Archive of Kevin McKelvin

has written 45 articles on The McDev Blog.

OSX Lion Reverse Scrolling

Posted by Kevin McKelvin on September 21, 2011 in Mac

The subject of mouse movement in OS X has been debated for years now. Personally I despise the default movement settings in OS X and have a whole array of tweaks in place. But that's a debate for another day.Today I'm looking at the new "natural" reversed scrolling feature in Lion. Having used it for a couple of days now I found that I like having the reverse scrolling on the trackpad, but whenever I reach for my mouse I prefer the classic scrolling method that we've been using for years.I dug around and couldn't find any way inside OS X of decoupling them, but I came across a cool

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FakeWeb

Posted by Kevin McKelvin on September 20, 2011 in Ruby, Testing

I was testing a client I wrote to a server API recently.  Being relatively new to testing with RSpec and Ruby, I initially took the naive approach of building a node.js application to behave as a dummy test server.Originally when I wrote the code I knew there had to be a better way, but I only found that better way today.I was revisiting some of that code and discovered FakeWeb.  It's a Ruby framework that makes it simple to test code that involves HTTP requests.  It intercepts HTTP calls made through Net::HTTP and makes it dead simple to create predictable responses for

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Slim Templates

Posted by Kevin McKelvin on September 18, 2011 in Open Source, Ruby

The Slim template engine seems to have gained a lot of popularity in the Rails community recently. Their site describes it as 'A lightweight templating engine.' For a long time I've loved Haml, taking the approach that I'd rather describe my intent than hard code HTML tags all over the place.However, in hindsight having used Slim for a while it appears Haml might have stepped a bit too far away from HTML, including some cryptic syntax like '%' signs to declare tags.  Slim takes a step back towards HTML.  It still uses the significant whitespace element of Haml and removes the annoying

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