Posts tagged ruby

Selected (belated, extended) Saturday Links

Mar 28th

Posted by James Stewart in Notes

The past two weeks haven’t really left time to compile my selected links, though there have been many. A few days at SxSWi (on which more, later) followed by travelling with the family and the inevitable work backlog moved blogging way down the priority list. So here’s a mammoth selection to get me caught up. Particularly interesting has been the discussion around the future of newspapers (represented here by Clay Shirky, Steven Johnson and Russell Davies), which seem to have finally pushed beyond “how t ind a good business model for papers” to looking at where the real value for society lies and how we can preserve and extend that in a changing landscape.

  • Making a jQuery Plugin Truly Customizable » Learning jQuery – Tips, Techniques, Tutorials

    Some nice tips for managing options, and a reminder to find _useful_ customisations not just load with customisation options without much thought about/consultation with other potential users

  • iPhone Coding For Web Developers

    Presentation slides from the internet's Matt Biddulph

  • Rack::Test released: Simply test any Rack-compatible app — Bryan Helmkamp

    There's a _lot_ to like about increased adoption of rack. "With Rack::Test, we hope to make it easy for frameworks to encourage their users to write tests by making it trivial to provide a testing environment. We’d like to foster compatibility between Ruby web app testing environments (especially important as ideas like multi-framework apps become more prominent). The philosophy is the library should stay small and extendable so frameworks can layer on additional functionality they want to offer without modifying Rack::Test’s core behavior or resorting to monkeypatching."

  • Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky

    "That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen …. Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify." … and a a lot more

  • russell davies: newspapers and all that

    "If we are going to create a new news ecosystem involving advertisers (and a lot of people would be grateful for that money) then we're going to have to do something about that institutional bifurcation between content and commerce. We're going to have to design the relationship between the two with the care of a good experience designer." – a response to Ben Hammersley asking if anyone talking about the future of newspapers had talked to anyone in advertising

  • Streams, affordances, Facebook, and rounding errors – Laughing Meme

    "Simon Willison asked this week about best practice for architecting activity streams. And the answer is, “It depends.” Depends on the scope, scale, access patterns, and affordances you’re building — your contract with your users.

    Which is a long way of saying think hard about the promises you make to your users, implicitly or explicitly.

    And, Facebook, my friend, what the HELL are you thinking? You managed to negotiate the best deal in the business, talk about a racket, and you threw it away for a piece of Twitter’s pain? Are you stupid? Well, best of luck with that."

  • SXSW Interactive Videos and Podcasts | SXSW.com

    Most of the sessions were recorded and this is the place to get hold of them.

  • SXSWi: Location-based service is the trend at Austin, Texas |

    "Predictably, location-based services were a major feature this year, with launches that included Foursquare, a social, location-based game by the Dodgeball creator, Dennis Crowley, and a new Facebook application for the location management tool Fire Eagle. While early adopters such as the SXSWers have been exploring location-based services for some time, it is inevitable that more consumer and privacy-friendly versions will start to creep into the mainstream."

  • stevenberlinjohnson.com: Old Growth Media And The Future Of News

    "I think it’s much more instructive to anticipate the future of investigative journalism by looking at the past of technology journalism. When ecologists go into the field to research natural ecosystems, they seek out the old-growth forests, the places where nature has had the longest amount of time to evolve and diversify and interconnect. They don’t study the Brazilian rain forest by looking at a field that was clear cut two years ago." … and …" Measured by pure audience interest, newspapers have never been more relevant. If they embrace this role as an authoritative guide to the entire ecosystem of news, if they stop paying for content that the web is already generating on its own, I suspect in the long run they will be as sustainable and as vital as they have ever been. The implied motto of every paper in the country should be: all the news that’s fit to link."

  • On running a panel

    A mixup over bus times meant I didn't make it to Andrew's panel at SxSW, but I heard many good things. It's really great to see this kind of debriefing-in-public going on. Hopefully it'll make for a stronger set of talks and panels next year.

  • Guardian API Maps – Home

    "This is a site that lets you search the Guardian's new API and add location information to articles. All the place data we collect is being made available to anyone who wants it."

