I had the opportunity to travel up to Oklahoma City to go to the Red Dirt Ruby Conference - organized by JEG2. The format was a 2 day conference with the first day being talks and the second day being training. The food was great, and the talk format also worked really well. JEG2 had a block of talks split out in chunks of 30/15/15/15/15 minutes. You could post questions via Twitter or IRC, and JEG2 would fire them off to the panel at the end of the block. Things moved well.

I’m a ruby guy. I TATFT. I love writing tests, and I love having tests when I need to make changes in the code.

The Old and Busted Nasty Project

You probably noticed that I sold my soul to the devil. I have ads on my blog now. It’s really an experiment more than anything else. I want to see how they work.

The wonders of SEO optimization have come a long way since I started doing websites. Excite was still been a major search site when I started doing websites, though. Yahoo took over, and then Google. And so it goes.

I haven’t posted a technical entry in a while. I’ve been busy, and have been working on cool stuff. I just haven’t had anything ready to post.

I’ve been working off and on with a buddy (classmate) from The Big Nerd Ranch. We attended the Ruby on Rails class over a year ago together, and have been in communication through the mailing list and email. His business is growing, which is great.

I spent the last week playing with Mephisto (a Rails blogging engine turned CMS). I thought it would be a good platform for a site that I may be about to work on.

I spent the last week fighting with Mephisto trying to get it to behave the way I want it to work in production on my host.

We have an app that I upgraded to 2.0 during it’s infancy about a year ago. Since then 2 versions have been released (2.1.x and 2.2.x) and a third one is looming on the horizon (2.3).

I read a blog post that recommended upgrading to 2.1.2 en route to 2.2. That way you could see what messages you get about things that will be deprecated. I chose this route.

This is another introspection sort-of post. I was talking with a friend the other day who challenged me on something. It’s something that I had already been mulling over.

Go the whole weekend without getting online.

I am poking around a little with a second framework for ruby. I’ve spent the last year working in Ruby on Rails, and I really enjoy it. A couple of my classmates from the Big Nerd Ranch have been playing with a new framework called Merb. It looks interesting, and I think it will help me be a better programmer all around - better at Rails, too.

This past week marked an anniversary for me. We are in the midst of launching a massive project at work, and on October 22, 2007 I made a binder to help with testing this big system. Around that same time my coworker convinced (tricked?) me to learn ruby.

I learned something else at the Lone Star Ruby Conference that I was just able to put to use.

First, some background…

I am using the built-in object serialization that Rails provides to marshal a whole bunch of objects while the app waits for the user’s confirmation to proceed. The objects are then read back and reconstituted. It’s really slick how it works. The objects are serialized in YAML format in the database. The database that I am using in this app is Sybase, and the data row cannot exceed 32k, so I was looking to make sure the yamilfied objects didn’t get over that size threshold.

I just got back from the Lone Star Ruby Conference. It was really good, and I picked up some nice bits that I was able to work into a rails app for work during periods of downtime at the conference.

UPDATE (20080729): AT&T put a captcha on the order status page, so the script below no longer works. It was fun while it lasted.

Lots of people ordered iPhones at AT&T locations under the Direct Fulfillment method, and we are getting anxious. They are shipping out, but in more of a trickle than a flood. I found a forum of other people who are just as neurotic about it as I am, which makes me feel a little better. This time last week was the Day Of The iPhone Launch, and I was like a kid on Christmas morning. I could Not Sit Still.

I found a lot of documentation that told me how to put an object into a YAML file. In my particular case I am reading through a file that needs to create or update a lot of things. I show the user what’s about to happen and give them 1 last chance to back out.

I work for a market research company that is also a part of AOL (which is also a part of Time Warner). Our stock price is not awesome right now, either.

So I went to an industry “technology” conference in NYC a week or two ago. It was really just an excuse for the industry organization to bilk some cash out of our companies. The content was really light, and I was disappointed to see that the ratio of legit “tech” people to “brass” people was terribly skewed in the executives’ favor.

