The Changelog - Open Source moves fast. Keep up.

RubyMotion toolchain now open source

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 12:34:33 -0500

Laurent has just announced the release of Ruby Motion’s lib folder which powers the command line tool chain. The source is on GitHub.

Stay tuned, Laurent will be our guest on the next episode.

Ostio - add a forum to your GitHub project

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 11:35:02 -0500

Ostio - add a forum to your GitHub project:

Ostio from Paul Miller lets you easily add a forum to your GitHub-hosted projects. Integrated with GitHub OAuth, Ostio syncs your orgs and public repos from your GitHub account. You can then create discussion threads with Markdown support.

Frontend and API source on GitHub.

Backstop - Simple HTTP service for submitting metrics to Graphite

Thu, 31 May 2012 15:55:52 -0500

Backstop - Simple HTTP service for submitting metrics to Graphite:

We’ve mentioned a couple of Graphite-related projects previously. Jason Dixon and Michael Gorsuch from Heroku have released Backstop, a simple HTTP-to-Graphite proxy to make it simple to send metrics. Using the /publish method, metrics and annotations can be posted that match any approved prefixes found in the PREFIXES environment variable, custom in the following example:

# Send a metric
RestClient.post("https://backstop.example.com/publish/custom",
   [{:metric => key, :value => value, :measure_time => Time.now.to_i}].to_json)

# Send an annotation
RestClient.post("https://backstop.example.com/publish/note",
   [{:metric => "foobar.release", :value => "v214", :measure_time => Time.now.to_i}].to_json)

Check the README for local usage and instructions for deploying to Heroku.

Episode 0.8.1 - Celluloid, concurrency, and more with Tony Arcieri

Thu, 31 May 2012 10:10:56 -0500

Episode 0.8.1 - Celluloid, concurrency, and more with Tony Arcieri:

Wynn talked with Tony Arcieri, creator of Celluloid, about concurrency in Ruby and his thoughts on Erlang, Clojure, and design patterns.

Download MP3

This week’s episode is brought to you by:

Pusher is looking for system engineers who specialize in evented systems. Go to → pusher.com/jobs.

Hacker Newsletter is a weekly newsletter delivered every Friday that shares some of the best articles on startups, technology, programming, and more. All links are curated by hand from the ever popular Hacker News site.

Items mentioned in the show:

Tony Arcieri, creator of Celluloid.
Celluloid is painless multithreaded programming for Ruby.
Celluloid:IO provides evented I/O for Celluloid actors.
DCell lets you build distributed Celluloid apps over 0MQ.
Adam Keys, formerly of Gowalla, is now teammates with Tony at Living Social.
Zed gave us the lowdown on 0MQ on 0.3.4.
Reel aims to be a fast, non-blocking evented web server without a Rack API.
Tony is aiming to get Reel working with Webmachine.
Sean Cribbs talked Riak on a previous episode.
Hubot is GitHub’s awesome Campfire bot.
Travis uses Celluloid, as discussed on 0.7.5.
Tony is shutting down LightRail since the release of Rails::API, from Santiago Pastorino.
ActiveModel::Serializer aims to provide an object to encapsulate serialization of ActiveModel objects, including ActiveRecord objects.
Wynn loves jbuilder despite its name.
E is the secure distributed pure-object platform and p2p scripting language.
Data, context and interaction is a paradigm used in computer software to program systems of communicating objects.
Tahoe-LAFS is a Python-powered decentralized secure filesystem.
Tony likes Clojure.
Joe Armstrong and Robert Virding, creators of Erlang are Tony’s programming heroes.

Hammer.js - Easily add multi-touch to your websites

Wed, 30 May 2012 22:14:00 -0500

Hammer.js - Easily add multi-touch to your websites:

With the continued growth of mobile devices, handling touch (and multi-touch) events is no longer optional. Hammer.js is a small - dependency free - library that makes handling touch events dead simple.

You can easily add tap (touch/click), double tap, hold, drag (touchmove/mousemove), swipe, and transform (pinch) events to your website with very little code.

var hammer = new Hammer(document.getElementById("hammertime"));
hammer.ondoubletap = function(e){
  console.log("CAN touch this!");
};

Oh, and if jQuery is your thing, they have a simple plugin that you can download as well.

View the demo or browse the source on GitHub.

Episode 0.8.0 - Lua, Luvit, want some more of it, with Tim Caswell

Wed, 23 May 2012 10:03:00 -0500

Episode 0.8.0 - Lua, Luvit, want some more of it, with Tim Caswell:

Wynn caught up with Tim Caswell to talk about Luvit, his new project that provides Lua bindings for libuv.

