RubyLearning has just announced the third batch of the Ruby Metaprogramming Course from 6th March 2010. Early Bird Discounts offered. You will find author of "Metaprogramming Ruby" book Paolo Perrotta, lurking in the course forum!
Ruby
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RubyFlow
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[ANN] Ruby Metaprogramming Course – Start Thinking in Ruby
8 Feb 2010 | 11:37 pm -
Paginating documents with couchrest & will_paginate
8 Feb 2010 | 12:38 pmPaginating documents from CouchDB with couchrest & will_paginate explain in this blog post, and it is not as difficult as you might imagine. -
Rad DCI Architecture Talk
8 Feb 2010 | 10:18 amI recently popped off a quick blog post about an awesome lecture on the concept of DCI architecture that I've been watching. This looks very promising and I'm guessing other Rubyists will be interested too. Check out my comments and jump from there to the video. -
Why we should drop 1.8 support in Rails 3.
8 Feb 2010 | 7:18 amHere's why I think we should only support Ruby 1.9 with the Rails 3.0 release. http://www.metabates.com/2010/02/08/ruby-1-9-rails-3-0/ -
Wrap your SQL head around Riak's Map-Reduce
7 Feb 2010 | 7:06 amMy second post about Riak explains how to convert your SQL queries into Map-Reduce jobs.
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Collaboration and Transparency Blog
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Task Delegation Has No Place in Agile
9 Feb 2010 | 6:00 amA goal, whether stated or not, on many software projects is to mitigate risk. There are many blog posts written on the subject, and I believe there is even software to help companies with this. A fairly common way that companies try to mitigate risk is to plan everything in advance (big design up front) and then micromanage people so that they stay on track. This could not be further from Agile principles and practices. Agile teams are self-organizing, meaning they decide who is going to do what tasks within a given sprint. The team is 100% responsible for ensuring that they deliver what they… -
Enjoy Today’s Scrum’d Updates
8 Feb 2010 | 11:00 amI’d like to thank Mike Sutton and David Harvey for taking the time to speak with me about their experience with Agile tools and the issues they’ve found with the ones out there. We’ve taken their feedback to heart, and have started to implement a number of ideas they gave us. So a big shout out to Mike and David. Today’s update brings a little more goodness to Scrum’d. Here’s what we’ve got. Project RSS Feeds Scrum’d tracks everything that goes on in a project, including the creation, updating, and removal of projects, releases, sprints, user… -
WordPress, Fun and Sun at WordCamp Miami
8 Feb 2010 | 6:00 amAtlantic Dominion Solutions and Scrum’d are proud to sponsor WordCamp Miami, being held on the University of Miami campus February 20, 2010. The more we get into the WordPress community the happier we are to be a part of it. Come on down to Miami and meet fellow WordPress community members, an awesome speaker lineup, and if you see some guy sporting a bright red backpack and looks like he’s about to take off say hello. -
Welcome to Your Weekend – Work
6 Feb 2010 | 7:26 amMany of us that own our own business work on the weekend. Many out there that work for someone else work on the weekend. Where did these weekends go? When did they start to disappear? Competition is fierce, and today even more so. and it isn’t going to be letting up anytime soon. Not only are we bombarded in our own locality, but from elsewhere on the globe. Developers are quite familiar with this situation. But work is not always work if you like what you do. And we really don’t have to work all the time to get and stay ahead. Focus is our friend, and prioritization is key. -
Shut Off Your Hype Engine
5 Feb 2010 | 6:00 amIsrael Gat added his thoughts to a post by Marcel Den Hartog wherein Marcel discussed technology assimilation in the face of hype. While the post talks mainly about the adoption of cloud computing in IT organizations (which is steadily picking up), Marcel brings up a point that is true with all new technologies: When the press, the analysts and the industry start writing about cloud as part of the IT solution, people will want to change. Now that it’s presented as the silver bullet to all IT problems, people are cautious to say the least. I remember when the Ruby on Rails community was…
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Ruby Inside
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Rails 3.0 Beta: 36 Links and Resources To Get You Going
5 Feb 2010 | 3:27 pmWhenever something's a really "big deal" in the Ruby world, we cover it - even if it makes more sense on Rails Inside (which is now switching to a user contributions model). Given that, we've gone through all the latest and greatest Rails 3.0 related links and put together a ton of them to help you on your way with the recently released Rails 3.0 beta. Enjoy! Getting Started / Must Reads Rails 3.0 Release Notes - An epic amount of documentation from the Rails Guides project. If you're already pretty familiar with Rails 2.x and just want to know what's new and updated, this is the place to… -
Deploy A Free, Ruby Powered Blog In 5 Minutes with Toto and Heroku
5 Feb 2010 | 12:22 pmToto (GitHub repo) is a new lightweight Ruby and Rack-based blogging engine designed specifically for "hackers" by Alexis Sellier. Content is managed entirely through Git - so everything is version controlled - and articles are stored as text files with embedded YAML metadata. At only 300 lines, it's easy to hack to your own taste, too. Alexis has decided to push Toto by demonstrating how easy it is to deploy - for free - on the Heroku platform. You can literally get a blog up on Heroku within 5 minutes, even if you haven't already got a Heroku account (I just tried it). How To Do It Here are… -
Rails 3.0 Beta/Prerelease Available Now and How To Install It
4 Feb 2010 | 7:29 pmToday, Rails core member Jeremy Kemper dropped the words that lots of ardent Rails developers have been waiting for: "Rails 3 beta is LIVE." It's true! Rails 3.0's first approved beta/pre-release version is now live and ready for you to install. Unfortunately, the installation process isn't as easy as Jeremy explains. RubyGems doesn't support the installation of prerequisites on pre-release gems, so you need to install them all manually. I think I have some instructions to cover that (works on 1.8.7 and 1.9.1): gem install i18n tzinfo builder memcache-client rack rack-test rack-mount erubis… -
MacRuby 0.5 Released: A Significant, Stable Release
1 Feb 2010 | 4:23 pmMacRuby has hit a significant milestone in its development today: version 0.5! The key features include improved HotCocoa support (though this is now maintained separately from core on GitHub), better Ahead-Of-Time (AOT) compilation, and support for OS X 10.6's Grand Central Dispatch. Give It A Go! If you've got a Mac and haven't yet tried out MacRuby, give it a go - its speed and general level of support for Ruby is very impressive. You can download MacRuby as a standalone package with installer (for OS X 10.6 and higher) or if you're using RVM, do an update and then rvm install macruby to… -
A Video Interview With Ruby’s Creator, Matz
26 Jan 2010 | 5:20 pmRuby's creator and benevolent dictator Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto has done a video interview for InfoQ at the QCon enterprise software development conference. You can watch the video on InfoQ's page (or, if you're a member of InfoQ, download an MP3). In the interview, Matz talks about what he'd do if he were recreated Ruby from scratch today, lazy evaluation, Erlang, actor models, typing, his opinions on alternative Ruby implementations, and continuations. Matz also recommends reading O'Reilly's Beautiful Code (Amazon link) but humbly advises against reading Chapter 29 - a chapter that he…
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Railscasts
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Episode 200: Rails 3 Beta and RVM
8 Feb 2010 | 12:00 amGet started with Rails 3.0 Beta and install Ruby 1.9.1 using RVM: Ruby Version Manager. Stay tuned to the end for a challenge on giving back to open source. -
Episode 199: Mobile Devices
1 Feb 2010 | 12:00 amChange the look and behavior of a Rails app on mobile devices. Also use jQTouch to build a native-looking interface. -
Episode 198: Edit Multiple Individually
25 Jan 2010 | 12:00 amUse checkboxes to edit multiple records in one form, where each one has an individual set of form fields. -
Episode 197: Nested Model Form Part 2
18 Jan 2010 | 12:00 amAdd and remove nested model fields dynamically through JavaScript using either Prototype or jQuery. -
Episode 196: Nested Model Form Part 1
11 Jan 2010 | 12:00 amHandling multiple models in a single form is much easier with the accepts_nested_attributes_for method. See how to use this method to handle nested model fields.
