Vera Street Consulting

Why I Use Median, and When You Should Too - Jul 27

One of the issues I struggled with on MTG Card Prices was how to price a card, based on historical sales.

My initial solution was to take the average price of the prices that had occurred in the last 4 weeks, rolling. Prices for individual cards always...

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The price effect of banning Jace and Stoneforge Mystic in Standard - Jun 25

A few days ago, Jace, the Mind Sculptor and Stoneforge Mystic were banned by Wizards. What is unexpected is that the price for a Foil Jace is still high, close to $200. This may be because the are not many for sale, so their value remains high, or...

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Matching Items to a Known Corpus - Jun 3

As part of MTG Card Prices, we have to be able to identify what cards are part of an auction. If you could only list a single card on eBay, this would be relatively simple, but it is complicated by the fact that you can list

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Testing sessions with Sinatra - Feb 8

I’ve got a sinatra-based app that relies on sessions and I need to test them.  After doing a little digging, here was the solution I was able to come up with:

  1. Make sure that you’re setting your RACK_ENV to ‘test’ ( I do this in my Rakefile )
  2. Disable...
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Command line scripts with Sinatra - Nov 16

There are times when I want to do batch processing or perform other command line activities that don’t fit well into the web-framework. The trouble is, my db connection info is based on what “environement” I’m working in. I could re-create the hooks...

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Building a Login Process with Sinatra and OpenID - May 10

Slides used in a talk I gave to the Portland Ruby Brigade in May. View This File

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