a work on process

Weekend Links

2010-02-07T20:40:46Z

MockSMTP.app bills itself as “smart and simple e-mail testing for new apps and websites on Mac OS X” and works as a non-delivering SMTP server so you can trap and review any emails your application sends. The instructions describe how to set it up for a Rails app but it should be usable in many contexts.

As with so many of these things, I heard bits and pieces about the Amazon-Macmillan dust-up over the past couple of weeks, but I really appreciate posts like this that lay out a good chunk of the story

node.js has been really exciting to watch over the past few months and it’s exciting to see Plurk adopting it to serve up “Instant conversations using Comet.” Apparently they ported from JBoss Netty over to node.js and saw a 10 times memory saving! Also getting a lot of buzz is redis and Mathias Meyer has a nice piece on “When To Redis“. It sounds like Redis 2 is going to adopt a Virtual Memory approach, a detailed write-up of which can be found here.

I’ve been doing a lot of work with jQuery this week and found this source viewer invaluable as a way of navigating the library.

Matthew from Bytemark–who I host numerous sites with–has been getting cross with people claiming libel but failing to supply URLs for the supposed instances, so he engaged Carter Ruck to help him work out an appropriate position. His writeup is well worth reading if you bear any responsibility for online discussion fora.

The tremors following the Apple iPad announcement continue to be felt including the ongoing debate about flash. It’s good to see a number of voices (such as Jeffrey Zeldman and Dorian Ray) pointing out that Adobe are well positioned to build tools to help with HTML5 adoption. That would seem a good way forward for them, specially as video players like this one demonstrate the goodness awaiting us.

Handling recurring payments (for subscriptions and the like) tends to be a pain. Recurly looks an interesting entry into that space and I’m looking forward to trying it out.

And then of course there’s Rails 3, now in beta. The announcement is on the rails blog, the release notes are a good place to start. Having had some deployment/gem version issues lately I’m very glad to see bundler stabilising.

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Weekend Links

2010-01-31T16:09:42Z

The usual round of Rails 3 updates: Pratik writes about the new Active Record Query Interface. I’ve had trouble with chaining nested scopes, so am very glad to see a better logic implementation, but the real win is that no queries are executed until the results are needed meaning that fragment caching suddenly gets much easier/more reasonable to use. Also on the new API front, Mikel has a piece on the new ActionMailer API which also seems much improved. Naturally with so many pieces about Rails 3 cropping up, posts are emerging linking as many as possible; Maxim Chernyak’s is the most comprehensive I’ve seen so far (though it’s missing my posts on the topic). If you’ve got a few hours free on February 18th, you may like to check out O’Reilly’s free online conference about Rails 3. And if you can’t wait to get started you might like to look at Jeremy McNally’s rails-upgrade gem that may help you on your way.

Caliper is a hosted version of the metric_fu gem, providing a very simple way to get lots of stats about your ruby app. I’ve had trouble getting metric_fu to run cleanly, so this could be a handy tool, though I’d rather get metric_fu properly integrated into my own Continuous Integration system. Speaking of which, my office mate Matt wrote up his experiences setting up Hudson for CI. I’m using Hudson too (partly thanks to Matt’s recommendations) and would highly recommend it.

I enjoyed reading about Tim Bray’s experience teaching his son and his classmates about blogging. Tim’s approach of having the students start by writing seems a great way to instil a positive vision of the web and also introduce a sense that web content isn’t necessarily to be trusted. On an entirely different note, I also enjoyed Russell’s brief piece “lowering the point point” arguing that:

Playing with something like Gowalla or Foursquare is worth doing – to see if it’s worth doing.

It’s been good to see Rachel Andrew blogging more frequently of late and I’m enjoying her pieces about running a small business. I’m particularly intrigued to see what responses come in to her piece about responding to tenders/RFPs as that’s a topic I’ve been wondering about lately too.

Google Sites suddenly becomes more interesting thanks to the addition of a Data API. On a not-entirely-unrelated note, I’ve been watching Tom release extractomatic and Paul release docent with some interest. It used to be that the potential ongoing work of maintenance was a disincentive to releasing tools that others might use, but things like Google App Engine and heroku really help with that.

Oh yes, Google are phasing out support for IE6. Could this be the move that pushes those last hold-out large institutions to upgrade to browsers created less than eight years ago?

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Help me clear some shelves?