I like to cook. Mostly I like to bake, but time in the kitchen where you can create something that is good is always rewarding. I just spent my lunch hour going through a handful of blogs that I like to read. One is the 37Signals “Signal vs. Noise” blog. They had a link to a cool cooking site: http://www.cookingforengineers.com/

I’ve wanted to include a little blog candy for a while, and this weekend I made it happen. I like how you can see what’s playing on my iTunes in iChat or AIM (Adium actually). I wanted to do the same thing on my blog.

I recently got a VPS with Dreamhost, and am now serving this blog with 1 mongrel rather than a handful of FastCGI processes. So far the default out of the box DH config is doing me right. This blog doesn’t see a firehose of traffic. Yet.

Backstory

Back in the day I landed my very first website gig. I found a company that had positive feedback and placed well on a rating site or two. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I had a gig. The company I chose for my host was CI Host. They were not good, and in the end they were dodging my calls and I had to issue some stop payments with my credit card company.

I am on my Dreamhost VPS now. I can see how heavy Apache or a Rails app is as I monitor my memory usage with top. I have a handful of rails apps running on my VPS, and I am more mindful of these sorts of things all of the sudden. I think I may have been one of those jackasses sucking down the shared host resources…. Sorry other people on lara.

I don’t have anything mind-blowing to share, but I have been busy with a lot of random things.

At work we’re still working on this phat rails project. It’s a support application for an even bigger project. Most recently we cobbled together an image server that serves images via Tomcat (which is what the primary application is server through) using an HTTP request. Why did we do this? Because Apache modrewrite is not our idea of fun. The rails app takes the images and thumbifies them in real time using RMagick (rails ImageMagick). I’ll then use a lightbox plugin to show the full image. Yay.

I recently upgraded from Tiger to Leopard (the newest Mac OS). The upgrade went VERY smoothly. I chose the basic “upgrade” path rather than the “archive and install” bloat or “scorched earth” start over again. I did this because I do web development on my Mac, and I didn’t want to reinstall all that stuff. Yes - I know, most (all?) of it is in /usr/local, but still.

I posted a few weeks ago about the troubles I had with capistrano and CVS. I got the project converted from CVS to Subversion, but the versioning was all jacked up. No worries - I’ll start with version 1 in svn.

But….

I don’t want to be an administrator. I want to make the pretty pages that do the neat things. I don’t want to worry about whether I have a hole in my firewall or deal with the Apache config stuff in general.

I participated in a lightening talk at the local Ruby Brigade meeting the other day. Nothing fancy - just a little recap on my Big Nerd Ranch experience.

The group is pretty smart, but I thought I was probably not the only nuby in the area, so it might be topical for someone else.

Background

I have 3 sites currently hosted with DreamHost. I actually had a fourth site that I was in the process of testing on DreamHost, but I pulled it back.

I have a handful of sites that are also hosted with Yahoo, Network Solutions, and 0catch.

I stumbled across a post the other day that stopped me down and made me think a bit.

I don’t know that I necessarily follow the logic completely. I do prefer ruby at this point over anything else. I do really dislike programming in tcl and php. That was true before I picked up ruby, though.

I like the in_place_edit plugin.

I needed it to work with validations in my model, though. It doesn’t.

I also needed it to work with a select box. It doesn’t.

So after some googling I found a few extensions that accommodate each of these shortcomings….

We use CVS at work. We have an app that a handful of people are working on. Deployment by hand kind of sucks.

No problem, I say. Capistrano works with CVS now. Hooray!

It does “work” inasmuch as it does not barf when you run cap. It doesn’t so much actually work, though. For me. The CVS command that it generates is crazy honked. Maybe my CVS is bad – it’s not you Capistrano, it’s me.

I have been working in ruby and in rails for a few months now. I came back to my Large Multinational Corporation recharged with a new zest for life. Flowers smell better. The sky is bluer. My children suddenly started behaving.

There is something that has been bugging me since I first looked at the skateboard book. I love the framework, and I love ruby. I also love consistency.

Having a button that does something (submits the form maybe) and a link that does something else (cancels the form maybe) bugs me. I see this a lot, and it always bugs me. I understand that we shouldn’t have links that do destructive things. But what’s wrong with having a complementary button to the submit?