RAG on Rails

Rock on!

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 11:20:12 -0700

Rock on!: I’m getting excited about this. Finally, an opportunity for sane leadership. America, don’t disappoint me again.

Ruby BDB and You.

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 14:20:37 -0700

I just got through tearing my hair out to get this to work finally. I hope that this is useful to anyone out there that doesn’t want to install ruby from MacPorts and already has the latest BerkeleyDB installed.

The problem is that to install the ruby BDB bindings you need to build it from source. I used 0.6.5 from ftp://moulon.inra.fr/pub/ruby/. If you have bekeley db installed somewhere then all you need to know is where the lib directory is and the include directory is. For me they were:

—with-db-lib=/usr/local/BerkeleyDB.4.7/lib

—with-db-include=/usr/local/BerkeleyDB.4.7/include

Since this the lib and include directories are both in that location I sort cut this by using:

—with-db-dir=/usr/local/BerkeleyDB.4.7

This should have worked, but there is one thing that I missed:

env ARCHFLAGS=”-arch i386”

I picked this up somewhere and it stopped the stupid errors about not finding db_version for ppc. The final command to get you off the ground is:

env ARCHFLAGS=”-arch i386” ruby extconf.rb —with-db-dir=/usr/local/BerkeleyDB.4.7

Drive Faster!!!

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 15:23:16 -0700

Drive Faster!!!

You should watch to full length video.

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 16:57:40 -0700

You should watch to full length video.

TWC is lazy: Part 2, Episode 6

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 22:34:46 -0700

So did I mention that Time Warner Cable has completely undermined my trust and confidence in them.

I was almost feeling sorry for them. I was starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel and expecting that there truly would be a day where I would have Internet at my home and it would be provided by Time Warner Cable.

I have lost all hope.

My initial sympathy for TWC started when an engineer came out to the apartment (this was the second visit that we’d had at this point) and tried to test the connection that he had set up. We quickly realized that my apartment had no direct cable line in that was actually connected to the box in the garage. The engineer supposed that a cable had been clipped during the improvements and that they would need to send out a construction crew. I was promised a call back to arrange that appointment…soon. No call, but I was following up with the management company. The management, incidentally, are doing their best, but I’m pretty pissed that this was even an issue. I hope they are too.

I called in to the TWC support line to see what the deal was and make sure that an appointment got made. In fact there was an appointment made. I was not informed, but the rep. told me that I would need to be on the premises and the construction crew might need access to the adjacent units. Well shit, thanks for the heads up. Maybe next time you can let me know when I’m expected and home.

Those that know me know that I have a hefty commute, and with no Internet I’ve got a pretty small pipe to work through with my AirCard (total life-saver by the way, you should get one). I arranged for the management to be available to let the guy in and was able to give very short notice that they might need access to the 2 units below me. The construction crew came and did some work and left. I was emailed by the building manager that they couldn’t get the go ahead in time for the other units and that the crew would be back out on Friday. Damn, ok well at least the ball was rolling, it was being handled, I’ll have my Internet soon.

Today it is Friday July 11. The construction crew supposedly came and left. I still have no Internet. I was fortunate to have someone on the support line for TWC to tell me that there was an appointment today. Thanks. She passed a note across to their construction department and expected that I would hear back on Monday. Oh, hey mister TWC man, don’t worry I wasn’t expecting to have this done today, or last week. I wasn’t expecting an update when it turned out that more work would be required, or that I would need to reschedule.

Time Warner, get your act together. This is not professional, it’s amature. I hope it does not reflect the quality of your work and ongoing service.

TWC is lazy

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 09:40:01 -0700

I just tried calling tech support to get my cable modem working. I call using skype and I get a message telling me that because my inbound number is out of state they don’t know how to route my call. Then they ask me to hang up and try again from a local phone. WTF! I’ll be happy to enter in a local number so you can route me. I’m in your SoCal LA North Division, will that route me well enought.

This after being told I would get a call back in 10 minutes from the service guy about if he needs any more information to get the modem up and running. That was yesterday and apparently he did because my internet is still down. Lame!

I’m tired of poor service from companies that specialize in services. Service is our life and focus, take some pride in the work and be amazing. Is that so much to ask?

Focus

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 15:59:10 -0700

Focus

Rake Bash Completion, FTW

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 09:06:16 -0700

Rake Bash Completion, FTW: For the OS X console, but should work for most versions of Bash. Drop in your ~/.profile

Oops.

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 11:51:22 -0700

Oops.

Nationwide killed my autopay

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 10:07:55 -0700

I found out today that Nationwide cancelled my Auto policy because back in February they killed my autopay. When I asked them about it the lady said that it did look like those were EFTs but that they didn’t have an agreement signed by me. Based on all of the confusion and the 10 minutes on hold while investigating I think they messed up. Note to self: Don’t trust Nationwide to bill you on time, they may cancel your policy before they get around to it.

