delynn - Home

Userstamp - Version 2

2008-04-05T21:30:00Z

As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve been moving all my code over to GitHub. Well, the first project to officially move over and also get a brand new version number is Userstamp.

Version 2 of the Userstamp plug-in is a complete re-write, and by default breaks backwards compatibility with the original. I did however add a compatibility mode to the new version so you won’t have to change all your database tables.

You can learn more about the new version and checkout the code from here. I’ve also created a dead simple sample application that shows how to set everything up, and it can be found here.

Rails CHM Documentation - Version 2.0.2

2008-03-30T17:15:00Z

I know Rails 2.0.2 was released over three months ago, so this announcement is way late, but I today I was able to get around to creating the CHM version of the Rails Documentation. You can download the file from the product page or directly from this link.

Breaking the Silence

2008-02-17T00:33:00Z

Wow, it’s been almost a year since I’ve updated my blog. I wish I could say that it was due to me not having anything to say, but that wouldn’t be true. Sometimes life decides to shake things up a bit, and that’s exactly what happened to me last May. As a result of this shake-up I was forced to alter my priorities quite a bit so that I could keep a proper life balance. During the next few months I learned an awful lot about previously unknown areas of life, as well as myself.

Every year during the first week of December I look back at my goals for the year and see how I did. I also start looking toward the year ahead and decide on what I’d like to accomplish. What I found this time around was that I hadn’t accomplished anything that I had set out to do during the year. This really bothered me, and at first I wrote it off to the rough year. After thinking about it a bit more though I realized something–I had incorrectly altered my priorities back in May. I had sacrificed a lot of little things that I really enjoyed (blogging, working on side-projects, personal time, etc.) in order to get my life back in balance, instead of just cutting the amount of time I was spending at work. But why?

For the longest time I’ve been a border-line workaholic. It was not uncommon for me to work eight to ten hours a day, seven days a week. In years past though, I did this because I really loved my job, and even though I worked a lot, I was still able to find time for all the other fun things in life. Unfortunately my work situation had changed to where I was no longer having fun, and I was also unable to scale back due to sheer number of responsibilities that I had accumulated over the years. I decided that a change was in order.

After being with this company for almost six years, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried about leaving. My fears were soon put to rest though, after my search began. For some reason things really fell perfectly in place and I just knew I had made the right decision. Within a day I had an interview scheduled, and within ten days I had completed two interviews and accepted a position with one of the best companies to work for in Denver. The really beautiful thing was that I was going to be working full-time with Ruby.

So, how has my life improved? Well, for starters I’ve only been working eight hours a day, and I’ve had six free weekends in a row to do whatever I wanted. I’ve taken the last six weeks to decompress and enjoy life more, and now I’m really looking forward to completing all of my goals from last year as well a couple new ones for this year. In the short-term expect a refresh of all of my existing projects as well as a transition of the code bases to GitHub. I’ll also probably move my blog off of my existing setup (which is still hosted on my personal server sitting in my old company’s rack) to something that is hardware independent and better fits my blogging style. I’ve been using Tumblr for the past couple months, and I’m quite liking it.

2008, here I come!

Austin Calling

2007-03-05T22:54:00Z

I’m starting to get excited about heading to Austin Texas this week for SXSW. I arrive late this Friday and will be hanging out all week. If you are going to be there, I’d love to meet up, so leave a comment or shoot an email to delynn at gmail dot com.

See you there!

Chef Daniel

2007-02-15T17:30:00Z

Late last year my youngest brother Daniel decided to attend the prestigious Le Cordon Blue cooking school. My dad and I helped him move out to Las Vegas over New Years weekend, and he started classes the first week of January. After getting settled in and finishing his Cooking 101 and Wine and Beverage classes, he has decided that it would be nice to record the experiences and share some of the more interesting things he has learned.

So, if you are interested in cooking, I highly recommend you keep an eye on his new weblog.

Rails CHM Documentation - Version 1.2.1

2007-01-22T17:15:00Z

A new release of the Rails framework means it’s time for a new version of the CHM Documentation file.

Download the latest version from here.

ZiYa Plugin

2007-01-19T16:30:00Z

I’m about two weeks late getting this announcement out, but I wanted to point everyone to a new Rails plug-in that I have been working on with Fernand Galiana. It’s name is ZiYa (after the Turkish impressionist painter Nazmi Ziya Güran), and its purpose is to make using the XML/SWF Charts library a snap with your Rails project.

Here’s how to get a sample bar chart in your current Rails project:

Step 1.

Install the ZiYa plug-in:

  [ruby] script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/liquidrail/plugins/ziya/trunk

Step 2

Include the ZiYa module into a controller that will be responsible for generating the chart:

123	class ChartsController < ApplicationController include Ziyaend

Step 3

Create the action that will be used to generate the XML document for the chart. Please note, this action will be used by a new or existing action, it will not be the same action that your users load in their browser.

1234	def posts_chart chart = Ziya::Charts::Bar.new render :text => chart end

Step 4

In the view template for the client facing action, use ZiYa’s gen_chart helper method to embed your chart into the view:

<%= gen_chart("posts_chart", :url_for(:controller => "charts", :action => "posts_chart"), "#ffffff", 400, 300) %>

Step 5

Refresh your browser to see the default bar chart.

To make getting up to speed on all the capabilities of this plug-in and the XML/SWF Library we have put together a great support site. We have generated documentation, a bunch of sample charts, an introductory video and a really great training application that allows you to play with the YML chart styling capabilities. You can also checkout the project page over on RubyForge. There’s also a Google Group that we’ve created specifically for ZiYa discussion. Please post any questions or comments that you have regarding the plug-in there.

