, they serve as a funnel into the rest of her website, which is filled with propaganda, misinformation, and outright lies.

Open Letter to a Burns Park Neighbor

Sat, 09 Jul 2022 15:28:12 -0400

A neighbor wrote this response to Kim Winnick’s endorsement of Anne Bannister. It’s mostly been circulating on Facebook but I’ve reproduced it here so that people without an account can view it more easily.

Full Speed Ahead

Tue, 05 Jul 2022 12:00:00 -0400

Let’s keep heading in the right direction. Vote for Mayor Taylor and one of Cynthia Harrison, Chris Watson, Ayesha Edwin, Dharma Akmon, or Jenn Cornell.

A2Qouncil

Tue, 21 Jun 2022 15:57:00 -0400

A brief overview of the conspiracy theories that have been floating around Ann Arbor in recent years.

Consequences

Sun, 18 Apr 2021 16:42:53 -0400

Councilmember Hayner used a homophobic slur to attack the local press, and I think he should face consequences as a result.

Covid and Dining

Sun, 21 Feb 2021 10:59:37 -0500

Where I argue that we should in-person dining closed until people are vaccinated, particularly indoor dining.

Letter to the Michigan Board of State Canvassers

Sun, 22 Nov 2020 13:53:34 -0500

This is a letter I wrote to the canvassers to encourage them to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election, since it seems that may not automatically happen.

The Future of Ann Arbor

Sun, 02 Aug 2020 15:53:22 -0400

Let’s solve our housing crisis. Vote for Lisa Disch, Linh Song, Travis Radina, Jen Eyer, or Erica Briggs.

On the AAPD Contract Renewal

Mon, 06 Jul 2020 18:07:01 -0400

a statement I intended to give at Ann Arbor City Council re: police contract negotiations and funding

Go Modules: The Best of Both Worlds

Sat, 06 Apr 2019 22:32:35 -0400

We recently started using go modules at work to handle dependencies. The experience has been mostly great, but unfortunately a lot of tooling hasn’t added support for modules. Most of the team uses vscode, which depends on module support in open-source tooling, some of which is incomplete. At the time of writing, refactoring/rename tools don’t work, and many of the other tools are very slow when modules are enabled. I wanted to find a way to use modules for dependency management, but use GOPATH for development. It turns out that it’s fairly easy to get the best of both worlds if you follow a few simple rules:

Rainbow Deploys with Kubernetes

Tue, 13 Feb 2018 08:50:50 -0500

or: how you can deploy services to Kubernetes that require long periods of draining. #

🌈 🌈 🌈 #

If you want to jump directly to the technical solution, check out the project repo. Below is a short story about how we got to this solution.

hello again

Mon, 16 Oct 2017 20:32:12 -0400

Well, it’s been more than 7 years since I’ve blogged, but I’ve collected a pretty large list of topics. But first, some people and and projects deserve credit for my fancy new site. Stay tuned for actual content.

Hacking Chrome with Git

Sat, 24 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Motivations #

I spent some time hacking around in Chrome the other day because I have been extremely frustrated with the behavior of the downloads bar in the Mac version of Chrome. When the user initiates a download, it appends the downloads bar to the bottom of your current window, causing your window to grow by the height of the download bar.

Ruby Brew at Great Lakes Ruby Bash

Sat, 17 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

John Roos of Roos Roast designed an excellent blend of coffee for Great Lakes Ruby Bash. John started Roos Roast while selling cars at Dunning Subaru. I met him there when I bought my WRX, when he gave me a free pound of coffee with my car. Not long after that, he quit selling cars and started roasting coffee full-time.

Method of the Month 1: Ruby's sort vs. sort_by

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Ruby’s Array has 2 methods for sorting: sort and sort_by. Both methods sort your array (obviously) but they do it in slightly different ways.

Background #

This article is based on a talk I gave at the Ann Arbor Ruby Brigade in August. The idea for this talk was conjured up at eRubyCon during a discussion between Gayle Craig and me. We decided we would each give a brief talk about the differences between sort and sort_by at our next user group meetings. Amazingly, we both followed through.

Walk Like a Duck

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction #

In a duck-typed language like Ruby, it’s very important that you actually use duck typing. This is especially important when you’re designing a library or other code that could interact with objects that you don’t control. I have come across a few libraries lately that don’t follow duck typing conventions and have caused unexpected behavior when I’ve used them.

Automatically log in on merb-auth account creation

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I was adding new user registration to tasteb.in and I wanted my users to be automatically logged in as soon as they created their account. I’m using merb for tasteb.in, and consequently merb-auth for authentication. It turns out it’s really easy to implement, but it took me a while to get it right. All you need to do is add the following to your action that creates the new user:

Fix Missing Disqus Comment Form

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I had a bit of trouble with Disqus where it would only display a link saying “Discuss this topic on Disqus” instead of displaying an actual comment form. It turns out that this problem was caused by a mismatch between the URL configured in Disqus and the url where my blog was actually accessible. So if you’re missing a Disqus comment form, make sure that the URL listed under Settings -> Website URL in Disqus is the actual URL where your site resides.

tasteb.in is up!

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been working on a Merb-based recipe paste site for the past couple weeks called tasteb.in. It’s extremely simple for now. It lets you paste recipes in a very simple format and they show up on the site. You can access your recipes and all recipes on the site. And that’s about it.