Download MP3

This week’s episode is brought to you by:

Items mentioned in the show:

Adam is recently hitched to the lovely Heather.
Tim Caswell is a long time friend of the show, creator of the How to Node blog.
Lua is a powerful, fast, lightweight, embeddable scripting language.
Luvit = Lua + libUV + jIT = pure awesomesauce.
LuaJIT’s FFI library allows calling external C functions and using C data structures from pure Lua code.
Luvit can take advantage of most Node libraries as long as they use non-blocking IO.
Rackspace is using Luvit in production already, but without HTTP.
Tim likes the callback style of coding that V8 promotes.
Wynn asks where Node.js is on the Gartner hype cycle.
Luvmonkey is a port of libuv bindings for SpiderMonkey.
Tim fails to see the use case for AMD.
Tim worked with Jeremy Ashkenas on CoffeeScript while at Document Cloud.
Candor is a language inspired by javascript, but with less features and, therefore, less complexity. So no semicolons, no exceptions and simplified anonymous function syntax (dart-like).
Tim has played with Go but likes Rust better.
Tim is now working at Cloud9 and their cloud-based IDE.
Surely Tim isn’t “the only JavaScript developer within a hundred miles of” Red Lick, TX.
Nodebits is another Node.js blog.
Bert Belder and Ben Noordhuis are the “libuv guys” at Cloud9.
Boot2Gecko is “an early-stage project to expose all device capabilities such that infrastructure like phone dialers can be built with Web APIs.”

JASidePanels - Reveal side ViewControllers similar to Facebook/Path's menu

Tue, 22 May 2012 10:55:49 -0500

JASidePanels - Reveal side ViewControllers similar to Facebook/Path's menu:

JASidePanels is a UIViewController container designed for presenting a center panel with revealable side panels - one to the left and one to the right. The main inspiration for this project is the menuing system in Path 2.0 and Facebook’s iOS apps.

Recently, I was looking for a library for the Path and Facebook style menu. After trying several, JASidePanels was the clear winner. It’s highly customizable, supports orientation changes, and works on iPad too! Configuring is dead simple:

JASidePanelController *viewController = [[JASidePanelController alloc] init];
viewController.leftPanel = [[JALeftViewController alloc] init];
viewController.centerPanel = [[UINavigationController alloc] initWithRootViewController:[[JACenterViewController alloc] init]];
viewController.rightPanel = [[JARightViewController alloc] init];
self.window.rootViewController = viewController;

The source and a demo project is on GitHub.

Sextant - view your Rails routes without waiting on Rake

Tue, 22 May 2012 09:54:48 -0500

Sextant - view your Rails routes without waiting on Rake:

When given the option, I’ll always opt for text mode when completing a task. In Rails that usually means Rake. There’s a point in most Rails apps, however, when the time to boot Rails just to rake -T is painful. So when Richard Schneeman got tired of waiting on Rails to run rake routes, he created Sextant, a gem that lists your routes in development mode right in your browser.

Since your web server is presumably already booted, there’s no startup tax to see your routes. Check out Richard’s blog post or the source on GitHub for more.

MPFoldTransition - Easily add custom folding and page-flipping transitions to UIViews and UIViewControllers

Mon, 21 May 2012 20:33:58 -0500

MPFoldTransition - Easily add custom folding and page-flipping transitions to UIViews and UIViewControllers:

MPFoldTransition is a set of classes to add folding-style transitions to iOS 5 projects.

This is a really amazing project. Making these fold and flip transitions is a ton of work and Mark Pospesel has made it dead simple.

You can easily transition views using different styles with one method call:

+ (void)transitionFromView:(UIView *)fromView toView:(UIView *)toView duration:(NSTimeInterval)duration style:(MPFoldStyle)style transitionAction:(MPTransitionAction)action completion:(void (^)(BOOL finished))completion;

There are versions for UIViewControllers as well. Source and demo app on GitHub.

SSPullToRefresh - Simple pull to refresh view for iPhone

Fri, 18 May 2012 08:33:00 -0500

SSPullToRefresh - Simple pull to refresh view for iPhone:

As I continue to dive into iOS development, I’m on the lookout for time saving Cocoa projects. Sam’s SSPullToRefresh is an easy, customizable way to add pull-to-refresh views like those made popular in Loren Brichter’s original Tweetie for iPhone app. SSPullToRefresh hides all the pulling and animating logic away, leaving you to implement what you care about - fetching and refreshing your view.

