April 2007
Streetcards - GapingVoid
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I Bought a Mac
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What's New in Edge Rails: ActiveResource Gets...
ActiveResource got a pretty major update today with the ability to invoke custom methods without having to go rooting around to manually build the invocation URI. This feature is close to my heart not only because of my affinity for ARes, but also because this patch was one I submitted as part of the Rails Hackfest. There was initially a lot of back and forth regarding the implementation and I...
Unit testing for RLisp
I’ve been coding RLisp pretty much continuously since about one week before RuPy 2007. Even a temporary switch to different hardware and revision control system did not make me stop. Turning RLisp into something more widely usable seems like a huge task. Every new language is expected to come with full CPAN out of the box. I don’t know if RLisp will ever get there, but I should at...
Distributed version control with SVK
I had to shut down the server with my Subversion repository for a few days. As I felt like coding and I hate coding without some sort of revision control system in place, it was the time to check out some Subversion alternatives. I dumped my Subversion repository (svnadmin dump) and scp’ed it to another machine. Pretty much at random I picked SVK first. It turned out what I did wasn’t...
Jens Axel Soegaard: Fun with macros - extending...
[Remember to leave a comment: Was this post silly? Enligthning? Old news?] “Scheme vector notation sucks” - a common complaint often heard amongst children and drunks. They might even be right. The sum of a three element vector is calculated like this: (define a (vector 1 2 3)) (+ (vector-ref a 0) (vector-ref a 1) (vector-ref a 2))
It looks like they are right. Can we repair this...
Basecamp Project Integration
Basecamp is a great collaborative project manager from 37signals.
With their API they have released a few ‘official’ extras to integrate Basecamp with other programs. These include:
Blinksale invoicing
Harvest: Time tracking
Tick: Budget tracking
BCTix: Issue tracker
Basecamp OS X Widget
SproutIt Mailroom
Phonified Tracker
Telescope
Sundial widget
Scout for Tablet...
Basecamp Project Integration
Basecamp is a great collaborative project manager from 37signals.
With their API they have released a few ‘official’ extras to integrate Basecamp with other programs. These include:
Blinksale invoicing
Harvest: Time tracking
Tick: Budget tracking
BCTix: Issue tracker
Basecamp OS X Widget
SproutIt Mailroom
Phonified Tracker
Telescope
Sundial widget
Scout for Tablet...
What Kind Of Blog Are You Writing?
Darren at Problogger.net has categorized three types of bloggers that might help you decide what direction your writing is going.
If you have started a blog and are on your way towards your blogging goals, this is a good read to see where you can actually take things.
Like many of us, Darren began small and has worked his way up, building his body of work - or body of business, if you will.
...
What Kind Of Blog Are You Writing?
Darren at Problogger.net has categorized three types of bloggers that might help you decide what direction your writing is going.
If you have started a blog and are on your way towards your blogging goals, this is a good read to see where you can actually take things.
Like many of us, Darren began small and has worked his way up, building his body of work - or body of business, if you will.
...
Chad Fowler's Keynote at the MWRC.
(via hornbeck’s shared items in Google Reader)
Eric Merritt: Erlang and the Web
I have been spending a lot of time thinking about leveraging Erlang’s concurrency features and OTP in web applications. Right now I don’t believe that any of the available frameworks do that very well. Erlyweb tries to be ‘rails’ for Erlang without really leveraging the features that make Erlang great. Yaws is more a web server then a web app server. It tries to make some...
Game tree - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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TextMate Bundle Browser
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O'Reilly Network -- Customizing TextMate
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Mike Hommey: svk shortcuts
Jörg, you can significantly reduce the number of commands to type by using some of the useful svk shortcuts.
First, you can create the mirror and check it out with a simple one liner:
svk cp svn+ssh://joerg@svn.debian.org/svn/debconf-data/ /chekout/directory
It will ask you the base URI to mirror (in case you’d actually want to mirror svn+ssh://joerg@svn.debian.org/svn/, for example), and...
Robby Russell: You Might Learn Something at the...
I love to look at other peoples code. Initially, that’s what got me excited about Open Source software. Otherwise, I was looking at small snippets on various developer sites and really not getting the complete picture for how everything tied together.
Last night, I finally had a chance to checkout the sample caboose application, which was created as a way for people to get an idea for how some...
Pound vs. Pen: Because You Need A Load-Balancing...
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Mongrel: Pen/Balance
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Install Ruby on Rails on a (dv) Dedicated Virtual...
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On GC and finalizers in Ruby, corrected weak hash...
Jens Himmelreich reported a problem with my
weak hash table implementations:
You use a hash, but you only save the object_id in the WeakHash. Every time you
need the hash, you get it back from the heap by _id2ref. You use a finalizer
to be acknowledged, if the hash is garbage-collected.
Sometimes this concept works, sometimes I get a RangeError. I log the
finalization and my theory - without...
cruise_control.rb campfire plugin
We’ve been somewhat unhappy with our current Cerberus installation, so we’ve decided to jump on the CC.rb bandwagon. Though there were a couple of problems when adding projects (I’ll try to expand on that in another post), the overall experience was pretty good—installation was a breeze, and the plugin system makes extending it dead simple.
As proof…
Campfire plugin for...
Dominique Boucher: Another commercial Erlang...
Slideaware, a company that develops a presentation management platform, has decided to port all its code base Erlang. They started blogging about their experience here. They seem very pleased by the end result. I particularly like the reason why they investigated Erlang:
We liked the idea of replacing our multiple language stack (Lighttpd + RoR + SQLlite + XMLRpc + Jython + Lucene) with an...
bsag: Modded Recumbent Bikes Rip Through NASA Ames...