2010-01-31T20:57:21Z

I’ve got quite a few tech books I never get round to using and I’d rather like to reclaim the shelf space they take up. I’ve tried selling some on amazon, but increasingly the meagre returns don’t seem to warrant the effort they take to ship, so I thought I’d list them here and see if anyone wants them. They’re generally in good shape, there’s the odd dog-eared cover here or there but they’re perfectly usable.

If you’d like one and can collect them from me either at home in South Tottenham or from my office in Shoreditch, I’d be happy to pass them along. While I’d love to be able to offer them to people further afield, the cost and the time involved in posting them isn’t an option right now so collection is a must.

(If you’re an author and you see your book above, please don’t take it as me slighting your book, a number of them have been very useful in the past)

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Week 123

2010-01-25T21:06:37Z

The last week of January’s here already and it seems like I’m still trying to sign off on the same projects I’ve been on all month. It’s not all that bad, really, and the budgets are working out fine (I’m very glad that one of these projects in particular wasn’t a fixed quote). But I’m feeling very ready to move on. Maybe this week will see some pieces being signed off?

The week will once again be about getting things signed off and trying to pin other things down. There are two or three meetings: one to review the work so far on the Greenbelt Programming/Scheduling Database and work out next steps; another to train a client on the CMS I knocked together with CodeIgniter (which I’ve grown to rather like); and a third to kick off the JLL project I mentioned last week.

One of the key reasons I’m keen to get these projects wrapped is the number of exciting ideas floating around the TCO team for building apps of our own. Based on experiences with clients and with our own processes we seem to have a nice list of product ideas. With lots of little projects on the go, sparing attention to work on any of those doesn’t seem realistic, but if we can bring the focus down to just a couple of pieces then maybe it’ll be easier to mark off time to work on our own stuff.

The new office seems to be working well. We’ve begun to meet our neighbours, we have a phone line (DSL should be active by the end of the week). And it’s really quite warm in there–we’re enjoying the novelty of occasionally being too warm. Ben’s been busy furnishing the space with bookshelves, angle poise lamps and other bits and pieces and it’s heading towards being presentable. We’ve still got space for two more regular tenants, and should also have space for people who are just looking for a space occasionally. Drop me a line if you’re interested.

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Weekend Links – 24th January 2010

2010-01-31T16:08:48Z

So perhaps calling these Friday Links was overly ambitious. From now on they’ll be weekend links, which allows me at least a little more flexibility.

This week youtube bought the rights to broadcast Indian cricket. This could be a very big deal.

The jQuery team really have done a marvellous job producing content and getting attention the past few weeks. Here John Resig talks about getting organised, with the new jQuery organisation and a few plans including a conference in London. Also on javascript I stumbled across this round up of progress on bringing ECMAscript 5 features to webkit. Quite a few changes that could be very handy – I’ve always wondered why there was no Object.keys available. And for debugging JS it was very good to see that Firebug 1.5 (with Firefox 3.6 support) appeared shortly before the launch of Firefox 3.6.

There’s continued to be a stream of Rails 3 focussed blog entries. José Valim has a good round up of links regarding generators in Rails 3 – it looks like they and templates (now merged) could be much more useful than they have been in the past. There’s also a nice detailed walk through the changes to the stack in Rails 3 on omgbloglol.com. Over on rails-core there’s been some discussion of how things stand with gem plugins in Rails 3, and Yehuda Katz has continued his excellent exploration of Rails 3 with a walk-through the new Railties approach.

I’m not using solr for search any more, but if I were I’d want to switch to sunspot (I wish I’d found it before diving into acts_as_solr…)

For some entertainment, I enjoyed tinker.it’s “making of” video to go with their space hopper project for Sony Ericsson – control space hoppers via twitter (via mattb) and the Living Craigslist project could be entertaining.

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Week 122

2010-01-22T17:32:36Z

So it’s Friday afternoon and I’m only just writing my weeknotes. In a rush. There’s something appropriate in that. It’s been a busy week and I find myself having to check Billings to get a sense of where the time’s all gone.

It’s been another week of small jobs. One of the small pre-Christmas projects that had sprawled into this year finally launched—there’s a bit more work to do polishing the CMS but the immediate pressure is off—and two others are in the final days of fine-tuning. I spent a lot of time in Internet Explorer testing things, and remembered why I’m so grateful that that’s usually not my responsibility. And I hit that point in a project where a tool you’ve been pushing and pushing finally snaps.