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Hivelogic
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The Pipeline Episode 2: Ryan Carson
9 Feb 2010 | 6:35 amIn the second episode of The Pipeline, I interview Ryan Carson, the co-founder of Carsonified, the company behind DropSend and conferences like Chirp: The Twitter Developer Conference, Future of Web Apps, Miami 2010 (which we’re covering live), and the just-announced Future of Web Design, London 2010. We talk about his unique work style and office environment, what inspires him, and how he’s built such a strong company and personal brand. [Permalink] -
The Conversation Episode 2: Don’t Twiddle the Knobs
5 Feb 2010 | 4:22 pmEpisode 2 of The Conversation, my live talk show, is now available in podcast format for those of you who missed it. Entitled Don’t Twiddle the Knobs, it features special guests including Dave Nanian, Adam Keys, Christina Warren, Mike Davidson, and Merlin Mann. We discuss Flash, HTML5, and the future of the web, Gowalla, the newsvine acquisition, technology and kids, comments on the web and losing control, and creating an identity on the internet. [Permalink] -
[Sponsor] MacSlaps
5 Feb 2010 | 4:13 amMy sponsor this week is MacSlaps, designer vinyl decals that utilize the backlit apple, allowing Mac owners to instantly customize their computer. There are a ton of designs, like Mario, the Ruby on Rails tracks, Pac Man, and my current favorite, Chuck Taylors. Because your Mac should be as unique as you are. [Become a sponsor] -
Join me for The Conversation Live, Thursday Feb. 2nd
3 Feb 2010 | 3:09 pmJoin me for The Conversation, streamed to you live on Thursday 4 February, 2010 at 12:00 PM EST. I have a bunch of great guests lined up, and an improved embedded chat client for your convenience. See you then. [Permalink] -
An Interview with the reclusive Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes
2 Feb 2010 | 3:34 pmIt’s been 15 years since Watterson stopped producing the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, and 20 years since he granted an interview, making this short interview even that much more special. Watterson: It’s always better to leave the party early. If I had rolled along with the strip’s popularity and repeated myself for another five, 10 or 20 years, the people now “grieving” for “Calvin and Hobbes” would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I’d be…
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the { buckblogs :here } - Home
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There is no magic, there is only awesome (Part 4)
25 Jan 2010 | 8:51 pmThis is the fourth (and final) article in a series titled “There is no magic, there is only awesome.” The first article introduced the four cardinal rules of awesomeness, the second was about knowing thy tools, and the third encouraged you to know thy languages . First off, I apologize for dragging this out. It’s really become a weight on my shoulders. I’ve been fretting and fretting about writing the last two or three posts in this series, and I just couldn’t find the inspiration to make them come out like I wanted…and they’ve been holding up other posts I’ve been wanting to… -
There is no magic, there is only awesome (Part 3)
9 Oct 2009 | 9:48 amThis is the third article in a series titled “There is no magic, there is only awesome.” The first article introduced the “four cardinal rules of awesomeness”. The second article discussed knowing your tools. Opening A.—Pass index finger of right hand distal to the little-finger loop, and passing round the ulnar side of that loop, bring it up from the proximal side into the thumb loop, and with the index finger pointing downard, take up with the back of the index finger the radial thumb string and return. Even to string figure adepts, it can be challenging to parse those… -
There is no magic, there is only awesome (Part 2)
25 Sep 2009 | 7:15 amThis is the second article in a series titled “There is no magic, there is only awesome.” The first article introduced the “four cardinal rules of awesomeness”. If you’ve ever watched someone make string figures, it’s pretty obvious that the tool set includes a loop of string, and your fingers. But if you haven’t played with string figures much, you might be surprised to learn that you’ve got a lot more than string and fingers at your disposal. There are figures that require the use of your wrists to hold the string. Some require you to use your lips, teeth, tongue, or nose. I… -
There is no magic, there is only awesome (Part 1)
16 Sep 2009 | 7:45 pmThe following is the first of a series of articles that I will be posting in the coming weeks, based on the keynote address I gave at the 2009 Ruby Hoedown in Nashville, entitled “There is no magic, there is only awesome.” I originally intended to publish the entire series of articles as a single article, but it got too long. At any rate, I think it’ll be more easily digestible as multiple posts. I’m always surprised to discover that there are people who have never heard of string figures. These are the games that are played (in western culture, at least) primarily by children, using… -
New Interview Online
11 Sep 2009 | 8:14 amDmitry Belitsky sent an email to prominent Rubyists with several different questions around the theme of “How to become a successful Rubyist”. He then posted their answers in interview form on his blog. I was a bit late to get my answers submitted, but they’re there now. Essentially, my advice is to participate in open source, use moderation, and have non-virtual hobbies, but you can read the entire interview if you like. Thanks, Dmitry!
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Ryan's Scraps - Blog
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'What's New in Edge Rails' Moves to EdgeRails.info
8 Feb 2010 | 6:06 amFor awhile I’ve wanted to move the “What’s New in Edge Rails” series to its own site to reflect the fact that it is an independent and self-sustaining series and not some small figment of my mind anymore. I started writing the What’s New series about four years ago and it’s clear it needs to be treated like a first-class citizen. While the move is still a work in progress, I’m proud to say that EdgeRails.info is now live and is where all future What’s New in Edge Rails content will be published (including some Rails 3 updates). <image… -
What's New in Edge Rails: Set Flash in redirect_to
20 Dec 2009 | 9:39 amThis feature is schedule for: Rails v2.3 stable Rails’ flash is a convenient way of passing objects (though mostly used for message strings) across http redirects. In fact, every time you set a flash parameter the very next step is often to perform your redirect w/ redirect_to: 1234567 class UsersController < ApplicationController def create @user = User.create(params[:user]) flash[:notice] = "The user was successfully created" redirect_to user_path(@user) endend I know I hate to see two lines of code where one makes sense – in this case what you’re saying is to “redirect… -
What's New in Edge Rails: Independent Model Validators
10 Aug 2009 | 7:13 pmThis feature is schedule for: Rails v3.0 ActiveRecord validations, ground zero for anybody learning about Rails, got a lil’ bit of decoupling mojo today with the introduction of validator classes. Until today, the only options you had to define a custom validation was by overriding the validate method or by using validates_each, both of which pollute your models with gobs of validation logic. ActiveRecord Validators Validators remedy this by containing granular levels of validation logic that can be reused across your models. For instance, for that classic email validation example we can… -
What's New in Edge Rails: Default RESTful Rendering
10 Aug 2009 | 6:39 amThis feature is schedule for: Rails v3.0 A few days ago I wrote about the new respond_with functionality of Rails 3. It’s basically a clean way to specify the resource to send back in response to a RESTful request. This works wonders for successful :xml and :json requests where the default response is to send back the serialized form of the resource, but still presents a lot of cruft when handling user-invoked :html requests (i.e. ‘navigational’ requests) and requests where error handling is required. For instance, consider your standard create action:… -
What's New in Edge Rails: Cleaner RESTful Controllers w/ respond_with
5 Aug 2009 | 6:52 pmThis feature is schedule for: Rails v3.0 REST is a first-class citizen in the Rails world, though most of the hard work is done at the routing level. The controller stack has some niceties revolving around mime type handling with the respond_to facility but, to date, there’s not been a lot built into actionpack to handle the serving of resources. The addition of respond_with (and this follow-up) takes one step towards more robust RESTful support with an easy way to specify how resources are delivered. Here’s how it works: Basic Usage In your controller you can specify what resource…
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techno weenie - Home
