Blog posts

There seems to be quite a plethora of Ruby/Rails libraries appearing aiming to simplify handling geography and distances. In some cases these libraries do quite distinct things (zip codes vs. longitude/latitude, map output vs. distance calculations) but they’re frequently lumped together and it’s difficult to tell which will be best to use in your projects. I’ve used several of these projects and have previously blogged about YM4R and acts_as_locateable, but I’m still not sure which I’d pick for new projects. So I thought it would be helpful to try to put together a comparison of which libraries offer what functionality. Here I’ll just offer a quick chart, but I’m hoping to write them up in a bit more detail over the coming days/weeks. If there’s sufficient interest, I’d consider moving this out to a wiki for more general use. ...

I’ve not used it myself, but conceptually I’ve always been very interested in WSGI (the Python Web Server Gateway Interface). WSGI defines a standard interface between web servers and frameworks, giving python web applications the same portability that Java servlets enjoy, and also makes it much easier to layer code—with a standardised interface you can easily add in extra components to process your input and output before or after your main framework has handled it. ...

I’ve been waiting for quite some time to see Open Congress in action, so it was a little frustrating that various commitments mean it’s taken a few days to really explore it. The site gets much of its data from govtrack.us, but provides a more intuitive interface. The index of what’s going on in the US Congress can be explored in a variety of ways, going through bills, senators, representatives, committees, industries, and issues. The senator and representative navigation works pretty well, and its nice to have a feed for each one, but it would also be good to be able to navigate using a map or other visual device rather than having to switch to the state view and then scroll down to find the representative I’m interested in. ...

Another FFM promo spot is now up on youtube, and even though some detail is lost in the compression needed to get it onto youtube, I think it’s well worth a look whether you can make it to the festival or not. Enjoy! Tags: ffm2007, youtube

I’d been meaning to take a look at Ralf Wirdemann, Thomas Baustert, Florian Görsdorf and Adam Grove’s Restful Rails Development PDF for a few days, and time travelling over the weekend gave me that opportunity. I didn’t go through it all in great detail, as it’s fairly introductory material, but if you’re wondering how to get started with RESTful rails it provides a great overview to get you going. You can find it here. ...

There are many things about the current administration that are hard to believe. Their nomination for Ambassador to Belgium. It seems he was a major ($50,000) donor to the “Swift Boat Veterans For Truth” group that attacked John Kerry during the last presidential election. From Salon’s coverage: OK, then, Kerry asked, so why did you give money to a group that tried to do just that? “When we’re asked, we give,” Fox replied. He said later that he couldn’t remember who had asked him for the contribution. And while he said that he thinks 527s should be outlawed and that he’d never give money to any group “if I thought what they were printing was not true,” he also said that he “personally” would have “no way of knowing” whether a group’s representations will turn out to be true at the time he’s giving it cash. ...

With only three and a half months left in Grand Rapids, it’s time for me to start passing along one of my few locally-based responsibilities. Building up Grand Rapids WiFi has been a great way to get to know the city and to learn a few new coding tricks, and I hope to keep enhancing the code, but it needs someone locally based who can keep their finger on the pulse of new wifi hotspots and make occasional visits to keep the site up to date. ...

While one of the most popular posts on this blog is the instructions I wrote up for compiling and installing Ruby and Rails at 1&1, I never actually got as far as deploying a full application there. I was helping a friend admin that server and hosting a few sites there that we work on together. We’ve got a rails app or two in the works, so I wanted to be ready, but I was never entirely comfortable with the idea of hosting there. ...

With only three and a half months left in Grand Rapids, it’s time for me to start passing along one of my few locally-based responsibilities. Building up Grand Rapids WiFi has been a great way to get to know the city and to learn a few new coding tricks, and I hope to keep enhancing the code, but it needs someone locally based who can keep their finger on the pulse of new wifi hotspots and make occasional visits to keep the site up to date. ...

Mark Nottingham has a good post running through a few topics on which people get needlessly caught when designing RESTful applications. If you’re new to working on RESTful application design (as many rails developers are) it’s worth checking out to save yourself needless anguish. Thankfully for Rails developers at least some of the issues he identifies will be a little simpler than they might be for people designing systems from scratch. In particular, while there are a few URL design choices (numeric IDs, other parameters, or a hybrid? nested vs. flat?) the conventions are good and changing isn’t all that hard. ...