Working With Rails

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Rails Envy Podcast - Episode #036: 07/02/2008

Episode 036. We're trying something new with the first ever Rails Envy public service announcement. Well, new if you don't count the PSA videos we just put out.

The Rails Envy podcast is sponsored this week by Engine Yard, fully managed hosting for your Rails applications. Learn more at EngineYard.com

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In this episode:

• Rails Scaling to 1 Billion Views Per month

• Faster RubyGem Deploys

• Passenger Pref Pane for OSX

• Phusion Passenger 2.0.1

• ShoeFests with Why the Lucky Stiff

• Merb Worker Background Tasks

• Holler

• Shout

• Make your own IM bot in Ruby
  Make your own IM bot in Ruby, and interface it with your Rails app
  Jabber Bot

• Subdomain Fu

• Git remote branches

• Add Gotchas to Rails-Doc

• Railsconf, maybe not Vegas

• DB2 Support for Rails 2.1

• State Machine in Rails core

New York City Printmaking Studios Directory

I am setting up a directory for printmaking studios in the city. The focus will be less on “jobbing” printers and more on spaces where workshops, open studio time, education and collaborative projects are happening.

If you run/work at/know of such an organization, hit me up.

Git submodules: corner cases on updating in old branches

scoop:

I just ran into this. This tip is gold.

Tag! I'm it!

David Chelimsky tagged me with this “chain-blog”. I’ve enjoyed reading other peoples’ stories. Here’s mine.

How old were you when you started programming.

Hard to say. I suppose I was legitimately writing code at 9 years old

How did you get started programming.

You might say I was born into programming. At a very young age, maybe 4 years old, my dad (Unclebob) would put me on his shoulders and take on a robot’s personality. He would remain motionless until I ordered a command. For example, if I said “walk” he would start walking. If I said “turn” he would turn. And in a very computer-like-fashion, he would follow my orders to the “T”. After a “walk” command, my dad would not stop walking until I issued a “stop” command. Poor programming on my behalf often led my dad, with me on his shoulders, straight into a wall. I used to laugh with delight as he’d bounce off and walk into the wall again and again until I corrected my programming error.

What was your first language?

At 9 years old my dad taught me Logo. I was drawing circles, squares, spirals, and in general making that turtle dizzy.

What was the first real program you wrote?

In high school I programmed casino games on my TI-81 during physics class. You could play Black Jack, Roulette, Bet on the Horses, play the One Armed Bandit. My friend Jim Maggio even did some pixel art for the slot machine. It was pretty sweet. All the physics students were required to have TI-81’s so my games ended up getting copied over and over. My first open source experience I suppose.

What languages have you used since you started programming?

In chronological order…

Logo, Basic, Fortran, Pascal, Forth, C, C++, Scheme, Java, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, C#, Objective-C, Smalltalk, Assembly.

Whoa! I’m impressing myself with that list. But who am I kidding? I doubt I could remember how to write HelloWorld in half those languages now.

What was your first professional programming gig?

An internship at Object Mentor. I wrote some Java Servlets to automate parts of their website.

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?

Software is not a spectator sport. ie. Just watching people code won’t make you a good coder. Code as much as possible if you want to master your craft. Code at work. Code at home. Code on vacation (WARNING Your spouse may throw your computer off the balcony). Code for fun. Code to kill time. Code while you’re sleeping (I mean in your dreams).

What’s the most fun you’ve ever had programming?

The project the David Chelimsky referred to was mighty fun. But I’d have to say the most fun I’ve had with my colleagues at 8th Light, Paul Pagel, Jim Suchy, Eric Smith, and Doug Bradbury. I have never worked with a stronger team. When it comes to software, I imagine we could prevail over any challenge. Outside of software, our strengths are less impressive….

1. We started a basketball league and had a perfect record: 0-10. That’s right, we lost 10 out of 10 games.
2. We went on a ski trip together an managed to loose some family members in the mountains, during a snowstorm, at night. They lived.
3. Doing push ups every hour of every working day surely made us stronger and earned us an infamous reputation in the office.

Up Next

Paul Pagel, Jim Suchy, Eric Smith, Doug Bradbury, Matt Segvich, Unclebob, Bob Koss, Michael Feathers, Dean Wampler, Tim Ottinger, Chad Fowler, Jake Scruggs, Mike Clark

Tag! You’re it!