Nice array of recumbent bikes and trikes. If I rode one, I’d feel obliged to say “Ex-NASA, you know” in Wallace’s voice to anyone passing.
Tags: bike, cycling, technology (via hornbeck’s shared items in Google Reader)
Wishlisting Blog » Blog Archive » Deploying Ruby...
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PragDave
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API Documentation - Twitter Development Talk |...
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josh: April SF Ruby Meetup notes
On Monday we had our April SF Ruby Meetup. The meetup was at the offices of Obvious, makers of Twitter. After all the changes the meetup group has been through in the last year, it was nice to have a good old fashioned “here’s some cool code” kind of evening. Lots of good people there, including David Black who stopped by since we was in town for the Web 2.0 Expo.
I...
Paul Ingles: Checking Object Equality In Mocha
I’m working on a little pet Rails project and wanted to use Mocha to isolate my controller tests a little from what is usually encouraged, especially in light of what happened last time. I figured I’d give Mocha a go.
I wanted to verify that my service was called with objects that look equal to what I was expecting. Ordinarily, it will compare instances - are they the same object. I didn’t want...
Christian Lynbech: Dynamic Languages are coming.
On the latest ACM TechNews newsletter, there was a reference to an InfoWorld story on the virtues of Dynamic Languages. The case is being made that the industry to a still greater extent turn to dynamic languages to tap into improved productivity. I am a great beliver in the promise of dynamic languages and I am here not just thinking of Lisp but dynamic languages in general including Ruby and...
Basic Readability
Is this simple code? It’s an example from the docs on Symbol#to_proc:
people.select(&:manager?).collect(&:salary)
It’s certainly readable. It’s elegant and expressive. But making it possible employs a number of fairly advanced topics relating to automatic conversion of method arguments as well as the ability to extend existing classes—not easy, and not something that someone new to...
Yariv Sadan: An Erlang Pipe
Yahoo Pipes is one of the most innovative apps I’ve seen: it lets you program data feeds. More specifically, you can use Pipes build programs (called “pipes”) that generate output feeds from input feeds by combining, filtering, and manipulating the inputs using different modules from the Pipes IDE. The IDE has a friendly graphical interface, letting you drag, drop and connect different components...
web.py: makes web apps
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Decision Tree Learning in Ruby - igvita.com
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Steven M Smith - Rethinking Stand-Up Meetings
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Steven M Smith - Rethinking Stand-Up Meetings 2
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http://martinfowler.com/articles/itsNotJustStanding...
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Adding Concurrency to Our Erlang Program
In our last thrilling installment, we used Erlang to fetch a book’s title and sales rank from Amazon. Now let’s extend this to fetch the data for multiple books, first one-at-a-time, and then in parallel.
A word from our lawyers: read your Amazon Terms of Service before trying this code. You may have limitations on the number of requests you can send per second or somesuch. This...
A First Erlang Program
One of the joys of playing at being a publisher is that I get to mess around with the technology in books as those books are getting written. Lately I’ve been having a blast with Joe Armstrong’s new Erlang Book. At some point I’ll blog about the really neat way the Erlang database unifies the set-based SQL query language and list comprehensions (it’s obvious when you think...
Rails: Scaling to Multiple Databases
Via loudthinking.com, DHH points to the Magic Multi-Connections plugin by Nic Williams. This plugin could be used in any number of ways, Nic has a recipe for randomly selecting a connection from a pool, but the plugin could just as easily be made to work with a set of model objects spread across multiple databases.
The interesting story behind this is on DHH’s blog. Read: Alex Payne’s...
Josh Knowles Just Another Opinionated Developer
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Magic Multi-Connections
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Dr Nic » Magic Multi-Connections: A “facility in...
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Avi Bryant: Turtles need Speed
In a comment on my last post, Steven Swerling (a fellow Smalltalker) questions my repeated nagging about the speed of the current Ruby implementations (both C and Java):
Zed Shaw said that “scalability” is most constructively defined not by raw speed but by how predictably overall throughput can be increased by plugging in additional hardware. (see here. From that perspective, JRuby doesn’t...
ScobleCam coming?
Come back Monday to my Twitter account at 10 a.m. for something fun. I’ll be at the Web 2.0 Expo in the lobby. Where will you be?
I can’t let Justin.TV and Chris Pirillo have all the fun!
I’m taking the weekend off, hope you are having a good one and see you on Monday morning!
UPDATE: Oh, heck, beta test here. We’ll see how long Verizon Wireless is going to last. We’re driving to Merced. My...
Eric Kow (kowey): congrats to hg!
I certainly do not speak for the darcs project as whole, but as a contributor and an enthusiastic fan. In any case, congratulations to the Mercurial team for adoption by Mozilla! I’m very happy to see Mercurial being adopted by both mutt and Mozilla, two projects that I also use. For me, it means that we’re slowly starting to move on from centralised version control. There may be...
Finding Seth Godin in Utah
Phil Burns wants to
bring Seth Godin to Utah to speak. That would be cool. Seth’s
promoting his new book, The
Dip. Here’s the deal (from Seth’s blog):
In each city I’m able to get to, if you buy 5 books (in advance), you get to come hear me give a speech for free. OR, if you prefer to think of it differently, if you pay $50 to hear me speak, you get five books...
Five Common Working-At-Home Problems- Solved!
We’re all familiar with the advantages (sometimes idealized) of working from home. You can work in your pajamas, you have a 25-foot commute, you have increased flexibility with your personal obligations, and you get some decent tax deductions. However, there are some special considerations that may need to be addressed or accommodated to make your home office the best it can be. Here are a few...