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Where's Waldo: Track user locations with Node.js and Redis
Where’s Waldo is my little node.js/Redis project to keep track of users in an app. Say hi! Tracking hits on every request can get costly, and I didn’t want to hold up the more important server processes with this. So, it felt like a good fit for a quick asynchronous web server. Node.js and Redis fit the bill perfectly. Here’s a sample from a development build of my Tender Support product. You can probably tell where I’m going with this… If you can’t tell: you’ll be able to see who is reading the same discussion that you’re currently on. If you want to play along at home,… -
Node.js For My Tiny Ruby Brain: Keeping Promises
I’ve been hacking on node.js for a week now. I won’t go into why I think it’s awesome, you probably already know (thanks to bloggers like Simon Willison). My second raw “hello world” speed test went something like this: # node.js on freenode spoob: technoweenie; seriously, you should look up how fast nodejs is... :) technoweenie: yea i was getting about 5k r/s, pretty impressive spoob: you should be getting around 20k r/s? technoweenie: really? technoweenie: oh wait i only ran 5k requests My first: # twitter technoweenie: sample node.js server is *extremely* slow, am i missing… -
A note on the Github/Twitter Proxy
In my last post, I made a quick note about how the FriendlyORM had some issues in Postgres. I made a few quick hacks (all in the interest of finishing this up and launching it yesterday). A few hours later, James Golick managed to fix the issues in a special postgres branch. I updated the Github/Twitter proxy with a vendored version of Friendly. If you have to upgrade though, you’ll have to wipe the database. Your steps on Heroku would look like: Don’t worry, only caching info is stored on the database. For normal code updates, you only need to perform the first two steps above. Just out… -
Get your Github news feed in Tweetie
A few weeks ago, I started hacking on twitter-server, an API wrapper for the Twitter API. It’s a Sinatra extension, where I toyed with the idea of adding top level API methods like #twitter_statuses_home_timeline to a Sinatra application. I’m not altogether happy with the way the XML is rendered, but it works with Tweetie. As a good real-world example, I wrote a Github proxy for my News Feed: Tweetie 2 for the iPhone and Spaz are the only Twitter clients I know of that let you customize the Twitter API urls that make this possible. I mostly use Tweetie, so right now that’s all that… -
Background Jobs Reloaded
So, Tender has been rolling for weeks with the new job structure: how’s it working out? First, I created multiple job classes for functions in events that are related. I used Job::CommentNotifications as my example in my last post. It’s now split up into four jobs in total: CheckSpam, CommentNotifications, CommentIndexing, and RunHooks (perhaps my next post should be on how to name these stupid things?). After that, I started spawning more queue runners. I had one set specifically for slower jobs like indexing. The other queues handled the really critical jobs quickly and staye empty, yet…
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Blog by John Nunemaker
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Correct, Beautiful, Fast (In That Order)
26 Jan 2010 | 10:00 amOne of the books I am occasionally grazing on is Beautiful Code. The title of this post is the title of Chapter 6. I’ll be honest, I only skimmed the chapter as one can only digest so much Java, but the title is spot on. Step 1: Correct (With Tests) I have been thinking exactly this as of late, though I will admit in no way as succinctly. First, you get it working. It does not matter if it is dirty. Rather, what matters is that it functions and is well tested. If it works and it is not tested, you can never make it beautiful with confidence, so testing is very important to this step. -
Just In Time, Not Just In Case
23 Jan 2010 | 10:30 pmSomething that has finally become a habit for me is adding code when it is needed, not in case it is needed. Often times we “think” we are going to need something, so we add the code to support it. What happens most often with that code is it sits and rots. It adds bloat and weight to your program that is not needed. Example I like to see examples first, so I will start with one. In Harmony, sites have users. I had a method in the site model named add_user. class Site def add_user(user) user_id = user.is_a?(User) ? user.id : user # add user code here, removed for clarity end end… -
Multiple Domain Page Caching
22 Jan 2010 | 8:00 amThe other day Brandon Wright emailed me about the following tweet: Just deployed full page caching on Harmony. Our log file stopped spinning by which made me happy and sad. Routing It might seem like black magic, but it isn’t all that hard. The front side for Harmony is not the same as a typical Rails app as we have multiple domains pointed at Harmony and the paths are not known up front so they don’t go in the routes file. In order to get everything headed to a controller, the last route in our file is this: map.dispatch '*path', :controller => 'the', :action => 'dispatch'… -
I Have No Talent
12 Jan 2010 | 10:00 amThe other day someone sent me an IM and thanked me for my open source contributions. They then said something about wishing they had my gem/code creation talents. I didn’t miss a beat and informed them that I have no talent. It is true. I have no talent. What I do have is a lot of practice. And I am not talking about occasionally dabbling in Ruby on the weekends. I am talking about the kind of practice where I beat code that isn’t working into submission (though often times the code wins). The kind of practice where all of a sudden I realize that it is 2am and I’m exhausted… -
Live From Harmony
5 Jan 2010 | 10:00 pmAfter more than a year and a half of self-funded work on and off, Harmony is almost ready. It is so close in fact, that we (Steve and I) are beginning to eat our own dog food by moving our own sites into it. Rails Tips is the first to go live (if you can see this post, you are a witness) and I’m not going to lie, it feels good! As I mentioned previously, we recently switched Harmony to MongoDB. A few have asked what issues we ran into and so far it has only been mental (free your mind matrix-style stuff). Now we will start getting into the nitty gritty. Expect some good posts soon.
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Bruce Williams
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Joining Reductive Labs
I’m happy to announce that I’ll be joining the great group down at Reductive Labs, the makers of Puppet, later this week. I’m really excited about the job switch; Puppet’s been in wide production deployments for some time, and it has a large, active open source community that’s grown up around it. The company has the startup flavor that I enjoy, a product that progressed past vaporware and dreams of rainbows and unicorns to become something real and useful to scores of people, and it has a cocktail of varied and compelling challenges to whet my appetite. I look… -
Ashes to Ashes
FiveRuns became one of the most prominent brands in the Ruby on Rails ecosystem over the last few years; a frequent sponsor of conferences and the source of a number of Rails-focused products and open source projects… but within months of going into beta with their latest product, Dash, a cascading set of EOLs were announced: the TuneUp server, Manage, and then, finally and inexplicably, the recently released Dash. Then FiveRuns itself was gone — acquired by Workthink, about which no one knew the faintest. That’s how it looked from the outside, at least. The view from inside… -
Living without send(), or trying to
Object#send (or __send__) is a scrappy little tool we Rubyists pull out to ever-so-casually ignore method private and protected visibility, and to call methods dynamically. Maybe we’ve gotten into the habit of using it a little too often. Let’s play with alternatives. An evaluation Here’s an example from practically every monkeypatching Rails plugin init.rb you’ve ever seen: SomeRailsConstantsend:include MagicSauce Okay, so include is a private method, and we’re breaking through indiscriminately by using send. If you wanted to do away with send because it seems… -
A GitHubby config.gem hack
I love using gems from my Rails apps, and have been an outspoken proponent for gem plugins from the beginning (you won’t find any vendor/plugins in my newer apps at all). I also love GitHub, but lines like this, over and over in my environment files, just annoy me: configgem 'username-foo' :lib => 'foo' :source => 'http://gems.github.com' configgem 'username-bar' :lib => 'bar' :source => 'http://gems.github.com' So, here’s a quick little hack. It could be smarter, but it works. module GitHubbyGems def gemname options if… -
A sleep hack
A quick aside. I’m experimenting with the Everyman polyphasic sleep schedule for the next 3+ weeks. Update: The experiment ended early, but was still very successful. Feel free to contact me if you’re interested in this sort of thing.