What if Adam Smith was right about poverty?

My ego just got a welcome boost :)

links for 2008-07-02

Would You Road Trip With A Job Candidate

In the past if I found myself on the fence about a job candidate, I’d ask myself, “If I saw this person on the street would I go out of my way to stop and talk to them or would I try to avoid them?” I’ve had decent success with that technique but came across a great blog post this morning and am revising that question to, “Would I be willing to go on an extended road trip with this person?” There isn’t a single one of the solid developers that I’ve interviewed and later worked with that I wouldn’t have been willing to road trip with immediately after interviewing them and a couple of duds that snuck in that I wouldn’t have been willing to road trip with.

I’m also going to make this the first question that I ask myself about a candidate rather than the last and not just for when I’m interviewing, but also for when I’m being interviewed.

Raise your standards. Life’s too short.

Aussagekräftige Html-Titel

Olho biônico?!

The wrong tail

Best photo

Simple code versus simple people

aizatto: A first! Being served water at decanters

Nested include has major memory leak (Rails 2.0.1).

As our mongrels were using up quite a lot of memory, so I tried to figure out what was causing this.

When running the app locally I found out that one certain page caused the mongrel to grow from 60 to 190 megabytes. A whopping 130 megabytes!

After commenting out some of the code, I found out that a single line was causing all this memory usage

contracts = Contract.find( :all, 
  :conditions => ['contracts.employee_id IN (?) ', employees ],
  :include => [:expertise_profile => :qualifications ] )

Auch! The nested include of rails somehow leaks a large amount of memory. The fix was off course a piece of cake.

contracts = Contract.find( :all, 
  :conditions => ['contracts.employee_id IN (?) ', employees ],
  :include => :expertise_profile )

No my mongrel stays a nice 60 megabytes. Don't know it this issue persists in the new Rails, but I'll check that soon!

Incompréhension radio bouton :

Bonjour,
J'aimerais faire deux chose en même temps :

J'ai un formulaire qui permet de télécharger un fichier :


'uploading'}, {:multipart => true}) do %>

J'aimerais en plus rajouter des radios boutons. Est-il possible de les rajouter dans le "form" ou dois-je créer un autre form_tag pour récupérer dans un premier temps la valeur des radios boutons avant de traiter mon fichier. A savoir que le traitement du fichier est lié avec la valeurs des boutons.
De plus est-ce que quelqu'un aurait un exemple d'utilisation de radio bouton parce que je n'arrive pas à récupérer leur valeur, l'affichage était pourtant facile, je n'ai pas trouvé sur le forum et sur le net un exemple ou l'on n'utilise que le bouton (sans base de données) :

Looking for Jerry memorabilia? Bid on my 16GB ipod touch: http://tinyurl.com/638e4v

Benchmarks entre os mais famosos framework PHP

Beautiful thoughts

Tom Taylor gave what sounds like it would have been a very interesting talk 'Delighting with Data' to the Oxford Geek night on Jun 25th last:

But sometimes we geeks forget about all the delightful and beautiful things we can build. The things that aren't necessarily useful or purposeful, but pointless, silly and wonderful. So, I'm talking about building beautiful things out of (sometimes) boring data sources. I'll be talking less about design and visualisation, and more about projects and 'things'.

I've never come across Tom before but he seems an interesting fellow and some of the applications that he's built, simple though they be, are inventive and interesting. It's a lesson to someone like me who is more prone to grand designs that never amount to anything real.

Coincidentally my copy of 'Practical Ruby Projects' by Topher Cyll just dropped through the door this morning. I'd come across Topher's name and the book was reccomended as a Ruby tinkerer's delight.

Over my life I've had a lot of periods where I have felt creative but the last few years I have struggled to capture that feeling.

I want it back.

Here's to beautiful thoughts and making them happen.

@mwilliams That explains why I…

Attention All CEO's - SEO has changed

In fact, Search Engine Optimization has changed beyond belief. Not so long ago, it was all about stuffing content with keywords, and then hoping those web crawlers straight out of The Matrix would be looking for them. Now, of course, it isn't so simple.

And what is infuriating for a lot of people who have a presence on the Internet in a legitimate sense - in other words, your real, honest business concerns who want to market themselves online in a real, honest way - is that the unscrupulous spammers and black hats out there have pushed SEO to new, highly complex levels.

