Friday, July 18, 2008
I got stuck for 90 minutes at the dentist office, so I decided to organize all my iPhone apps. First screen (left) is essentials, stuff I use every day. Second screen (right) is references and tools.
Third screen is "communications and entertainment". Fourth screen is the graveyard, for things I don't use regularly or can't get rid of.
I can think of worse ways to kill 90 minutes.
Labels: iPhone
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
At
OtherInbox we love open source and are looking for ways to share some of our labors with the community. Today I came across a great opportunity to contribute something to
Ruby-on-Rails core development. I'm posting it here so everyone can see how easy it is to contribute.
I was building a JSON API to enable some new awesome features we're working on. Following the
JSON request specification, I had the client setting its MIME type to "application/jsonrequest". But this was not causing Rails to recognize the request as JSON and thus the request body was not properly parsed. After doing some digging, I realized that Rails only looks for MIME type "application/json".
Fortunately, MIME type processing is implemented really humanely in Rails, so I whipped up a little patch that adds "application/jsonrequest" as a synonym for the JSON MIME type. First I wrote a test to prove that this was a problem. Once I had a failing test, I added the MIME type, and got my test passing. I followed the
git patch instructions on lighthouse, then jumped into IRC #rails-contrib to garner support for it.
I happened to see that
Rick Olson, the author of the existing JSON parsing code, was in the chat, so I pinged him with the lighthouse ticket. He tested it and applied it, and now
our one line of code is a part of Rails!
Hopefully this will save some future JSON implementer a bit of pain.
Labels: git, rails
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
I will be speaking at the
Lone Star Ruby Conference in September about how we use Ruby to deploy, monitor, and manage a cluster of servers running in the
Amazon Web Services virtual cloud. Below is a summary of what I'll be talking about.
In OtherInbox, almost every system administration task imaginable is carried out using Ruby, meaning we as developers can enjoy all of Ruby's expressive benefits and spend less time scripting the shell, writing cron tasks, or using other languages. Because we make fewer context switches from thinking in Ruby to thinking in other languages, we also reap a big productivity benefit.
Using Ruby throughout our cloud also means that porting the application to run in different production environments is a trivial task, because Ruby is the glue connecting the Ruby components together, thus all we require is a Ruby interpreter to deploy.
Two key Ruby technologies have matured in the previous 18 months which make it ideal for almost every layer of managing a cluster of servers:
- god.rb allows fine-grained process monitoring and daemon control (a la monit)
- rufus-scheduler enables Ruby-based scheduling (replacing cron, and providing a great facility for running daemons that must be executed on a recurring basis)
When combined with these Ruby workhorses, developers today can spend much more of their time writing Ruby code, and less time struggling with the vagaries of their production environment:
The talk will also include a discussion of using several different
AWS gems to make
cloud computing simple, by illustrating the use of Amazon's
S3 and
SQS services to distribute asychnronous work and handle communication between servers.
Labels: conferences, deployment, god.rb, lone star ruby conference, otherinbox, ruby
Friday, June 6, 2008
random_data v1.3.1 is out. Courtesy of stalwart contributor Hugh Sasse, this release includes more firstnames, and two new methods:
Random.firstname_male and
Random.firstname_female.
Install it via:
sudo gem install random_data
Labels: random_data, ruby
Monday, June 2, 2008
I wrote up a few articles on the
OtherInbox blog about my experiences at RailsConf 2008:
The best blow-by-blow coverage so far is from
Drew Blas. Of the ones I attended or heard the best feedback about, I most strongly recommend looking at the slides for these:
Labels: otherinbox, rails, railsconf
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
I'll be leading two Birds of a Feather sessions at
RailsConf 2008 that I hope everyone will attend (or flock to):
I was also invited to sign copies of the book
Advanced Rails Recipes (to which I contributed a couple of recipes) at
Powell's books in Portland on May 30th at 12:30 pm. Hope to see you there!
I'll be there with the full
OtherInbox contingent, so if you're looking for an awesome startup to join, come and track us down.
Labels: rails
Sunday, May 25, 2008
random_data is a testing and seed data gem I wrote a few years back to help get Ruby projects up and running with semi-realistic fake data (the
faker gem provides similar functionality).
I just released version 1.3.0 which includes a bunch of RDoc enhancements as well as some new features contributed by the tireless (and patient!) Hugh Sasse:
- Added RandomData::Grammar, which lets you create simple random sentences from a grammar supplied as a hash, like so:
Random::grammatical_construct({:story => [:man, " bites ", :dog], :man => { :bob => "Bob"}, :dog => {:a =>"Rex", :b =>"Rover"}}, :story)
==> "Bob bites Rex"
- Added Random.bit and Random.bits
- Added Random.uk_post_code
- Bug fix: zipcodes should strings, not integers
Thanks Hugh! Open source is awesome!
Labels: random_data, ruby
