Collected posts from the various blogs I’ve contributed to since 2002.
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. ...
The geographical illiteracy of much of the US population is something of a joke both in-and outside of the United States. But it’s a shame that it’s shared by so much of its media, particularly when they’re frequently sending reporters to distant lands. For their assistance: Distance from Baghdad, IraqTehran (Iran)442 milesDamascus (Syria)466 milesWashington DC (U.S.A)7000 miles (approx) or to put it another way, where is the USA on a typical map of the middle east. ...
Like many others, the first place I hosted a rails application was at textdrive, and I was very pleased to finally find a shared hosting company that respected the fact that I have some understanding of how a server is configured. It’s not that I can’t administer my own server, but I have other priorities and am very happy to pay someone else to do the job better than I could. I leapt at the chance to get a lifetime hosting account, and have a number of sites, including this blog, hosted there. ...
Rails is great for many things, but for very small apps, it can definitely be overkill. That’s where why the lucky stiff’s Camping micro-framework comes in. Where rails gets you started with a clearly defined structure and generally presumes you’re going to want to use a database, Camping makes no such assumptions and just provides a few nice hooks for micro apps. I got started using Camping a couple of months ago. With a lot of travel coming up, I’m eager to keep up to date with special deals on flights and frequent flyer miles, and stumbled across milemaven.com which seemed a great source of that information. But it doesn’t provide feeds and I have no desire to visit the site every day, so I decided to dust off hpricot and combine it with Camping to scrape the site and deliver the contents to my news reader. ...