Collected posts from the various blogs I’ve contributed to since 2002.
the { buckblogs :here }: Faking cursors in ActiveRecord A neat trick for when you need to perform an ActiveRecord operation on a very large dataset and don’t want to use too much RAM (tags: activerecord cursors)
O’Reilly Radar > Google Launches MyMaps There’s been a flurry of announcements in the mapping space again this week. Looks like mapping mashups are no longer solely the domain of developers and ’local search’ is becoming a little more semantic. Maybe next google could announce they’re parsing m (tags: georss google kml maps) RubyForge: ruby-geonames: Project Info Ruby support for the Geonames Web Services. At some point I must try this out. (tags: geography geonames) phpsh – an interactive shell for php ...
It seems that anyone involved in helping musicians with their web presence has to learn to tolerate MySpace. I don’t think I know anyone who actually enjoys the process of using MySpace, but a strong presence there is a must have for almost every musician these days. I’ve long wished for a decent API that would help me integrate MySpace with websites I run for musicians—after all, it isn’t very DRY to post the same content in several places when it could be automated—but as time has gone on it’s become clear that an API would be entirely anathema to MySpace’s approach to the web. ...
Duncan Beevers » History » Simile Timeline Rails Helper part 1 Rails helpers for building timelines with the simile library (tags: rubyonrails simile timeline visualisation) Control.Modal : Unobtrusive CSS Modal Windows and Lightboxes for Prototype Looks like a fairly nice lightbox implementation, but the server’s been unresponsive so I’ve not been able to confirm my suspicion that it might be quite lightweight (tags: javascript lightbox modal rubyonrails) Stars compose new ways to use music | Pop | Guardian Unlimited Music ...
InfoQ: Ruby on Rails case study: ChangingThePresent.org Good case study/review of a large rails project (tags: brucetate management performance rubyonrails scaling) Mac Rumors: New iTunes Features: My Alerts and Complete My Album Really interesting that Apple are trying to provide incentives for people to buy full albums. Is this a focus on the album as an art form, a result of pressure from labels, or simply an attempt to maximise profits? (tags: albums digitalmusic distribution itunes)
I just got caught out by an upgrade to Ruby 1.8.6 and an app which I can’t as yet upgrade to Rails 1.2.3. Ruby 1.8.6 (and 1.9) make the Time#to_date and Time#to_datetime methods private so any code which depends on those methods being public will break. The fix is very easy. I just copied the code from the relevant rails changeset and placed it in my environment.rb file: class Time %w(to_date to_datetime).each do |method| public method if private_instance_methods.include?(method) end end Of course, the ideal is to upgrade to 1.2.3, but that’s not on the cards just yet for this particular project. In the meantime, having to add five lines isn’t too much trouble. ...
Over the past few weeks I’ve been hooked by Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell’s blog Observations on film art and Film Art. For the film geek in me, the discussions of film history and criticism from an academic perspective are fascinating. Yesterday, Kristin posted an entry responding to A. O. Scott’s claim in the New York Times that: It is now possible to imagine—to expect—that before too long the entire surviving history of movies will be open for browsing and sampling at the click of a mouse for a few PayPal dollars. ...
Writing a Book | English Rules Karl Swedberg and Jonathan Chaffer are working on a book about jquery (tags: book javascript jquery)
The thing I probably enjoy most about working with Rails is that it makes it easier to put logic in the right place than not to. To get back in the swing of blogging after a light couple of weeks, I thought it might be useful to run through an example of how that’s worked out for me recently. From time to time I’ve been working on an application that will contain a database of musicians. To be able to add new musicians quickly I’ve been using: ...
Graticule and acts_as_geocodable, which I wrote about here, has a new release with a couple of updates worthy of note. First up is the addition of new geocoders which provide better coverage of locations outside North America, and second is IP address to co-ordinates conversion similar to that in GeoKit. Brandon has the lowdown, and I’ve updated the Comparison chart on the wiki.