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has_many :bugs, :through => :rails - Home
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Signed and Permanent cookies in Rails 3
5 Feb 2010 | 4:37 amDavid added a very cool feature to Rails recently – Signed cookies and permanent cookies This lets you set permanent and/or signed cookies very easily. Before this, you’d have to write : 1234 cookies[:user_preference] = { :value => @current_user.preferences, :expires => 20.years.from_now.utc} Now just becomes : cookies.permanent[:user_preference] = @current_user.preferences In case you happen to have seen my Railssummit presentation I had talked about using ActiveSupport::MessageVerifier for implementing “Remember me” functionality. The above commit makes that a whole lot… -
Now sponsorsed by Ruby Row
30 Jan 2010 | 11:23 amI’m happy to announce that this blog is now sponsored by an exclusive ad network run by James Avery called Ruby Row. While I could have just slapped google adsense all over the blog, Ruby Row provides much more value to the visitors as the ads are primarily targeted at Ruby/Rails developers. I still have a spot open for per post text advertising. So if you’re interested, drop me an email on pratiknaik gmail -
Active Record Query Interface 3.0
22 Jan 2010 | 10:28 amI’ve been working on revamping the Active Record query interface for the last few weeks ( while taking some time off in India from consulting work, before joining 37signals ), building on top of Emilio’s GSOC project of integrating ARel and ActiveRecord. So here’s an overview of how things are going to work in Rails 3. What’s going to be deprecated in Rails 3.1 ? These deprecations will be effective in Rails’ 3.1 release ( NOT Rails 3 ) and will be fully removed in Rails 3.2, though there will be an official plugin to continue supporting them. Consider this an advance warning as it… -
Websockets made easy with Cramp
15 Jan 2010 | 10:42 amIf you aren’t aware already, HTML5 has Websockets API – enabling bidirectional communication between client and server. You should check Ilya’s post Ruby & WebSockets: TCP for the Browser for a better explanation. Starting with version 0.9, Cramp has in built support for Websockets. Unlike other solutions, Cramp extends the underlying webserver ( thin or Rainbows! ) to add the websockets superpower. As websockets protocol is an extension of the HTTP protocol, hopefully the webservers will be supporting it out of the box once websockets are well established. For working with websockets,… -
Introducing Cramp
7 Jan 2010 | 6:17 amCramp is the latest entry on the ruby web frameworks list. However, unlike all the others, Cramp is an asynchronous framework, always running inside EventMachine reactor loop. Cramp isn’t a good fit for most of the web applications out there. However, Cramp is good at holding and working with a large number of open connections. Hence it’ll work great for things like comet, long polling, streaming API or even when your application needs to handle thousands of concurrent connections. This article assumes that you’re aware with the evented programming model. If you are not, things below…
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Riding Rails - home
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Plugin Authors: Toward a Better Future
9 Feb 2010 | 3:05 amSome of the biggest changes in Rails 3 involve how Rails expects plugins to behave. Dependencies If your plugin has dependencies, make it a gem and have your users install it using the Gemfile. This will ensure that Bundler properly calculates the dependencies alongside any other dependencies the user’s app has. If You Override Something, Require It If you need to override ActionController, ActiveRecord or other Rails frameworks, require them first, then override. Instead of assuming that Rails will require your gem plugin at a “correct” time, assume that the user will require your… -
Rails 3.0: Beta release
4 Feb 2010 | 7:33 pmYou thought we were never going to get to this day, didn’t you? Ye of little faith. Because here is the first real, public release of Rails 3.0 in the form of a beta package that we’ve toiled long and hard over. It’s surely not perfect yet, but we were out of blockers on the list, so here we go. Please give it a run around the block, try to update some old applications, try to start some new ones, and report back all the issues you find. I’m really proud of this moment, actually. We’ve had more than 250 people help with the release and we’ve been through almost 4,000 commits since… -
Rails 3 Bugmash
15 Jan 2010 | 4:12 amRailsBridge has organized a Rails 3 Bugmash on January 16th and 17th. The idea is to try and upgrade your apps and favourite plugins/gems to work with Rails 3 and make the upgrade path as smooth as possible for everyone else by documenting the process and fixing the bugs you encounter. Rails core team and others will be around in #railsbridge to help out the participants during the bugmash. Check the RailsBridge announcement for more details. -
Getting a New App Running on Edge
31 Dec 2009 | 7:03 pm(cross-posted from Yehuda’s Blog) So people have been attempting to get a Rails app up and running recently. I also have some apps in development on Rails 3, so I’ve been experiencing some of the same problems many others have. The other night, I worked with sferik to start porting merb-admin over to Rails. Because this process involved being on edge Rails, we got the process honed to a very simple, small, repeatable process. The Steps Step 1: Install bundler (version 0.8.1 required) $ sudo gem install bundler Step 2: Check out Rails $ git clone git://github.com/rails/rails.git $ cd rails… -
Ruby on Rails 2.3.5 Released
30 Nov 2009 | 11:58 amRails 2.3.5 was released over the weekend which provides several bug-fixes and one security fix. It should be fully compatible with all prior 2.3.x releases and can be easily upgraded to with “gem update rails”. The most interesting bits can be summarized in three points. Improved compatibility with Ruby 1.9 There were a few small bugs preventing full compatibility with Ruby 1.9. However, we wouldn’t be surprised you were already running Rails 2.3.X successfully before these bugs were fixed (they were small). RailsXss plugin availability As you may have heard, in Rails 3 we are now…
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Rails Envy » Home
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Episode 104: Something New
21 Jan 2010 | 5:00 amEpisode #104: Something new. I’m sad to say that this will be the last episode of the Rails Envy podcast. I’m happy to say that Dan and I will be doing The Ruby Show which will follow the same general flow of Rails Envy. There’s no need to update your feeds (though you can if you’d like) because the feed will redirect for the foreseeable future. We’ve also got some other fun stuff planned like The Dev Show so stay tuned! The Rails Envy podcast is brought to you this week by NewRelic. NewRelic provides RPM which is a plugin for rails that allows you to monitor and… -
Rails Envy Podcast – Episode #103
18 Dec 2009 | 2:58 pmEpisode #103 Dan edition. The Rails Envy podcast is brought to you this week by NewRelic. NewRelic provides RPM which is a plugin for rails that allows you to monitor and quickly diagnose problems with your Rails application in real time. Check them out at NewRelic.com. Show Notes Rails 2.3.5 Released Rails 2.3.5 has been released with several bug fixes and improved Ruby 1.9 compatibility. Rails XSS Plugin Koz has released the rails xss plugin which makes all strings html unsafe by default and uses Erubis for templating. RubyConf Videos ConFreaks has posted the 2009 RubyConf videos. Speedy… -
Rails Envy Podcast – Episode 102
7 Dec 2009 | 8:42 amEpisode #102 Introducing Fancy Buttons! Also check out @railstips on Twitter. The Rails Envy podcast is brought to you this week by NewRelic. NewRelic provides RPM which is a plugin for rails that allows you to monitor and quickly diagnose problems with your Rails application in real time. Check them out at NewRelic.com. Show Notes MagLev Alpha Released Peter Cooper writes about the recently released MagLev alpha over on the Ruby Inside blog. Passenger 2.2.7 Released Phusion has released passenger version 2.2.7 which includes many bug fixes. HTML Sanitization in Rails David posts on the Viget… -
Rails Envy Podcast – Episode #101
20 Nov 2009 | 9:05 amEpisode #101 Let’s put another shrimp on the barbie! The Rails Envy podcast is brought to you this week by NewRelic. NewRelic provides RPM which is a plugin for rails that allows you to monitor and quickly diagnose problems with your Rails application in real time. Check them out at NewRelic.com. Show Notes Torquebox Torquebox is an enterprise-grade application server that provides scale-oriented services to your Ruby webapps, including turn-key clustering. With its latest release, Torquebox supports all Rack-based Ruby frameworks. Metaprogramming in Ruby: It’s All About the Self… -
Episode 100
13 Nov 2009 | 2:43 pmEpisode #100: Mustache edition. And hey, it’s episode 100! The Rails Envy podcast is brought to you this week by NewRelic. NewRelic provides RPM which is a plugin for rails that allows you to monitor and quickly diagnose problems with your Rails application in real time. Check them out at NewRelic.com. Show Notes JRuby 1.4 Final Released JRuby 1.4 has been released. New in this version is a native launcher for JRuby on Windows. Software Craftsmanship Katas Chris Parsons and Corey Haines release the katacasts blog and video cast. Software Craftsmanship Katas is a place dedicated to…
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slash7 with Amy Hoy
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Your Questions: Amy, how do you learn?