So, download the plug-in and get charting your data. This is a must have feature for an application that needs to impress their managers!

Rails CHM Documentation - Version 1.2.0 RC1

2006-11-24T15:45:00Z

Since the first release candidate of Rails 1.2.0 was announced yesterday, I decided to update the CHM documentation to match this latest release. You can find the updated file via my CHM Documentation Project Page, or just download the file directly from here.

Please note that ActiveResource was pulled from 1.2.0 as of revision 5554, so its documentation is not included in the above file. If you are running off of trunk and want/need the ActiveResource documentation, then you should download my latest trunk CHM file from here.

The Rails Way

2006-11-01T00:35:00Z

Jamis Buck just posted about how he and Michael Koziarski have recently teamed up to start a new blog called The Rails Way. If you’re new to Rails, or are just interested in how these wily veterans might solve a coding problem, be sure to add their feed to your RSS reader.

As a side note, it’s nice to see them using the Scribbish theme for Mephisto.

Project Repositories

2006-10-27T16:45:00Z

Just a quick note to update everyone on the status of my project repositories. I’ve gotten them moved to my new server, and I have also updated the location urls on the individual project pages. Instead of installing Apache on this box just to proxy SVN requests, I decided use the built in SVNServer, so the urls have changed. Also, since I created new repositories, the version numbers have changed. So if you are using SVN externals in your applications, make sure to update the url (as well as the version number where applicable).

I have also installed Bounty Source’s neat Subversion Browser, to give people the ability to browse the repository source. You can find that by going to: http://code.delynnberry.com/.

Scribbish for Mephisto

2006-10-18T16:25:00Z

I wanted to post a quick note to let people know that a port of the Scribbish theme for Mephisto has been posted. I’m currently using a personalized version of the theme on my site, and I may be a bit biased here, but I think it’s one of the better themes currently available.

The release of this port began a while ago when I first considered moving my site from Typo to Mephisto. I didn’t really want to lose the look that I had recently switched to, so I set out looking into what all would be involved in porting the theme. It took me a little time to learn the ins and outs of the Liquid syntax (that and a few updates to Mephisto’s Liquid API helped make the theme even better), but after re-launching my site a couple weeks ago I thought it would be nice if the theme was available for all Mephisto users. I contacted Jeff and asked him if he was interested in posting the port on his site. He was more that willing to oblige, and quickly setup a SVN branch for me to hack on. After a few uploads and some refinements by him, we had something we consider ready for release.

You can learn more about Scribbish from the product page, or download the zip file and upload it to your Mephisto install.

Rails CHM Documentation - Trunk r5315

2006-10-17T19:25:00Z

So, I was able to take the time last night to put together a CHM document that contains documentation for revision 5315 of Rails trunk. You can find the file here.

For more information related to what’s new in Rails, be sure to read Ryan Daigle’s category “what’s new in rails”–great stuff.

Rails CHM Documentation - Version 1.1.6

2006-10-16T16:25:00Z

It’s been a long time coming, but I just posted an update to my Rails CHM Documentation file. This update has the documentation for the 1.1.6 release of Rails. This version also has a much more organized Contents section that has a folder group for each gem, which will hopefully lead to easier browsing of the entire file. You can download this release from this url.

If after downloading the file you find that you can’t view pages in the document, Windows Security is probably to blame (complaining about the file originating from another computer). To fix this problem, simply right-click on the downloaded file, select Properties and click the Unblock button at the bottom of the window.

Also, if you’re one of the hip kids using Rails trunk, keep an eye out for a pre-release of the 1.2 documentation later this week. With all the new items in Rails trunk (ActionService, simply restful, etc) I’ve found myself needing to scan the source files from time to time (interesting, but time consuming). So, if this is something that might interest you, leave me a comment encouraging me to make this happen, or watch the Rails CHM Documentation page for the url.

Transition Complete

2006-10-03T00:30:00Z

If you’re reading this article, then it means the DNS entries have successfully propigated through the Interwebs and you are pointed at my new home. For the last two months I’ve been working to move my domain away from TextDrive’s shared hosting service to something that I actually own and maintain. For those of you that might be interested, here are the geeky details:

Dell PowerEdge 1650 (Dual P3 1.4 GHz w/ 1.5 GB of memory) called stan
Gentoo Linux
LiteSpeed
MySQL 5
Rails
Mephisto
A Mephisto port of the Scribbish theme

There will undoubtedly be some old links that are broken, but the new redirection support in Mephisto will account for at least 90% of them. If you do find an old link that’s broken, please send an email to delynn [at] gmail.com and let me know about them. I’m still in the process of moving my code to a new permanent home, so if you are looking for ActsAsDropdown or Userstamp please be patient. I’ll be posting updates about the future and locations of those projects shortly.

Update: The repository urls have been updated on the project pages. See http://delynnberry.com/2006/10/27/project-repositories for more information on the changes that were made.

Still Alive

2006-09-24T21:00:00Z

It’s a sad thing when it’s been so long since your last post that even NetNewsWire thinks you’ve fallen off the face of the blogosphere:

Well, I just wanted to post something here to let the 5 of you that actually do read this blog know that I am still alive. Believe it or not, I’ve actually been doing a lot of work behind the scenes upgrading my site and server situation, as well as some of my code projects.

With this post I’m actually making one these change active. I recently signed up for a FeedBurner account, so I highly recommend that everyone switch to using their url instead of the generic Typo feed urls. For those wanting to just do a copy and paste via their feed reader the new url is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/delynnberry.

In the coming days I hope to finish with the other updates and get them live. Sorry again for being out of communication for so long.