- (void)viewDidLoad {
   [super viewDidLoad];
   self.pullToRefreshView = [[SSPullToRefreshView alloc] initWithScrollView:self.tableView delegate:self];
}


- (void)refresh {
   [self.pullToRefreshView startLoading];
   // Load data...
   [self.pullToRefreshView finishLoading];
}

- (void)pullToRefreshViewDidStartLoading:(SSPullToRefreshView *)view {
   [self refresh];
}

You can use a couple of provided content views or you can subclass and implement your own. Check out the source on GitHub or see it in action in Cheddar.

Bootstrap-powered viewer makes RFCs easier on the eyes

Wed, 16 May 2012 12:20:07 -0500

Bootstrap-powered viewer makes RFCs easier on the eyes:

In what may be the most useful application of the Twitter UI framework, Mislav Marohnić offers RFC, a website that reformats The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) documents into something a bit more reader friendly:

I know which I’d rather read. The source is on GitHub and the live site is running on Heroku.

rspec-rails-uncommitted - Selectively run specs based on git status

Wed, 16 May 2012 09:28:00 -0500

rspec-rails-uncommitted - Selectively run specs based on git status:

Marshall Yount has released a project to make it easier to run Rspec specs in Rails based on git status:

rake rspec:uncommitted    
rake rspec:unpushed
rake rspec:unmerged

It looks like a nice way to filter specs for those using a git-based workflow. Source on GitHub.

UPDATE: As Alex Soulim points out, it works with SVN, too.

Redis-faina - query analyzer for Redis

Wed, 16 May 2012 08:17:27 -0500

Redis-faina - query analyzer for Redis:

From folks that know something about scale, the Instagram team has realeased Redis-faina, a tool that parses Redis’ MONITOR command to provide stats on Redis queries:

# reading from stdin
redis-cli -p 6490 MONITOR | head -n  | ./redis-faina.py

Overall Stats
========================================
Lines Processed     117773
Commands/Sec        11483.44

Top Prefixes
========================================
friendlist          69945
followedbycounter   25419
followingcounter    10139
recentcomments      3276
queued              7

Top Keys
========================================
friendlist:zzz:1:2     534
followingcount:zzz     227
friendlist:zxz:1:2     167
friendlist:xzz:1:2     165
friendlist:yzz:1:2     160
friendlist:gzz:1:2     160
friendlist:zdz:1:2     160
friendlist:zpz:1:2     156

...

Check out the source on GitHub. If you’re new to Redis, Episode 0.4.5 with @antirez is a classic.

MGTileMenu - pop-up tile-based contextual menu for iOS5

Mon, 14 May 2012 08:24:16 -0500

MGTileMenu - pop-up tile-based contextual menu for iOS5:

MGTileMenu is an innovative context menu for iOS from Matt Gemmell. Resembling Path’s oft imitated corner menu in some respects, it appears to be more contextual than navigational, as the screencast demonstrates:

Matt’s introductory blog post provides a deep introduction on the design or you can grab the source on GitHub. The license requires attribution, or you can purchase a non-attribution license online.

Plumbum - Pythonic, cross-platform shell syntax

Sat, 12 May 2012 08:27:31 -0500

Plumbum - Pythonic, cross-platform shell syntax:

Plumbum is an interesting project from Tomer Filiba that aims to bring shell syntax to Python scripts:

The motto of the library is “Never write shell scripts again”, and thus it attempts to mimic the shell syntax (shell combinators) where it makes sense, while keeping it all pythonic and cross-platform.

A piping example:

>>> chain = ls["-a"] | grep["-v", "\\.py"] | wc["-l"]
>>> print chain
/bin/ls -a | /bin/grep -v '\.py' | /usr/bin/wc -l
>>> chain()
u'13\n'

In addition to piping, Plumbum supports redirection and even remote commands over SSH. Check out the source on GitHub, Tomer’s introductory blog post or the excellent project docs for more.

fr_public: Demoscene tools

Fri, 11 May 2012 12:05:00 -0500

fr_public: Demoscene tools:

Hey everyone! It’s Friday, and a good friend of mine (@DeMarko) just tipped me off to a really interesting repository.

If you’re not aware of the Demoscene, you should be. Basically, they make awesome crazy videos with computer graphics. That sounds boring, until you realize that they work within crazy constraints.

For example, here’s a ten minute Demo made on the Amiga:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8JbAdEzvMA

Here’s one on the Commodore 64, in 1982:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Nfgdr4fOS8

While these videos are old, the Demoscene certainly isn’t dead. Here’s another C64 demo, this time from 2010:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8onlB0F1_A

Anyway, I could go on and on. Point is, many modern demos are made on modern computers, but with a different constraint: file size. Generally, it’s “make an awesome video with graphics and sound that’s less than 4k.” That’s smaller than a blank word document. Here’s an example of one of these:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=0w_xEUoK79o

Make sure to tell YouTube you want the 1080p (!) version.