If you are unfortunate enough to own or run a business whose online presence is slipping, chances are you won't even know how to stop the decline. You just don't have the knowledge. And if you don't know how to use good SEO to stand out from the crowd, you my as well not be online.

Some websites use good SEO, some use bad. For years now firms have been enjoying the feeling of having their pages at the top end of Google, apparently with minimum effort. It seems that they know exactly what to do. They know the secret.

The secret to Good SEO

So what is the secret to Good SEO? Easy, don't do it.

Remember that great idea you had at the kitchen table? That is your company. That is what you are in charge of. The vision. Remember that? Savor it once again. Your vision. The thing that gets you up in the morning.

Then, once you have remembered why you started the whole thing (and you're all fired up about helping people again) you'll be eager to think up some new keywords. Don't.

Take a step back, think about the goals and objectives for your website, and give your firm's marketing to the experts.

Give it up because an SEO expert has two things going in their favor, two reasons why you should hire them to make your site noticeable. Reason number one is easy. SEO experts are perfect because they can look at your firm from the outside; they have the commercial perspective, the detached view, whatever you want to call it. In other words, when it comes to your firm and its online marketing, while they weren't present at the birth, they can smooth it over, smarten it up, and get it a date for the prom.

Reason number two is even simpler. An SEO expert knows exactly what to do to make your firm's website shoot up high in the rankings, and then make it stay there. They know about image searches and logos, about linking (the Holy Grail of SEO, and an aspect that will have a whole post dedicated to it soon), about content management, and so on. All things that, while you may well know something about them, you can't honestly say they're your business. They're not what you do.

The Bottom Line

SEO experts need not be expensive. And the job they can do for you and your firm will bring results. There are a lot of cowboys out there, and we'll deal with that in a later post, but get your hands on a company who know online marketing inside out (as well as you know your firm), and you will see business growth. Guaranteed.

We will spend the next few posts exploring the bottom line, looking at aspects of SEO that companies need to be on top of. By the time we're done, you'll know how a good SEO expert can make those web crawlers straight out of The Matrix cling onto your sticky site for dear life.

GrayBit v1.0: Grayscale Conversion Contrast Accessibility Tool

The "Yes is No" Problem

tip

RE: primary key

The victory of version control

So I gave a talk ...

... and messed it up.

Last week I’ve been giving a talk (in german) about the project I did during my internship at the Human Computer Interaction Research Center at the university of applied sciences Fulda. This was the first talk I gave (not counting those I had to do in school and for university) and of course it ended up a little awkward. I didn’t intend to do a live demo at the end but somehow I changed my mind during the presentation. Of course nothing worked like expected … ;-) Lessons learned for next time. If you’d like to see the disaster yourself there is a video available.

Un nuevo algoritmo de google aprende a indexar sitios web en flash

Herramientas para gestionar MySQL

Como si con phpMyAdmin no fuese suficiente, 7 herramientas para gestionar MySQL.

powered by www.nueveseis.com.ar

유인촌 예언 ㄷㄷㄷ

Una cita de Richard Stallman

RE: RE: RE: Вывод каталога в несколько столбцов

Some wannabe Serbian firm had the nerve to steal my code and present it to a prospective client as a...

RE: primary key

class Operator < ActiveRecord::Base
  set_primary_key :operator <--- :sims end has_many>

как сделать опрос на сайте

Learn from the master

Die ochtend, tijdens de koffie

• Hehe, heb je het gezien, Twitter lag weer plat gisterenavond!
• Ja, ‘t is erg he, iedereen spreekt erover.
• Ja, haha. Ha. Zeg, over ons spreekt eigenlijk niemand, he?
• Nee, eigenlijk niet. Dat is niet zo goed, zeker?
• Nee. Misschien moeten we onze strategie eens aanpassen?

En zo geschiedde…

RE: RE: primary key

RE: RE: Вывод каталога в несколько столбцов

RE: primary key

Porque es malo para la sociedad que España haya ganado en el fútbol

RE: primary key

IMG_0196.jpg

hjw3001 posted a photo:

de Young Museum - Golden Gate Park - San Francisco, CA

IMG_0193.jpg

hjw3001 posted a photo:

de Young Museum - Golden Gate Park - San Francisco, CA

IMG_0190.jpg

hjw3001 posted a photo:

de Young Museum - Golden Gate Park - San Francisco, CA