12 Jan 2010 | 6:42 pmAng writes: My question for you is, what sort of process did you use to _learn_, whether it’s coding chops or design chops… Did you typically do it on-the-job, or were they usually after hours experimentation / courses / books / mentors? How did you find the resources to support learning, etc? I’m asking because I find that sustained, focused, self-directed learning can be difficult, and I would love to hear experts like you talk about how you got through the various stages of learning (Dreyfus model?). Thanks very much! First off, ANg, I had to look up the Dreyfus model on… -
The Elephant Is Not Its Trunk — And other reasons to stop fooling yourself, and start marketing
11 Dec 2009 | 7:09 amAn elephant is long, limber, and slightly tapered. Like a giant roll of cookie dough, but with fewer chocolate chips and a lot more muscles! And an insatiable appetite for peanuts! Imagine somebody came up to you on the street and announced this proudly to you. What would you think of them? Let me take a guess: First: Wow, ever heard of the Personal Bubble? Then: You’re absolutely, flipping, batshit insane. Am I right, or am I right? Elephants are not their trunks. Or their cute little taily-wailies. Everybody knows an elephant is not its trunk. That mistake made by the… -
Jump Start *Your* Year of Hustle – Weekend Workshop
10 Dec 2009 | 11:04 amI’ve been thinking a lot about my Year of Hustle (thus the posts, and the tweets). I’ve been making notes of stories, and thoughts, and lessons, and results to share for months. Last week I had the crazy idea to do a live, 3-hour workshop for those who want to make their own Year of Hustle, rather than making them wait while I trickle it out at a blog-post rate over the next 6 months. I want to help people not make the same mistakes I did, and to share all the practical advice I’ve learned from shipping a SaaS product and a desktop software product, and an information… -
My Year of Hustle & the Freckle-aversary
2 Dec 2009 | 1:46 pmNew Year’s resolutions, anyone? Three hundred and sixty five days ago, I was drinking spiked punch and looking forward to Christmas. Oh, and spending late, late hours in the office, busting tail to launch our time tracking service, Freckle. And working on our JavaScript performance book. (And later came Twistori Desktop for Macs.) Even though it was December 2008, it was all part of my plan for 2009: my Year of Hustle. Minus the punch, maybe. Year of Hoositwhatnow? Hustle. You know, that verb—like a fly-by-nighty who helps part fools from their money, using only his wits, walnut… -
On Wordpress, pardon my dust
1 Dec 2009 | 2:07 pmYeah, it’s been a long time since Slash7 looked this fugly. Theme conversion’s got some kinks. Which is OK, because I planned to redo the site design anyway. But I will fix the headings and stuff before spending time on the new design. Til then, though, I’d be much obliged if you could ignore the bad typography, and let me know if you notice any broken links. Thaaanks!
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Softies on Rails - Home
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Waterfall, Scrum, and Kanban, Oh My
1 Feb 2010 | 12:13 pmI thought I’d write up my thoughts on the various organizational processes I’ve been subjected to over the years. I’m currently on the Kanban wagon but I haven’t completely figured it out yet. I would put some links to each of these, but I’m too lazy. Use google to follow up on whatever piques your interest. Or link up your favorite site in the comments. These are just my opinions – everyone has different experiences, and I’m not trying to make any absolute proclamations here. The pluses and minuses are based on my experience only. Feedback welcome. Chaos Goal/Theme: Pay the… -
Ruby Job Opening
26 Oct 2009 | 8:59 amI’ve got a Ruby Software Engineering position open on my team at Leapfrog Online, in Evanston, IL. The ideal Rails candidate has: Real-world experience using MVC frameworks to build high-traffic web sites and applications. While we don’t expect any graphic design skills from our developers, candidates should be well-versed in the world of HTML, CSS and Javascript/Ajax. Knowing how to develop RESTful applications is a big plus. A love of testing and test-driven development. You should know how to write standard Rails unit tests, and/or a popular specification framework like RSpec, shoulda,… -
Last Call for Rails for Everyone
1 Oct 2009 | 5:53 amTechnically the registration window has closed, but if you sign up this week we’ll let you in. Register now. -
Registration Now Open for Essential Javascript
21 Aug 2009 | 4:43 amRegistration is now open for Essential Javascript with jQuery, a one-day, action-packed, fun-filled workshop for everyone that wants to learn how to integrate Javascript into their .NET, Rails, PHP, or straight-HTML web applications. We’ve secured a great location right in the heart of Chicago’s downtown (right across the street from the Sears Tower, in fact). If you’ve been wanting to learn Javascript, our friendly, inclusive workshop is the place for you. Seats are limited, so register today. -
RT The Learnometer
16 Aug 2009 | 12:38 pmPhoto credit New article posted on the Purple blog called The Learnometer.
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Polishing Ruby
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Isolate for Rails Apps
4 Feb 2010 | 2:17 pmI work on a lot of stuff. I'd rather have my laptop's gem installs be for my stuff, not my work stuff. I'd especially rather not deal with the version mess you get into when you've got several different rails apps. Isolate makes this incredibly easy. With just one gem system-installed, you can make every project completely standalone: A New Rails App: % rails blah You can use isolate with just two files in your rails app. You just add the following: config/preinitializer.rb ENV['RAILS_ENV'] ||= 'development' # le sigh require 'config/gems' config/gems.rb require "rubygems" require "isolate"… -
rdoc_osx_dictionary version 1.2.0 has been released!
3 Feb 2010 | 11:32 amrdoc via Apple's Dictionary.app. Automatically builds and installs an Apple Dictionary with all rdoc nicely formatted. Changes: 1.2.0 / 2010-02-03 3 minor enhancements: Added -d flag to delete .ri directory to help me debug. Loudly skip bad files created from rdoc. Skip reduce\d+ methods (generated methods from racc of no value to rdoc). 2 bug fixes: Added extra de-duping on xml creation to fix The Bug I Cannot Repro(tm). OMG I am an idiot. Generating class id string properly now. :/ http://rubyforge.org/projects/seattlerb -
rdoc_osx_dictionary version 1.1.1 has been released!