  • Foursquare, Hot New Phone App, Is Dodgeball on Steroids | The New York Observer

    Quite a few people seemed to be playing with Foursquare at SxSW but most of the Brits were excluded as we didn't want to use that much data and it wasn't available in the UK iTunes store. One to watch, though.

  • A few notes on the Guardian Open Platform

    I saw Simon present the Guardian Platform at SxSW and it looks like a great achievement. Waiting to see what developers build on it, and how they roll some of the ideas back in

  • Taking remote imagery offline to Nigeria :: High Earth Orbit

    Andrew's notes on trying to source good map data for use in Nigeria. It's a useful overview of a variety of services and ways to use them, though highlighting the absence of really accessible, high-quality data.

  • Pulse Laser: The Utility of the Unfinished

    "One technique that S&W has been using recently to illustrate design work is placing sketches or wireframes in situ. Whilst wireframes themselves are incomplete artefacts, designed to be work in progress, they still suffer for being uniformly incomplete. Wireframes themselves can be almost too beautiful, and this means that it becomes all-too-easy to criticise them as only wireframes, rather than as part of a product that exists in the world. Contextualising the sketches into the photograph places the design into the world. This enables the design to be understood within the world, and also (importantly) to highlight the seams between the unfinished design and the finished world around it"

  • Spike: a log file viewing & (if we’re being generous) analysis tool for Rails developers.

    Looks like a handy addition to the toolkit

  • Generation Open | FactoryCity

    "Sharing and giving away all that you can are the best defenses against fear, obsolescence, growing old, and, even, wrinkles. It isn’t always easy, but it’s how we outlive the shackles of biology and transcend the physicality of gravity." – Perhaps an overly optimistic piece, but it connects together a number of current themes and we can hope…

  • Testing Facebook with Cucumber | opensoul.org

    For those faced with the unpleasant task of writing facebook apps, some people are working on making sure they can be thoroughly tested.

  • scraplab : instant sinatra deployment with heroku

    A lot of people seem to be excited about heroku lately, and it does look like a nice simple way to put up quick ruby apps. Must play soon.

  • How to speed up gem installs 10x « The Budding Rubyist

    Handy little tip, particularly for server environments: turn off ri and rdoc generation in your .gemrc file, and speed things up considerably

  • Facebook in 2010: no longer a walled garden – O'Reilly Radar

    A more positive spin on facebook's changes from David O'Recordon, who suspects they're going to pull down the walls around their garden and become a proper citizen of the open web.

  • Facebook blinks, copies Twitter, still gets it wrong. – broadstuff

    Critical commentary on facebook's recent changes. I'm not sure I entirely agree with statements like "By 2009 it was clear no one gives a sh*t about the Social Graph" but facebook really do seem to be finding that their approach is overly complex and quickly trying to shift to a more twitter-like "web of flow" (to steal Stowe Boyd's phrase)

  • Acquia Search goes public beta | Acquia

    Hosted solr for drupal: "Acquia Search can be installed as a module on any Drupal 6 site, and enhances a site's search experience with faceted search navigation, content recommendations, and configurable results weighting, all delivered through a redundant hosted service infrastructure.".

  • Oauth using pecl/OAuth

    Looks like a nice simple way to interact with oauth from a PHP app

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Selected Saturday Links

Mar 7th

Posted by James Stewart in Notes

Big themes this week have mostly revolved around twitter, facebook, and openness. Some have focussed on facebook redesigning to embrace a more twitter-like “web of flow” approach, and others on the fact that they’re jumping on various open web bandwagons. It’s been interesting to see some tie in with the government transparency thinking going around, as particularly noted by Chris Messina on FactoryCity. Meanwhile there are quite a few nice new tools emerging, and I really must try heroku one of these days.

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Quick update on Heathrow Tower

Feb 13th

Posted by James Stewart in Announcements

While there haven’t been any visible changes to my Heathrow Tower project in the past couple of weeks beyond my throwing in a few greetings in other languages to break things up a bit. Having put some of the statistical plans on hold as the snow last week prevented any data gathered from being anywhere close to representative, I’ve gradually been building up the database behind the scenes so I can start to do some of the more intricate things I’d like to do.

The key data I wanted was the airport codes for the various flights, and geographic data for those airports.

