posted by delano

A comment from Alistair Croll today made me realize I didn't have a brand positioning statement for one of the projects I'm working on. While creating one, I put some notes together and thought I would post them in case they're helpful for someone. If you don't have a brand positioning statement or you want to understand them better, definitely take a look at the links below too!

Definition

A brand positioning statement describes the "mental space" a brand should occupy in the minds of a target audience. It serves as an internal document which guides most of a company's marketing communications strategies, programs and tactics. The brand positioning statement focuses on the elements and associations which meaningfully set a brand apart from the competition. It is typically constructed in the following format: "To (target market), Brand X is the brand of (frame of reference) that (point of difference) because (reasons).

Process

1. Describe your customers (so you know what's important to them)
2. Define yourself in terms of your competition (to help you explain your product)
3. Explain your greatest benefit (the one thing that's most important to your most important customers)
4. Put it together to create your Brand Positioning Statement

Templates

FOR ,
OFFERS
THAT PROVIDES .

OUR
IS THE ONLY
THAT .

FOR
IS A
WHICH PROVIDES
UNLIKE
WHICH PROVIDES .

FOR THAT ,
WE OFFER .
UNLIKE , PROVIDES THAT .

posted by delano

I got annoyed with manually authorizing my public keys to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys and ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2 so I added a feature to rye to automate the process.

$ rye authorize user@example.com

The expected output looks something like this:

$ rye authorize user@example.com
Authorizing user@example.com
Passwordless login failed for user
Password: ************
Added public keys for: 
/home/user/.ssh/id_dsa
/home/user/.ssh/id_rsa
Now try: ssh user@example.com

Installation

$ gem install -V rye

You can generate an SSH keypair with the following command iff you don’t already have one (by default they’re installed to ~/.ssh/id_rsa or ~/.ssh/id_dsa):

$ ssh-keygen -t rsa

posted by delano

There’s something about Ruby that I’ve wanted to know for a long time: where does the hexadecimal value in #<Object:0x000001009e60f8> come from? Today I finally went looking for the answer.

When in doubt, look at the code

The documentation for Object#to_s tells us that the value is based on the object id: “Returns a string representing obj. The default to_s prints the object‘s class and an encoding of the object id.”

Looking at the source code for to_s, we can see that it’s using sprintf to create the hexadecimal value. From object.c:

/* Ruby 1.9 */
rb_sprintf("#<%s:%p>", cname, (void*)obj);

/* Ruby 1.8 */
snprintf(RSTRING(str)->ptr, len+1, "#<%s:0x%lx>", cname, obj);

Now, Ruby’s sprintf doesn’t support %p or %lx but it does support %x. However, there’s obviously more to the story because the values still don’t match up:

obj = Object.new
"#<%s:0x%x>" % [obj.class, obj.object_id]        # => #<Object:0x80813ff4>
obj.to_s                                         # => #<Object:0x101027fe8>

So what do we need to do to the object id to get the real hexadecimal value?

A tiny calculation

If we take a look at the hexadecimal values in plain-old decimal, the answer becomes obvious. Can you see it?

"0x80813ff4".hex                                 # => 2155954164
"0x101027fe8".hex                                # => 4311908328

All we have to do is double it!

And the answer is…

"#<%s:0x%x>" % [obj.class, obj.object_id.abs*2]  # => #<Object:0x101027fe8>

Note: I’ve created a tiny project called Hexoid to handle the minor formatting difference between Ruby 1.8 and 1.9.