2 Feb 2010 | 10:51 pmrdoc via Apple's Dictionary.app. Automatically builds and installs an Apple Dictionary with all rdoc nicely formatted. Changes: 1.1.1 / 2010-02-02 1 minor enhancement: Extra munging to remove more (all?) warnings from the dictionary compiler 1 bug fix: Only run the hooks once per gem invocation, not once per install/uninstall http://rubyforge.org/projects/seattlerb -
rdoc_osx_dictionary version 1.1.1 has been released!
2 Feb 2010 | 10:50 pmrdoc via Apple's Dictionary.app. Automatically builds and installs an Apple Dictionary with all rdoc nicely formatted. Changes: 1.1.1 / 2010-02-02 1 minor enhancement: Extra munging to remove more (all?) warnings from the dictionary compiler 1 bug fix: Only run the hooks once per gem invocation, not once per install/uninstall http://rubyforge.org/projects/seattlerb -
rdoc_osx_dictionary version 1.1.0 has been released!
1 Feb 2010 | 5:32 pmrdoc via Apple's Dictionary.app. Automatically builds and installs an Apple Dictionary with all rdoc nicely formatted. Changes: 1.1.0 / 2010-02-01 2 minor enhancements: Added -f to force rebuild. Refactored system calls to a handler so failures are uniformly handled. 2 bug fixes: Fixed dictionary entry id munging to avoid errant duplicates. Setting $LC_ALL to C to fix unicode errors discovered in iTerm. http://rubyforge.org/projects/seattlerb
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BuildingWebApps Articles
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Web 2.0 Expo: TV and Radio with an API
National Public Radio (NPR) is changing what it means to be a news organization. While traditional news organizations want to keep their content close, NPR has taken the approach of making content widely available via an API – an approach they call “brand and release.” They’ve made 250,000 stories, going back 13 years, available through their API. Zack Brand from NPR said that the NPR API is getting about 2 million requests per month, and there are 1,300 registrants (you have to register to get access to the API). Content is available in a variety of formats; so far,… -
Web 2.0 Expo: Web Developer Tools
Ben Galbraith and Dio Almaer of Ajaxian and the developer tools group at Mozilla gave a wide-ranging talk on web developer tools. They noted that the web often seems more like a hack than a platform — it’s amazing that developers are able to make web apps do the things they do. This is especially true with Ajax raising the bar for interactivity, and sites turning into applications instead of documents. They’re out to make the web a better platform. Some future technologies that have them excited: HTML5 canvas Fast JavaScript — kicked off by Chrome, Firefox’s… -
Web 2.0 Expo: Social Media
The conference sessions at Web 2.0 Expo had a major emphasis on social media. I only attended a couple of these talks, about which I have brief comments below; at the end of the article, I have links to several others. Social Media Marketing – why it fails and how to fix it This one felt somewhat remedial to me, with the essential points being: Be authentic. You need to be a person, not just a representative of a company. It’s hard to change the marketing culture in an organization to deal well with social media. (A point that I was glad to gloss over, being in my tiny… -
Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco Spring 2009
March 31 – April 3, San Francisco Last week’s Web 2.0 Expo seemed like a successful event, with a good-sized crowd despite the economic malaise – due in part, no doubt, to unusually aggressive discounting and promotion. With multiple tracks across four days (one day of workshops and three of conference sessions) there was much more to see than any one person could possibly attend. Here’s a few articles that we’ve written about talks at the conference: Web 2.0 Expo: Social Media Web 2.0 Expo: Web Developer Tools TV and Radio with an API Many of the presentations are… -
Enhancing Conditional Routing in Rails
Rails’ routing infrastructure supports the concept of conditional routes: preconditions that must be satisfied before a particular route will trigger. Rails 2.1 supports one built-in condition, HTTP method checking, which is of some use but rather limited. What I needed was to be able to limit certain routes to only trigger when a particular host-name was used to access the application. I thought I’d have to write messy additional logic until a little comment tucked away in ActionController::Routing::RouteSet and ActionController::Routing::Routing caught my eye. Here I briefly…
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jarin udom's tumblelog
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UI Fundamentals for Programmers by Ryan Singer
8 Feb 2010 | 11:58 pmvia vimeo.com Posted via web from jarin’s posterous | Comment » -
Embrace Life - Really touching seatbelt PSA
8 Feb 2010 | 6:54 pmvia youtube.com Posted via web from jarin’s posterous | Comment » -
Mirror Scares!!!
8 Feb 2010 | 2:49 pmvia youtube.com Posted via web from jarin’s posterous | Comment » -
Wes Anderson Spider-Man
7 Feb 2010 | 10:30 pmvia youtube.com Posted via web from jarin’s posterous | Comment » -
Haha this is awesome: What would it look like if various filmmakers directed the Super Bowl?
6 Feb 2010 | 10:20 pmvia neatorama.com Posted via web from jarin’s posterous | Comment »
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ones zeros majors and minors
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Jumpcut
I can't really imagine what life was like before Jumpcut. If you're not using clipboard history, try it - it's basically one key command that will change the way you work. Even better: Launchbar has a clipboard manager, too (which I currently use). -
Hotkey Bookmarks
Since switching to Chrome the thing I've missed most is the ⌘# hotkeys for bookmarks. In Safari you can hit ⌘1 to open the first bookmark in your bookmark bar, ⌘2 to open the second, etc. This means you can keep your bookmark bar closed and jump to any site whose number you know pretty quickly. No clicking or extra UI required! In Chrome, ⌘N quickly switches you to the corresponding tab in the active window. Some people love this. That's great, and they're not wrong - it's a cool feature. What's wrong is having to pick sides. Spark is a great piece of OS X software which… -
Chrome Error Pages
Why so many different styles? -
2009 Open Source Top Ten
This was an amazing year for open source software. In alphabetical order, here are my favorite releases of 2009. BERT Beyond playing a massive role in making GitHub fast, BERT is a textbook example of how to do open source correctly. Three well documented and tested libraries double as reference implementations for those who would implement the spec in other languages. ClickToFlash In only a few months it became the canonical example of distributed version control gone right: a simple Safari plugin posted on GitHub got dozens of contributors and was kept surprisingly sane and useful under the… -
return early
I often see code like this: def logger unless @logger @logger LoggernewSTDOUT @loggerlevel LoggerWARN end @logger end What you really want to do is return the instance variable if it's already set. So why not do that? def logger return @logger if defined? @logger @logger LoggernewSTDOUT @loggerlevel LoggerWARN @logger end Or you could cache bang it.
