20111115100456

Bedrijven post uw ruby en rails stageplaatsen nu!

2011-09-15T00:00:00Z

Beste Belgische Ruby en Rails bedrijven,

Het wordt tijd dat de scholen weten dat er werk is in België voor Ruby en Rails developers. De enige richting in Vlaanderen, waar ik weet van heb, die deze taal aanleert tijdens de uren is nMCT, en zij zoeken stageplaatsen.

Laat dus massaal weten dat er ook stageplaatsen zijn voor Ruby en Rails geïntereseerden, zo weten de studenten dat hier ook toekomst in zit en gaan er misschien meer zijn die de stap durven zetten naar Ruby en Rails.

Haast jullie, want het schooljaar begint bijna! Registeer je stageplaats hier

ArrrrCamp #5

2011-03-28T00:00:00Z

Avast!

I’m happy to present you the fifth edition of Arrrrcamp.

After the success of last year I’m aiming to an ever better conference. More room for more pirates. More treasure to collect, more cocktails to drink, and more fun! Ticket sale is open as from today, and speakers and sponsors are invited to get in contact.

I’ve planned the 2011 treasure hunt on October 7th. This year, I even got a bigger ship. The venue is still the Zebrastraat in Ghent (I got bigger conference rooms, no worries), the formula hasn’t changed (good talks and some networking time) and I hope for the same atmosphere as last edition (cocktails and fun).

I can already present two fellow deckhands, John Long and Jim Gay. Both of them are Radiant Core developers, with John Long being the founding father of Radiant, and Jim Gay the current captain of the Radiant project. I happily raided their ship and convinced them to share their treasures and piratry-knowledge.

All preparations have started, but I still have some holes left and right to fill. If you are interested in speaking, or you know some people we should contact, contact me! There is a call for papers open, feel free to submit your talk.

If you want to sponsor Arrrrcamp, please get in touch. Me and my crew want to make the experience as good as possible for attendees and speakers, but this costs some money. We value our sponsors, and we are convinced that our sponsoring deals are good value.

Book your seat now! As from today the early parrot ticket sale is open at the reasonable price of € 65 per ticket. Normal ticket price will be € 95 once the first batch of tickets is sold.

So, start warming up your liver, feed your parrot and brush your eyepatch, ‘cause we are ready for our next adventure. Stay tuned through this site, and follow the captains parrot babblings through Twitter.

The captain!

Carrierwave image quality

2011-03-09T00:00:00Z

Carierwave is an awesome gem to manage your uploads. It is pure Ruby, so it isn’t strangled in Rails or ActiveRecord. It is easy configurable, but I missed one option.

It doesn’t support to change the quality of your uploade images. But if you use RMagick or MiniMagick, you can use this snippet.

# rails carrierwave initializer that gives you a quality option in your uploader. use:
#  version :medium do
#    process :resize_to_fit => [640, 480]
#    process :quality => 95
#  end

module CarrierWave
  module MiniMagick
    def quality(percentage)
      manipulate! do |img|
        img.write(current_path){ self.quality(percentage) }
        img = yield(img) if block_given?
        img
      end
    end
  end
end

If you are using RMmagick, just replace self.quality(percentage) with self.quality = percentage. With thanks to matwiemann for sharing this solution

Wider Vimeo Chrome Plugin

2010-07-08T00:00:00Z

A nice feature on Youtube is the ability play the videos a little wider, specially with all the HD videos out there. I also don’t really like to view them fullscreen all the time.

This feature I really missed on Vimeo. With more HD videos this view is just a shame for the quality :)

So finally we wrote a very small Google Chrome extension so we could give all those nice videos on Vimeo a proper view.

You can download it from the Google Chrome extention library or fork it on Github.

Next step is to port it to a Firefox and Safari extension. This shouldn’t be much of a problem since it is just pure css.

ArrrrCamp #4, Speakers announced and ticket sale online

2010-06-25T00:00:00Z

On October the 29th ArrrrCamp organizes its fourth event.

Ahoy mateys, the captain has news. Big news. News the size of the masts of LeChucks and Jack Sparrows ships combined!

We are taking ArrrrCamp to the next level, as per your own requests. We scouted the bars at the docks, and found some fairly-sober people willing to join our crew. And not just some ordinary deckhands, even your captain feels small and humble knowing that he will set sail together with these mateys…

If all goes well, the next edition of ArrrrCamp will welcome the following speakers:

Yehuda Katz – member of the Ruby on Rails core team and the jQuery Core Team, lead developer of the Merb project, and a core contributor to DataMapper.

Carl Lerche – a software engineer at Engine Yard, a member of the Merb team (currently working on Rails 3), and a contributor to many OSS projects

Drew Neil – creator of the vimcasts, and core contributer to Radiant CMS.

Joseph Wilk – member of the Cucumber core team

Alas, mateys, ArrrrCamp #4 cannot not be free. Ticket sales start today, at a 3-week early-bird (limited to 50 tickets) sales price of 42 euro. Normal ticket price will be 55 euro per ticket. Book your seat now!

If people are interested in contributing financially to ArrrrCamp, contact the captain to discuss sponsoring opportunities.