Alongside those bits of work I’ve been setting up a new server for the James Lind Library, a new client we’ll be working with this year. Right now their site is managed with Adobe Contribute, but the coming weeks will see me beginning proper data exploration and figuring out how to design and populate an appropriate database so that we can then work with them to enhance their metadata, rethink the design, and all those sorts of things.

There were a couple of meetings helping Joe at Street Action prepare for his forthcoming trip to South Africa. Setting up a posterous blog, advising and planning for how to capture, edit and disseminate content. I’m looking forward to seeing it all come in.

And now it’s time for my week to end.

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Friday (ish) links – January 15th 2010

2010-01-16T13:58:43Z

A few random selections from this week’s reading.

Discussions of online privacy continue to rumble on. ReadWriteWeb had a piece about (facebook’s) Mark Zuckerberg repeating the adage that “the age of privacy is over.” Zuckerberg’s comments would appear to continue the confusion around facebook and privacy. Facebook’s popularity is at least in part due to peoples’ perceptions that there is some privacy (or at least control) inherent in it, but they keep eroding that. I deleted my facebook account a few weeks ago, partly because I was tired of negotiating its plethora of options. Twitter’s “always public” or “private” are really so much easier to handle.

Jeremy Gould pointed out O2’s SIM only iPhone plan on twitter the other day. I really wish I could find an equivalent in the US. On our last trip I was carrying two iPhones and a Palm Pre, but ended up buying a $10 virgin mobile phone from Best Buy.

Perhaps the biggest news in web development this week was the release of jQuery 1.4. The full announcement is here. I’m particularly pleased about all events now supporting live(), the improved support for contexts for actions, and the performance speedups, but many of the API changes look very nice. It’s been great to see several meaty blog posts about how some of the new features/improvements were achieved, such as this one on how the live() support works and Ben Nadel’s piece on handling problems with mouseover/mouseout.

In a similar vein I continue to enjoy Yehuda Katz’ coverage of Rails 3, including this piece on ActiveModel. It’s great to finally have a simple way to use AR’s validations, callbacks, etc. outside of ActiveRecord without resorting to nasty tricks. Gabe de Silveira also deserves some credit, not only for his very useful looking validation_scopes gem, but also for a dissection of its writing.

I missed this month’s LRUG but have been reading up on Dragonfly, a ruby library to handle image uploads and produce resized versions on the fly based on directives in a view. Putting that logic in the view makes a lot of sense and I really like the rails integration being handled by inserting rack middleware. I’ll definitely be looking for a project to try it out on.

Ajaxian continues to be the best source for impressive efforts with javascript. This week I was especially taken by efforts to implement audio sampling in firefox.

Fresh from Silicon Roundabout’s appearance in the latest issue of Wired UK, Ben Terrett of RIG has been working on some merchandise. I guess this joke’s just going to keep going.

TinyMCE is now on github. Chances are it’ll remain a pain to use (as are all editors of its ilk) but at least it can be checked out more quickly now.

And of course it’s been impossible to miss the tragedy in Haiti. The past few years have seen really impressive efforts to harness open source tools and techniques for use in disasters. Andrew Turner’s blog is a good stopping off point to find out what the mapping community has been up to.

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Week 121

2010-01-11T10:07:03Z

In his weeknotes for last week, Matt Webb commented that “The first week back after new year is tough. It’s like dropping sudently onto a bike halfway up a hill”. I resonated with that, though for me it started half way through the week. The first half was spent trying to follow up on pre-Christmas enquiries, and then suddenly the bike appeared and I was careening away. And then there were travel disruptions meaning we arrived back in London 24 hours later than planned, the day before the big office move. (I’d also note that, as Matt mentioned in his post, this will be my wife’s first week working at BERG)

So now I’m enjoying being back in Shoreditch, catching up over breakfast while waiting for the old office to be unlocked so we can get going with the move. Hopefully we’ll get that out of the way today as the rest of the week looks like a continuation of last week’s uphill stage. There are two projects that need to be ready for client review by the end of the week and several others that need proposals, scheduling or other preparatory work.

The first of the projects to be delivered this week will be my first built on CodeIgniter. It’s a first project with a new designer and unfortunately not one where I could specify the server I wanted to use. So when I confirmed that I couldn’t use ruby for the CMS, I decided it was time to pick up one of the PHP frameworks I’d been meaning to put through its paces. I’m not thrilled with CI–my biggest bugbear so far is that I’d have expected a solid range of easy to install authentication plugins–but it’s a reasonable framework and worth having in the saddle bag.

