my recent reads..

Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters; From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima
Power Sources and Supplies: World Class Designs
Red Storm Rising
Locked On
Analog Circuits Cookbook
The Teeth Of The Tiger
Sharpe's Gold
Without Remorse
Practical Oscillator Handbook
Red Rabbit

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

cancannible role-based access control gets an update for Rails 4

Can You Keep a Secret? / 宇多田ヒカル

cancannible is a gem that has been kicking around in a few large-scale production deployments for years. It still gets loving attention - most recently an official update for Rails 4 (thanks to the push from @zwippie).

And now also some demo sites - one for Rails 3.2.x and another for Rails 4.3.x so that anyone can see it in action.


So what exactly does cancannible do? In a nutshell, it is a gem that extends CanCan with a range of capabilities:

  • permissions inheritance (so that, for example, a User can inherit permissions from Roles and/or Groups)
  • general-purpose access refinements (to automatically enforce multi-tenant or other security restrictions)
  • automatically stores and loads permissions from a database
  • optional caching of abilities (so that they don't need to be recalculated on each web request)
  • export CanCan methods to the model layer (so that permissions can be applied in model methods, and easily set in a test case)

Friday, January 09, 2015

555 Timer simulator with HTML5 Canvas

The 555 timer chip has been around since the '70s, so does the world really need another website for calculating the circuit values?

No! But I made one anyway. It's really an excuse to play around with HTML5 canvas and demonstrate a grunt & coffeescript toolchain.

See this running live at visual555.tardate.com, where you can find more info and links to projects and source code on GitHub.


(blogarhythm ~ Time's Up / Living Colour)