Kurt Tomlinson's Blog

React and Ruby on Rails Lessons Learned

I recently started using React in my web apps to make them more interactive. React is great for the view layer of an application, but it needs to be paired with a backend of some sort. In my web apps, I use Ruby on Rails to generate a JSON API that is consumed by my React views. In getting started with React and Ruby on Rails, I learned a few things. I'd like to share those with you today.

coding | 2017.06.25 05:00 | Kurt Tomlinson

Ruby on Rails Status Page

I like knowing what's going on on my servers, but I haven't had time to set up a real monitoring system. Usually when I want to check on my servers, I just remote in with SSH and fire up top and a couple other utilities. After I realized I tend to always check the same things again and again (CPU usage, RAM usage, free disk space), I decided to dump all those things into a page that my server would then serve up. This way I can check my server's health with from anywhere with an internet connection, and the time it took to set up was just a couple minutes.

coding | 2017.06.18 05:00 | Kurt Tomlinson

Disk Usage and How to Find Big Files on Ubuntu Server

If you find your server seems to be running out of disk space, the first thing you should do is figure out how full your disk really is. After that, you'll need a way to quickly zero in on which files and folders are using up the most disk space unnecessarily.

coding | 2017.06.11 05:00 | Kurt Tomlinson

How to Fix Access-Control-Allow-Origin Error in Ruby on Rails

If you're trying to make an API to allow your site's content to be accessible via JavaScript from another site, you've probably run into the error "XMLHttpRequest cannot load XXX. No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource. Origin 'YYY' is therefore not allowed access." where XXX is the resource you were trying to fetch and YYY is the domain of the page that loaded the JavaScript that was trying to fetch XXX.

coding | 2017.06.04 05:00 | Kurt Tomlinson

Korean Culture from an American Perspective: Bathing Habits

My wife is Korean, so I'm exposed to all kinds of interesting culture differences between America and Korea. I'd like to share a few of those culture differences so that people can learn more about Korean culture. I also want to show people that a lot of things we take for granted as just "how things are done" are actually nothing more than cultural norms that can and do vary from place to place.

korea | 2017.05.28 05:00 | Kurt Tomlinson