Play in the Sandbox

Sat, 14 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I needed to test some code that reads and writes files on the filesystem. I got sick of manually setting up a scratch area for my test files and cleaning them up when I was done, so I created Sandbox to keep my tests DRY.

How to learn Ruby

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

UPDATE 4/20/2010: Well Grounded Rubyist is not prerelease anymore. Corrected.

UPDATE 6/30/2011: Fix links to _why’s poignant guide, since he vanished from the earth. Add a bit about finding live people to help you.

Sinatra block parameters!

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The latest master Sinatra now supports optional block parameters. It captures any parameters in the URL and passes them into the block that defines the action:

get '/hello/:name' do |n|
  "Hello #{n}!"
end

The params hash is still available as before, so this should not break any existing applications. It will also work with regular expressions. Any captures are yielded in order:

Run specs with autotest, er, autospec!

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

It seems that it’s not well publicized, but if you want to run your RSpec files with autotest try autospec instead. It looks inside the spec/ directory for files named “*_spec.rb” by default for specs. autospec is part of the RSpec gem, and basically just sets up the proper environment and then shells out to autotest.

Gearing up for CodeMash

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I’m getting all packed for CodeMash! Hope too see a lot of you there. I’m a little bit disappointed by the dearth of Ruby sessions, but there are enough of us that the open sessions will be rockin’. And the ever popular scotch track always helps.

Commit a linear git history to subversion

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Update: Deskin points out that there is a commit to git that fixes this problem by adding a --root option to rebase --onto. So when you get a new build of git, you can probably ignore everything here.

Use Capistrano to set your production database password

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This is a Capistrano recipe I use to configure my production database.yml. Before deploy:setup executes, this recipe will prompt for a database password and save a new database.yml file to the shared directory on your server. After each deploy, the database.yml file will be symlinked from the shared directory. You can reconfigure your database by executing cap db:configure.

Resolutions

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I generally think that new year resolutions are silly, but since it’s the new year and I have some goals I’d like to set, I guess I might as well call them resolutions.

Ruby Hoedown Videos Online

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Ruby Hoedown 2008 videos are now live. There are a lot of good talks. I highly recommend checking them out. I’ve set up a torrent of all the videos for your convenience.

Make RubyMate work with MacPorts Ruby

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

To make TextMate’s RubyMate work with MacPorts (or any other non-default ruby install) just set TM_RUBY environment variable to be the path to your custom ruby interpreter in TextMate’s preferences. Custom environmental variable settings are located under ‘Advanced’->‘Shell Variables’ in TM’s prefs.

Fix empty sake tasks

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve had a problem with my sake tasks being blank for the past couple days. Since there were a couple comments on err about similar things, I’ll share my fix: gem install -v 2.0.1 ParseTree. That’s it. Turns out my ParseTree install was messed up and to_ruby was not working on the task blocks.

Rails 2.0 is out

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Rails 2.0 has been released. Check it.

Using other MySQL Storage Engines

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Try

create_table(:suppliers, :options => 'ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8')

if you need to make a table with a different storage engine than default on MySQL. Note that this will bind your migration to MySQL, as it simply appends whatever is in the :options string to the end of the CREATE_TABLE generated by the migration.

RubyInject

Tue, 27 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

RubyInject is a small library from the folks who brought you RubyCocoa. It allows you to inject a ruby interpreter into a Cocoa app and tinker with all its’ internals.

shoulda

Sat, 29 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I’m trying out shoulda, a testing framework written by the guys over at Thoughtbot.

Test behavior, not implementation!

Fri, 21 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

This is a based on a comment I made on a post on thoughtbot’s blog. I suggest you read the original post for some background on what I’m talking about.

If you’re too lazy to read, here’s the basic gist: You could potentially test your associations or plugins (such as acts_as_solr) by simply checking whether or not your object responds to the messages that the plugins generate when their class methods are called.

I can has patch?

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I was poking through svn for has_many_polymorphs to see if a bug that I found had been fixed. Lo and behold, it was:

r688 | evanweaver | 2007-08-29 03:49:55 -0400 (Wed, 29 Aug 2007) | 2 lines

Caboose Sample App

Mon, 10 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The Caboose sample app comes with user authentication and many other useful features baked in. It’s a great starting place for your new Rails app!

Massive list of Rails development tips from Peepcode

Fri, 07 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The Peepcode people have published a long list of Rails development tips: Tips!

Railsify

Fri, 07 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

A new Rails plugin repository has been launched: Railsify. Check it out.

Predefined models? No different than any others.

Fri, 31 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Earlier today I was trying to figure out how to make a list of potential models to be created. For example: I have some Users and some Groups. I have a many-to-many Membership join model with some has_many :throughs. The fundamental goal is to provide the user an interface to add Membership models that link a User to a Group. I could use a bunch of checkboxes, but I’d rather pull up a list of possible Groups with little “add” links next to them.

Installing a Rails stack on Mac OS X with MacPorts

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I have a clean install of OS X on which I need to install Rails. I’ve done this maybe 3 or 4 times in the past year with minor variations each time which inevitably come back to bite me later. This post is an effort to document and standardize all the details to get a Rails stack going with MacPorts.

First Post

Mon, 27 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000

After 9 months of trying to get a Ruby blog launched, I finally have succeeded. And now it’s late, so I’m going to bed. But check back soon for juicy Ruby and Rails tidbits.