Firstly I found FlightAware.com who will provide all sorts of data from a flight code, but unfortunately the first time I tried making a request to their site using HTTP Client I spotted a comment in the HTML referring visitors to http://flightaware.com/about/termsofuse.rvt which states:

You will only access the FlightAware web site with an interactive web browser and not with any program, collection agent, or “robot” for the purpose of automated retrieval of content.

So I started looking at airline sites. United have a relatively straightforward URL scheme that responds to a GET and returns data that can be scraped. eg:

http://www.ua2go.com/flifo/FlightSummary.do?date=20090201&fltNbr=959

BA and Virgin, on the other hand, both require cookies to be enabled in order to get results from their flight trackers and don’t advertise any other URLs for flight data. Once I’d realised that only one of those three carriers was going to be helpful, I decided not to keep checking airlines.

So, a little frustrated, I tried just typing flight codes into google. And lo and behold… most of them give useful results. It doesn’t get them all, of course, but it’s enough that out of the 838 flight codes in the database, 695 are fully identified. Of those not identified, a number seem to be flights that were diverted to Heathrow but don’t normally go there.

So with some sense of the airports served, I also want to know about the airports themselves. Wikipedia’s pretty good there, with geo data for them all in an easy to capture form. Some, like Heathrow itself, are very easy to find:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LHR

while others are a bit trickier. But with some manual intervention I was able to get all of that data. The manually produced mappings and the code for pulling in the data can both be found on github.

More updates as time allows…

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Tracking Heathrow with twitter

Jan 29th

Posted by James Stewart in Announcements

It's 11.23 on Thursday

A few months back—while we were discussing the number of talking objects appearing on twitter—Jenny pointed out to me that all Heathrow airport arrivals and departures data is online. That set my mind racing, as if you know all the flights leaving that currently controversial airport, there are all manner of things you could begin to do. Working out miles travelled and carbon emitted, spotting delays, and so on. But at the time it all came down to a quick note in Things to some day set aside time to explore.

That day arrived this week. The data turned out to be pretty simple to scrape, with a quick wrapper around hpricot, and to throw into an SQLite database using datamapper to give me a little abstraction and a place to throw a variety of methods to make my code simpler. And then it was a small matter of employing John Nunemaker’s twitter gem to set up regular tweets letting followers in on how many flights in and out of Heathrow there have been lately.

The result is a rather pleasing hourly summary, that adds a little rhythm and background awareness into my day. You can follow it at http://twitter.com/heathrowtower.

Perhaps the biggest frustration with the data is that all destinations/origins are given as city names. Given that city names are hardly unique, and even if they were a given city may have several airports connecting with Heathrow, that makes it a bit trickier to do some of the more sophisticated calculations. My hope is that the flight codes (which are given) can soon be transformed into a list of airport codes, which can then open up a route to more useful and interesting data. (if anyone knows of an existing database that does that mapping, please let me know!)

I’m looking forward to that, but I’m also anticipating the ambient awareness that having the bot running will create. Will the hourly ritual of seeing a sentence or two about Heathrow activity reveal any patterns? If they do, maybe I’ll update the code to make more of those. We’ll see.

For now, please do follow the tower on twitter, tell people about it, send it messages if you spot anything interesting, and feel free to take a look at the code over on github.

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Testing PHP apps with Ruby tools

Nov 10th

Posted by James Stewart in Snippets

As I’ve mentioned here before, when working on web applications built with PHP, whether custom-rolled or drupal-driven, I often find myself missing various tools from the ruby kit. I’ve talked before about using capistrano with non-ruby code, but lately it’s been rspec and its stories that I’ve been craving.

I’m aware of PHPSpec and have played with it from time to time, but the lack of a compelling way to work with mocks/stubs has slowed my adoption, and last time I checked it didn’t offer anything for high level user stories. So this week I set out to harness cucumber and webrat to write some simple stories.

It turns out to be pretty easy. There’s no nice simple support for test environments, fixtures, mocks or stubs, but if you just want to make sure that a few pages load correctly, and have the right elements, or that logging in works as you expected, then it’ll do the job.

I’ve not done any packaging up of the code, mainly because there’s so little to it. My folder structure is:

specs/
  Rakefile
  features/
    admin_articles.feature
    steps/
      admin_steps.rb

(click on the links to see sample files)

I simply set up those files, go into the folder and type ‘rake features’ to put your site through its paces.

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