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Rail Spikes - Home
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Fixing raw HTML error pages from Facebooker
2 Feb 2010 | 3:16 pmI am using Facebooker for Facebook Connect with Rails 2.3.5 with the rails_xss plugin, which escapes HTML by default unless you use raw. I recently started seeing exceptions that looked like this: The top of the HTML contains a <fb:fbml> tag which led me to suspect Facebooker. A quick git bisect confirmed this. But why is it happening? I spent some time looking through the Facebooker source code and located the suspicious-sounding facebooker_pretty_errors.rb file. Sure enough, that file renders a template for errors that look good on the Facebook Canvas (assuming you’re not using… -
Fixing the Heroku "Too many authentication failures for git" problem
31 Jan 2010 | 8:42 pmGetting an error like this when you push to Heroku? electricsheep:herokuapp look$ git push heroku master Received disconnect from 75.101.163.44: 2: Too many authentication failures for git fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly If you like to create an ssh key for each server you use, you run this risk. The reason is that unless you specify which key to use for a host, ssh-agent sends each key in turn until one works. However some server configure sshd to reject connections after too many attempted logins. For example, Dreamhost does this (see Dealing with SSH’s key spam problem for… -
Editing Migrations
20 Jan 2010 | 8:29 amI have a confession to make: when I’m starting out a new project, especially if it’s a small team, I like to edit my migrations. At the beginning of a project there are always a ton of changes in how models are defined and how they relate to one another. I find it so much easier to edit migrations and keep these initial declarations compact than to write new migrations for every piddling change. The downside is an increased communications burden—people need to know they need to run rake db:migrate:reset when migrations change. And, of course, once you’ve got real data in production,… -
Y Combinator Interview Advice
8 Nov 2009 | 10:07 pmPaul Graham emailed YC co-founders to share their interview stories for those who were asked to interview for the W10 batch. Here’s my take. First off, congratulations! You’re probably wondering what to do next, depending on the outcome of the interviews. I’m not going to tell you not to be nervous, because that won’t help. But keep perspective – YC’s not the end-all of the startup world. If you’re dedicated, you can make your company happen (startups did exist before YC, believe it or not). I know one team that got rejected, but decided to move to Silicon Valley anyway. They… -
Let a human test your app, not (just) unit tests
29 Oct 2009 | 10:06 amI’m a big believer in unit testing. We unit test our Rails apps extensively, and we’ve done so for years. On some projects, we do both unit testing and integration testing using Cucumber. I preach unit testing to everyone I can. I’d probably turn down a project if the client wouldn’t let us write tests (though this has never come up, and I don’t think it would be a hard sell). But for a long time, that’s all I did on my projects. Our clients and users would find the bugs that got past the developers. They were, in effect, our QA testers. (I think a lot of small/agile teams are the…
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redemption in a blog
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Railscasts Xcode theme
4 Feb 2010 | 6:12 amFor those of you who use the excellent Railscasts TextMate theme and want to replicate the theme in Xcode, you can grab my version from Github. This is what it looks like: Save it into ~/Library/Application Support/Xcode/Color Themes/, restart Xcode, and open its Preferences. You will be able to pick the Railscasts Color Theme in the Fonts & Colors tab. I dug this theme up after realizing that I haven’t actually saved the Railscasts theme I’d replicated from several months ago and was too lazy to set up another one in my other Mac. Koen Van Der Auwera did a similar theme too… -
Setting up virtualization on Ubuntu with KVM
1 Feb 2010 | 6:18 amThese instructions have been tested on Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) 64-bit. Skip right to the instructions if you’re short on time. After being a happy Xen user for several years now, I’ve recently had to switch to an alternative virtualization solution. My colleague Arun (@iamclovin) actually struggled for a week with Xen VMs that locked up on Hardy; we’ve had much success with Hardy and Xen before, so we attributed it to a hardware problem since these were our first blade servers. Out of ideas, we tried Karmic (Ubuntu 9.10) only to discover that Xen support via the apt package… -
Stop and Reload buttons merged in Firefox
14 Jan 2010 | 2:41 amA minor UI improvement to Firefox has been made to Firefox and it’s currently only available on nightly builds of Firefox: the Stop and Reload buttons have been merged into a single button. This change should make it into Firefox 3.6. While a page is loading, the button acts as a Stop button: When it’s done loading, it becomes a Reload button. I’m always up for 1 less unnecessary button. I think this feature is copied from Safari (I might be wrong). -
Firefox quick tip: view images in a new tab quickly
25 Nov 2009 | 3:13 amA mini-tip on viewing images quickly in a new tab in Firefox. Useful for web devs who want to look at the URL of an image quickly. As an example, here’s the Youtube webpage of the owner of Maru the Cat: To open the thumbnail image of Maru in a new tab, right-click the image, and then middle-click the View Image item from the context menu: It should open up in a new tab: You can also do the same for background images (middle-click View Background Image from the right-click context menu). -
How my simple iPhone app made it to the top of the App Store
22 Sep 2009 | 7:26 amSlightly more than a month back I wrote this little iPhone app (App Store link), almost a toy app really, to check the usage of my data plan with my local telco (Singtel). I wanted to scratch an itch and I also really didn’t want to exceed my data plan – the fees are excessive. Anyway, I submitted it to the iPhone App Store for approval as a free app and named it Singtel Data Usage. No points for creativity with the name but I thought it’d be nice to know exactly what the app did from just reading its name. After one keyword rejection (which was unfounded but I wasn’t…
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Dead Programmer Society
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Crossing The PhoneGap For Multiplatform Mobile Applications
18 Jan 2010 | 8:30 amI had first heard of the PhoneGap open source framework for multiplatform mobile development last year at the FutureRuby conference in Toronto. Honestly, I did not really concentrate on all they were saying at the time, and in the flurry of info including back-to-back mobile sessions with Rhomobile, I did not fully retain a clear picture of what they had to offer. My bad.It was not until late last year, while working on plans for a very cool mobile application, that I was reminded about PhoneGap by one of my colleagues. After a brief evaluation of their benefits vs. the other multiplatform… -
Sparkline Some Interest With Ruby on Rails
12 Jan 2010 | 12:12 pmRecently, I added some sparkline graphs to a Ruby on Rails application. A sparkline is a very small graphic that displays a large amount of information, typically shown over time, and usually embedded in some other text. Invented by the father of modern infographics Edward Tufte, the sparkline has become a fixture of many online applications that want to visually display some stats in a simple, integrated way.When it come to adding sparklines into a Ruby on Rails application, there are a couple of different options. You can chart the data on the server, output being an image file. You can… -
Thanks For A Great #code2009
31 Dec 2009 | 9:07 amIt has been an amazing year for both personal and professional code development.Starting with the inspiration to begin Project Flying Robot, to the prestige of presenting at LARubyConf, FutureRuby, TWTRCON, IgniteLA, 140 The Twitter Conference, RubyConf, and Conferencia Rails, and lastly the year-end fun of starting out the ongoing #code2009 Twitter meme, so popular that it spawned a couple of mashups and got picked up by Hacker News and uber-language blog Lambda the Ultimate. In between were numerous meetups, hackfests, code jams, code dojos, pull requests, and casual codeslinging with… -
Flying Robot: World Tour 2009 Continues
16 Nov 2009 | 8:15 amAs usual, no blog posts = a lot of other activity here at Flying Robot HQ. Among other personal stuff, my brother Damen Evans and I have been getting ready for the last public demos of @flyingrobot for 2009. And we are going out with style! Later this week, we roll up to San Francisco to present at the prestigious RubyConf! Then, next week @flyingrobot and I will fly off to Madrid, Spain, to do our first European appearance at the awesome-looking Conferencia Rails.Anyhow, if you have been waiting eagerly for more Flying Robot news and gadgets, be patient. We will be unveiling our mysterious… -
PostgreSQL on Ubuntu on EC2: Backing It All Up