Twitter Said To Be Abandoning Ruby on Rails...???!!!

Sat, 03 May 2008 11:35:23 -0700

Twitter Said To Be Abandoning Ruby on Rails...???!!!: It’s pretty clear that people are clueless about where Rails is now as far as performance. And as far as I can tell there has been nothing but unanimous agreement from the Twitter people that they are not changing their technology. This smells of FUD. What does Arrington have against Rails anyways.

Dopplr will calculate your carbon footprint

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 14:15:55 -0700

I’ve been using Dopplr for quite a while now and I just recently noticed a new tab they added to my profile page.

This new feature looks at your travel schedule retroactively and in to the future and estimates your carbon footprint. I also noticed that when creating new trips you can select your method of travel (airplane, car, train). I’m assuming this is to more accurately estimate your impact. This is pretty neat since normally this type of information is pretty tricky to collect, especially when you are travelling frequently.

Developer's Guide - Google Chart API - Google Code

Sun, 09 Dec 2007 16:56:38 -0800

Developer's Guide - Google Chart API - Google Code: Was shown this last week. Sweet idea.

OpenSocial... 50% there

Sun, 09 Dec 2007 16:52:54 -0800

I’m starting to really see the gaps in OpenSocial. That is, the difference between 0.5 and 1.0. I think a lot of people are forgetting that this is not even a complete spec. For example, as a OpenSocial application you need to have a notion of “streams”, which in turn have an idea of “folders” in which you create new actions. The REST API makes no mention of this abstraction. The purpose of these streams are pretty fuzzy too.

So, who is writing the last 0.5 of the API? And when can we get the next piece?

Cary says this should be Asa’s slogan.

Thu, 06 Dec 2007 08:05:00 -0800

Cary says this should be Asa’s slogan.

Europe, meet Amazon S3

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 18:52:13 -0800

Amazon announced today that they are opening a new datacenter in Europe. This datacenter will be playing host to a new European S3. The goal of this move was to address the concerns that the AWS suite of services were not well suited for global users. S3 has been getting some negative reviews by many Europeans as idealistic and impractical with the primary justification being the terrible latency experienced from across the pond.

ELC uses the AWS toolset extensively. At RailsConf Europe I was very surprised to hear people’s apprehension with S3 and EC2. Many were convinced that S3 was doomed to fail in the web application space because of the poor performance outside of North America. It seems that Amazon was listening.

I was surprised, and frankly excited to see that they have explicitly differentiated the European S3 and the the American S3. Storage and request fees are slightly more expensive in Europe. This may be a reflection of the differing energy costs. Having separate EU and US storage facilities that can be managed by the developers themselves was a smart move on Amazon’s part. This gives application developers the opportunity to optimize the distribution of static content that may be location specific. It also leaves open the option of dynamically switching asset servers based on IP location. Exciting! If they do eventually try to unite the services I hope that they make multi-homed IPs a possibility with S3; then we’ll have a real CDN.

OpenSocial and Ruby

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 22:13:00 -0800

OpenSocial was released late in the evening on Thursday, November 1st with much fanfare. MySpace is now boasting an API, as does Orkutt, and LinkedIn among many others. This is great! Facebook has revolutionized social widgets with the release of their API. Its exciting to see the possibility of expanding the coverage of these widgets across all of the major (and minor) networks. ELC Technologies will be investing quite a bit of time towards developing a Ruby implementation of the OpenSocial set of standards. Expect a first draft of a gem and a Rails plugin by the end of the week.

Josh and I started working on the standard based on the documentation that Google released. They have 4 general APIs that they have pulled together under the OpenSocial banner. The JavaScript API specifies how to build widgets using the same constructs as used in Google Gadgets. The People and Friends data API describes methods for retrieving information about different user’s profile along with their friends information. The Activities data API supports reading and updating a users activities and reading their friend’s activities. The Persistence data API allows for the manipulation of key/value pairs on a OpenSocial compatible network.

Yarrr

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 22:39:30 -0700

Yarrr

New before_filter semantics

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 22:24:47 -0700

Something I posted on the ELC Tech Blog at: here

It looks like Rails 2.0 will no longer pay attention to the return value of before_filters. Currently, in our Pre-Rails 2.0 world, before_filters stop processing a request when they encounter a return value of false. You may recognize the common pattern:


  redirect_to new_session_path && return false

Rails 2.0 won’t require a return value of false for a before_filter to stop the action, but will instead look to see if you called redirect_to or render. If either of these functions are called the filter chain is halted. This should clean up a lot of code and remove a lot of repetition. At the end of the day your before filters look almost the same as they always have, just drop the && return false.

"If this is what sends me to hell, God’s not paying attention."

Fri, 14 Sep 2007 09:31:49 -0700

“If this is what sends me to hell, God’s not paying attention.”

- Toby Keller