Anyway, I’ll stop with the history. Here’s the point: There’s a repository that’s basically just a raw dump of the code people have written to make these kinds of demos. An archive of the last ten years of a bunch of people making awesome things.

The README warns that much of the code is hard to compile, and if you don’t know C or C++, you probably won’t be able to make heads or tails of it. Note also that these are tools used to make demos, not necessarily the code of the demo itself. Point is, there be dragons in this repo. Lots of dragons.

You can check out the Farbrausch tools repo here.

UPDATE: One of my other friends (@davewilkinsonii) pointed me to this article, which refers to the above repository, but also has links to download source code of a TON of demos: http://www.displayhack.org/2012/the-great-demoscene-sourcecode-giveaway/

Gitspective - Facebook style timeline for your GitHub feed

Wed, 09 May 2012 08:51:03 -0500

Gitspective - Facebook style timeline for your GitHub feed:

A great looking use of the GitHub API from Zach Moazeni to visualize your GitHub timeline.

Create your own timeline or browse the source on GitHub.

Imperator - Command pattern for Ruby apps

Tue, 08 May 2012 08:19:32 -0500

Imperator - Command pattern for Ruby apps:

Jon Leighton isn’t the only one picking a fight with Rails controllers. Keith Gaddis suggests in The Problem With Controllers that we’ve relegated the command pattern to the depths of our queuing frameworks:

The problem with controllers in Rails is that they’re a part of the web domain—their job is to respond to requests, and ONLY to respond to requests. Anything that happens between the receipt of a request and sending a response is Somebody Else’s Job™. Commands are that Somebody Else™. Commands are also very commonly utilized to put work into the background.

Why are commands an appropriate place to handle that logic? Commands give you the opportunity to encapsulate all of the logic required for an interaction in one spot. Sometimes that interaction is as simple as a method call—more often there are several method calls involved, not all of which deal with domain logic (and thus, are inappropriate for inclusion on the models). Commands give you a place to bring all of these together in one spot without increasing coupling in your controllers or models.

He’s released Imperator, a Ruby gem to help move that logic, simplify our controllers, and make them less model-dependent.

class DoSomethingCommand < Imperator::Command
  attribute :some_object_id
  attribute :some_value

  validates_presence_of :some_object_id

  action do
    obj = SomeObject.find(self.some_object_id)
    obj.do_something(self.some_value)
    end
  end
end

The project is brand new and will likely evolve so check the source on GitHub.

twitter-text-objc — An Objective-C implementation of Twitter's text processing library

Mon, 07 May 2012 16:28:00 -0500

twitter-text-objc — An Objective-C implementation of Twitter's text processing library:

Twitter released a version of their twitter-text library for Objective-C today. It makes extracting entities from strings really easy.

Here’s the header:

+ (NSArray*)extractEntities:(NSString*)text;
+ (NSArray*)extractURLs:(NSString*)text;
+ (NSArray*)extractHashtags:(NSString*)text checkingURLOverlap:(BOOL)checkingURLOverlap;
+ (NSArray*)extractMentionedScreenNames:(NSString*)text;
+ (NSArray*)extractMentionsOrLists:(NSString*)text;
+ (TwitterTextEntity*)extractReplyScreenName:(NSString*)text;
+ (int)tweetLength:(NSString*)text;

Extracting the URLs from a string is super simple:

NSArray *URLs = [TwitterText extractURLs:@"4 new HTTP status codes http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6585"];
TwitterTextEntity *entity = [URLs objectAtIndex:0];
NSLog(@"Entity range: %@", NSStringFromNSRange(entity.range));
// Entity range: {24, 34}

The source is on GitHub. There’s a Ruby, JavaScript, and Java version of this library as well.

Opa - Event-driven, non-blocking, strongly statically typed web framework with JavaScript-like syntax

Mon, 07 May 2012 08:42:58 -0500

Opa - Event-driven, non-blocking, strongly statically typed web framework with JavaScript-like syntax:

It seems our industry’s search for a unified theory of web development is resulting in a blurring of the line between client and server. Opa, the latest on our radar even goes so far to introduce client and server keywords:

 // Opa decides
function client_or_server(x, y) { ... }
 // Client-side
client function client_function(x, y) { ... }
 // Server-side
server function server_function(x, y) { ... }

Personally, Opa’s JavaScript-like syntax doesn’t get me excited. JavaScript’s strength lies in its ubiquity, not in its syntax.

Opa’s web site is very well done and the source is on GitHub for your perusal.