10 Oct 2009 | 11:19 amThis post continues what I started with "PostgreSQL on Ubuntu on EC2: The Installation Guide". Once you have your PostgreSQL database server instance running, you will need to backup two different things: your database data, and the instance itself. The database data will be backed up using Elastic Block Storage (EBS) snapshots. Once we have the instance running the backups correctly, we will then create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that will allow you to launch a new instance to replace the database server in case it goes down.Backing Up The DatabaseFirst, we need to connect to our database…
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Intridea - Company Blog
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Present.ly Chrome Extension
29 Jan 2010 | 6:00 amWe’re always looking for ways to make it easier to keep up to date with your co-workers using Present.ly. Recently I’ve been using the Mac Beta of Chrome and thought a Chrome Extension could be a great way to use Present.ly throughout the day. As of today it is available on Google’s Chrome Extension Directory. The functionality of the extension is still growing, but you can read and post updates to your network as well as view text attachments. It will keep refreshing automatically and let you know when new updates come in, letting you check in without even opening a new… -
Official VOA PNN Application Released for iPhone and Android
25 Jan 2010 | 6:44 amOn the heels of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Net Freedom speech, Intridea was delighted to receive notification Apple had approved the official iPhone application we developed for Voice of America’s (VOA) Persian News Network (PNN). “This new application gives Iranians a unique opportunity to get the latest news on their mobile devices and to share with the world the news as it happens in their country,” said Acting PNN Director Alex Belida. “It is a groundbreaking way to expand our reach inside Iran and deepen our relationship with a key VOA… -
Simple Mustache JSON Serialization
21 Jan 2010 | 1:15 pmIf you’ve taken a look at Mustache, the “stupid in a good way” templating engine, you might know that there are also Javascript Mustache renderers such as Mustache.js. Today we’ve released a small library called mustache_json that allows you to compile your Mustache view objects into JSON, allowing them to be interpreted by Javascript Mustache rendering engines. What this means for your project is that you will finally have a identical client-side and server-side rendering interface, opening wide the opportunities for pushing more of the rendering work onto the… -
Presently Now Available for Palm webOS Devices
20 Jan 2010 | 9:05 pmComing hot off the heels of the Presently 2.0 release for the iPhone, comes Presently for Palm webOS. Presently for Palm brings most of the same great features from the iPhone version to any Palm webOS device, such as the Pixi or the Pre, with the unique look and feel of Palm webOS applications. Some of the great features of the webOS version of Presently include: Post and view updates View your replies, direct messages, and your feed View profiles groups and people View updates for groups and people Join existing Presently accounts Create your own Presently account if you don't have one ... -
Presently v2.0 Released for iPhone
6 Jan 2010 | 5:18 pmA new version of the Presently application has just been released for iPhone and is now available on the App Store. Presently for the iPhone is the best way to keep in touch with your co-workers where you're not in front of your computer. The new version of Presently brings a completely new application, developed using Appcelerator's Titanium Mobile platform, that is packed with many more features than the previous. Below is a list of just some of the great new features that have been added to the latest version of Presently for iPhone. Completely redesigned user interface iPhone 3GS users…
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Josh Huckabee
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jQuery with Rails 3
8 Feb 2010 | 2:04 pmOne of the most talked about features in Rails 3 is its plug & play architecture with various frameworks like Datamapper in place of ActiveRecord for the ORM or jQuery for javascript. However, I've yet to see much info on how to actually do this with the javascript framework. Fortunately, it looks like a lot of the hard work has already been done. Rails now emits HTML that is compatible with the unobtrusive approach to javascript. Meaning, instead of seeing a delete link like this: you'll now see it written as This makes it very easy for a javascript driver to come along, pick out and… -
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) for Kindle
11 Sep 2009 | 3:22 amI just started reading the SICP book (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, by Abelson, Sussman, and Sussman) which MIT Press has so graciously made available on their website. I'm not very fond of sitting in front of a computer screen to read books, so I mirrored their copy locally and converted it into a prc file (using Mobipocket Creator) so I could read it on my Kindle. Here it is for anyone else who wants to save a bit of time. It is provided under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. -
Ubiquity Commands Updated
22 Jul 2009 | 3:36 pmUbiquity 0.5 was released a few weeks ago, and I finally got around to updating my commands. If you were using my W3C or Drupal API Ubiquity commands, they are now 0.5 compatible. Please update your command source. -
March Phoenix Drupal Meetup
3 Mar 2009 | 9:29 amThe March Phoenix Drupal meetup will be held next Tuesday, March 10th at 7pm. The meetup is moving on to the ASU campus thanks to the help of Chris Yates. Event details can be found on the DrupalPHX group page. Chris will be giving a presentation about the Mars Image Explorer project and how they are utilizing Drupal within that project. There's also been mention of DrupalCon attendees sharing a bit about what went on at the conference. Hope you all can make it. -
Phoenix Metro Drupal Meetup Next Tuesday
3 Feb 2009 | 11:24 amThere will be a Phoenix Drupal meetup next Tuesday evening at Macayo's in Tempe. See official event details and sign up HERE. This meeting is a chance for local Drupal developers to get together and discuss what's going on in their Drupal world and Drupal in general. While we are working on a more presentation friendly meeting spot for future meetups, this will give us a chance to at least meet and gauge community interest level. Hope to see you there!
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Engine Yard
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Rails 3 Beta is Out — A Retrospective
4 Feb 2010 | 12:00 pmThe Rails team has finally released the Rails 3 beta, after more than a year since the Rails and Merb teams started working on this release. You can read all about it at the official Rails blog, but I figured I’d take the opportunity to share my take on the release. First of all, you’re probably sick of hearing this, but we’ve done far, far more than we ever expected. A lot of that happened in the last few weeks. One of the things that most surprised and impressed me is the Rails core team’s (and especially DHH’s) attention to detail and the experience of the… -
Homebrew: OS X’s Missing Package Manager
2 Feb 2010 | 10:00 amManaging software packages on Unix has always been, to put it politely, a giant pain, and most Linux distributions are built around the different ways we’ve all been trying to alleviate that pain. In this post, I’ll walk you through Homebrew, a fantastic new option for package management made simple. Pre-Homebrew, there were various attempts to create effective package managers for OS X. The two most popular efforts were Fink and MacPorts, but they each had their frustrations. In both cases, creating packages or portfiles was still complex and difficult. Max Howell’s done a… -
Iteration Shouldn’t Spin Your Wheels!
27 Jan 2010 | 10:00 amThis article was originally included in the September issue of the Engine Yard Newsletter. To read more posts like this one, subscribe to the Engine Yard Newsletter In this series, Evan Phoenix, Rubinius creator and Ruby expert, presents tips and tricks to help you improve your knowledge of Ruby. Ruby is a rich language that believes there should be more than one way to express yourself—the many ways of counting and iterating are no exception. Most Ruby programmers are familiar with the most common one: Integer#times 100.times { i p i } Integer#times counts from 0 up to 99,… -
Announcement: Engine Yard Cloud Price Reductions
26 Jan 2010 | 10:00 amToday, we’re announcing new lower pricing on Small and Medium instances for Engine Yard Cloud. Small instances now cost $0.11 per hour (down from $0.145) and Medium instances now cost $0.20 per hour (down from $0.24). This means you can run a full-time 1 ECU, 1.7GB instance on Engine Yard Cloud for less than $80 per month or a powerful 5 ECU, 1.7GB instance for $144 per month. We’re backdating this change to January 1st, so all usage in January so far will be billed at the new lower prices. [Happy New Year!] We’re able to provide this new lower pricing because of a new… -
Rails and Merb Merge: Rails Core (Part 4 of 6)
22 Jan 2010 | 12:00 pmAfter working to make Rails faster and more modular, we took a look at the glue code holding Rails together: Railties. Railties started life as a relatively modest piece of code in the early days of Rails, but it eventually grew to encompass quite a few different areas. For instance, Rails 2.3 included quite a bit of code for managing plugins, and some additional code for managing gems. Adding in explicit support for engines meant yet more code. In isolation, each of these pieces of code made a lot of sense as they were added, but as the pieces accumulated, plugin authors, and even Rails…