The schedule has changed, you have to mark all of friday October 29th in your agenda (and not just the afternoon, as for the previous editions). The venue stays the same: the Zebrastraat meeting center in Ghent – Belgium.

More names will follow when they have confirmed their presence. If you wanne give a talk yourself, just visit the call-for-paper-page and send your request to the captain.

Thoughts on Rack

2010-05-03T00:00:00Z

At the most recent ArrrrCamp I gave a small introduction to Rack and Rack Middlewares in a Ruby on Rails application.

It was really interesting because I had some people in the room who knew a lot more than me about Rack and some of them who had never played with it. So we had some nice small discussions about when we use some middlewares like RACK::GOOGLE-ANALYTICS and Device. I had the feeling that in the end we had convinced a lot of people of starting to play with Rack, so my mission was accomplished.

You can view my slides on slideshare

Something something rack

View some more presentation given at ArrrrCamp on slideshare

Mobile detect

2010-04-19T00:00:00Z

Working on the arrrrcamp website we wanted a lighter version for mobile devices. Specially when people would visit the website during the event to see the schedule or more information about a talk or a speaker.

For the mobile design I use a very common and basic iPhone CSS and HTML framework iphone universal. At first we would just tell everyone that you could visit m.arrrrcamp.be, because users could then still visit the normal website. But you can find all the information on the mobile version, so we could immediately redirect the users browsing with a mobile device to the mobile website.

A couple of weeks ago we found a nice Rack middleware that took care of this logic, Rack mobile detect. This middleware detects which device is visiting the website and adds a header to the request. Because we use a different url for the mobile design, we added a redirect options which the author also added to his version.

So just install the gem sudo gem install rack-mobile-detect and require 'rack/mobile-detect' to your environment.

Afterwards simply add config.middleware.use "Rack::MobileDetect", :redirect_to => '/mobile' and your mobile visitors will be redirected to the mobile version.

We did added some page caching to make it faster.

ArrrrCamp 3rd Edition

2010-04-15T00:00:00Z

Also known as “About Ruby, Rails, Radiant and Rum”-Camp, will take place in Ghent, on Friday, April 30th. In our third edition we will slightly change the course of the day. There will no longer be a barcamp part. So we’ve asked participants from the previous editions who wanted to give a longer talk. And with success, we have in total 12 talks, which means 6 parallel slots.

For those who are interested, you can still sign up for the free event at arrrrcamp.be. See you all there

new blog powered by toto

2010-03-31T00:00:00Z

A little History

Back in the old days I started blogging with Geeklog, this evolved to Xoops an later on to a basic Wordpress.

When I started with Rails, first I wanted to build my own system, customize it to my needs. But after the first edition of ArrrrCamp the guys of Gorilla Webdesign could convince me to try Radiant.

I liked the system, but as I wanted to post more media, the flow was to slow. For this I started using Tumblr where I can dump the media I collect on the internet.

Still, my radiant blog, which I use mainly for technological stuff was to slow, I needed something smaller, easier and I wanted to be able to write posts without login in, saving the post when it wasn’t ready, continue typing offline on the train. Which isn’t possible with Radiant or any other online system.

Toto

Then I bumped into Toto a git powered, minimalistic blog engine, entirely build on Rack. You just

If you have an account on Heroku, it really just takes 10 seconds to have it online.

Customizing

After I played with it for a while, adding some extra functionalities to it like rack-google-analytics and rack-rewrite to have my old posts still working. All just added to the config.ru file. I really like the lightness of Rack and this blog. It maybe has 300 lines of code and is superfast.

Deploying

After that I just had to add a very simple capfile and deploy it on the account where used to run my Radiant blog. You could just use a default passenger capfile but skip all the database and assets stuff.

Just give it a try yourself!

irc and bitlebee

2010-03-31T00:00:00Z

Lots of stuff at Openminds goes via irc, it started with our company channel for internal communication. After a while I found the joy of irc by joining community channels like #rails, #spree, #git, where, most of the time, you can find an answer really quickly. But it was time to do more with it.

Since I’m mostly using Skype, I don’t really run Adium anymore to connect with MSN, Google Talk or even Facbook chat, that just uses Jabber.

Quick start

For a quick start, visit http://www.bitlbee.org/main.php/servers.html and connect to the server closest near you. After you got connected start by registering. Do use a good password for this step!

register *<password>*

Adding accounts

Then you can start adding some accounts. The syntax for this step is like this:

account add jabber handle password servertag

In my case I wanted to ad my MSN, Google Talk and Facebook account. (you will need a Facebook username)

account add msn handle password
account add jabber <username>@chat.facebook.com> <Facebook password>
account add jabber username@gmail.com mypasswd

you can find more information for more account types here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Bitlbee#line-57

Start chatting

After you created all your accounts, you can see them by typing account list and with account on you can activate all accounts.

With the command blist on you can see al you online account. When you use facebook chat you will see that all you buddies called somthing like u12345678456, which is pretty hard to remember :) But no worries, there is a script which allows you to rename all those buddies. Be sure to sign off and on after you loaded the script with ‘account off’ and ‘account on’

So you wanne start a conversation? Type /msg username message to start one in en new window or just user: message for just a single IM.

For more stuff just use our good friend google.

There is a nice quickstart document with some basic commands to see your accounts, your buddies and much more. Download the pdf