PullMonkey Blog

Over 4 years ago, I wrote a tutorial for doing dynamic (cascading) select boxes.
Still getting comments and emails to this day. Mostly asking how to get this working with rails 3, which has moved from prototype to jquery.
So here's a tutorial for getting 3 select boxes to trigger updates for each other....

Looking at our data trends for VIN API, we show about 15% of all requests are for the complete data set. It's the same price as the basic data set and rich with a ton of data.
Check out the data set from this post over 1 and half years ago. On top of the basic data set's year, make and model, the complete data set comes with data like MSRP, MPG (city and highway), dealer invoice, gas tank size, etc....

Been playing around with a lot of USB devices lately, to get them to play nicely with some of our touch screen Rails apps.
One of the devices is a card reader - specifically a MagTek reader, and the same code works for the ELO reader.
I've tried a billion different ways to ensure we're reading in all the data. At first, I was just asking the usb stream to present me with a certain number of characters, b/c that's how all the examples do it....

I'm using the topaz model T L462 HSB. It's nice now that it works. But what a PITA to get it going. The biggest problem with the device is the documentation. There is no low level documentation explaining the representation of the bytes coming in over...