I’m looking forward to clearing more of these smaller projects out of the way and digging back into something more substantial, where there’s time to really focus on possibilities, experience, and all those sort of things. Hopefully that’s what the preparatory work is building towards…

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Friday Links – January 8th 2010

2010-01-09T03:57:52Z

It’s time for me to take another stab at occasional link blogging. While I really appreciate those who blog individual links, I seem to keep coming back to ways of packaging links. Here’s a first installment for 2010:

Last month may have been the time for advent calendars—with Drew’s 24ways yet again containing many excellent articles that have me very excited about HTML5—but the jQuery team have decided to follow a similar model in the run up to the release of version 1.4. jQuery14.com kicks off on January 14th, but already has details of their new API website based on the contents of the jQuery Reference Guide.

The folks (downstairs from our new office) at the Really Interesting Group have been keeping busy. Not only can you now see the price list for Newspaper Club (want to make a newspaper like we did at Greenbelt? Newspaper Club should be your first port of call) but you can also read about the fun they had exposing data in Christmas presents. On the newspaper front, I found the idea of the Nashville Retrospect fascinating – it’s a free monthly newspaper devoted to Nashville nostalgia and history.

There’s all sorts of excitement around key-value store Redis. Simon Willison pointed out that the addition of BLPOP and BRPOP support over Christmas means you can use it to drive a queue server without polling. Ezra Zygmuntowicz has been working on an Actor library for ruby based on it. And there’s lots more. It’s good to see that the NoSQL/LessSQL movement is developing beyond simply replacing relational databases and opening up new possibilities and techniques.

For those of us who work with drupal, Project Verity could be quite a boon. Mark Boulton and Leisa Reichelt quite rightly point out that If you’re a company that takes pride in good design and user experience, handing over a Drupal backend can be a bit embarrassing and difficult to reconcile with your company philosophy. Project Verity is their response and while I’ve not actually seen it, I suspect those two are likely to be onto something. It certainly would be nice to be able to deliver a drupal site with a friendly face for admins. I’ve not really been tracking drupal 7 development, and hopefully it’ll reduce the need for such projects. If not, I imagine a port won’t take long to surface.

Given that I’ve been playing around with a Palm Pre and WebOS lately I’m delighted to see Palm using github. There’s a fair range of sample code that comes with the SDK, but this looks likely to be more comprehensive and it’ll be fascinating to see what develops as people begin to fork the code, throw in comments, etc.

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More notes from a Rails 3.0pre upgrade

2010-01-05T17:45:28Z

This is a follow-on from my piece on how I got the (development version of) Catapult Magazine up and running with Rails 3.0pre. If you haven’t already done so, I’d recommend you read that first.

Catapult makes use of the permalink_fu plugin which fails in Rails 3. It fails because of a reliance on the evaluate_attribute_method method which no longer exists in version 3. I’ve temporarily worked around that by replacing it with class_eval, but lately I’ve been using friendly_id a lot more and I suspect I’ll be focussing on porting to that if it works cleanly in Rails 3.

***

A dependency I’ve long wanted to part with is has_many_polymorphs. I’m using it to manage the categorisation of issues and posts but all that’s ever really saved me is one table/model, so perhaps now is the time to clean up the models and lose that dependency.

***

open_id_authentication uses a config.to_prepare block to include itself in ActionController::Base but that’ll work just as well if I add

include OpenIdAuthentication

to my ApplicationController, so that’s what I’ve done. I suspect a number of other changes will be needed (there’s a reference to config.gem in there) but so far, so good.

***

The key issue I’ve run into is that the init.rb files in my gem plugins aren’t run automatically, meaning that in addition, say, to declaring a model has_attached_file (for paperclip) I also need to require ‘paperclip’. That’s not totally unreasonable, but in a complex app it could be quite time consuming and begins to move away from the sense that a plugin/gem is a self-contained unit.

Looking through the new rails source I found the method that loads the init.rb files for plugins installed in vendor/plugins. Rails::Plugin::Vendored (in railties/lib/rails/plugin.rb) contains:

initializer :load_init_rb, :before => :load_application_initializers do |app|
  file   = "#{@path}/init.rb"
  config = app.config
  eval File.read(file), binding, file if File.file?(file)
end

but that only looks through those, not gem plugins. It wouldn’t be too hard to add some code in the initializer to glob the relevant folder and load those files but I’ve not had time yet to decide if that’s my best way forward.