Bryan on CNN
Geez, What Happened?
Ok, so you may not know, all my sites are running from my data center at home. Yes, I do have a rack of servers I maintain at home. So, when the weird ass snow storm hit my area, the power went down and went down hard. I lost power on Saturday and just got it back. That’s three plus days. Obviously my UPS’s doesn’t last that long and all my sites, including this one, went down.
So, why didn’t I just redirect to my backups at EC2?
The simple answer is that I have a family and had to evacuate them to safety since without electricity, I have no running water. I also got rid of my other remote servers to save some money. Guess the savings weren’t worth it. They’re all coming back.
Rails 3.1
Now that Rails is 3.1, we should take a short break from our daily lives to see what changed. In this release, there are many significant changes. The biggest one that I see is the assets pipeline. I’ll have to tackle this issue next coming days since all my apps use “traditional” layout. Of course I don’t have to use it, but why stay behind?
Here’s the link to the release note.
I’ve been too busy with iOS development recently and this new release gives me an excuse to dive into Ruby again. I’ll post the results of my experiments here.
Short Survey – iPhone App & Rails
Although this blog is about Ruby (see the post about the origin of RubyHead), I thought it would be interesting to demonstrate how an iPhone app could be another front-end to a system other than web.
I’m thinking about creating a series of screencasts that shows me writing a simple iPhone app with Rails serving up data and tiny web admin. Instead of going into details, I’d like to make it so that it’s just a rough play by play.
Please vote in the comment if this is something that interests you.
Wanna Learn Testing?
As you know, I bitched about the RSpec book before. Some people pointed out the fact that I didn’t offer anything for those wanting to learn testing. Well, take a look at these videos. There are six videos that teaches you from begging to end.
Efficient Rails Test-Driven Development – by Wolfram Arnold
class 1 of 6
class 2 of 6
class 3 of 6
class 4 of 6
class 5 of 6
class 6 of 6
Service-Oriented Design with Ruby and Rails
Paul Dix wrote a book titled “Service-Oriented Design with Ruby and Rails” and it’s available on Amazon at here. The book is also available on Safari, so check it out if you’re interested in developing API’s.
I’ve been working with SOA for years now and developed couple of API’s using both Rails and Sinatra. The book appears to cover both of them. I have not read the book cover to cover, but only glanced at certain sections. However, based on the sections I read, the book appears to be a good one.
Rails 3.0.0 Now Official
Ok, so DHH announced that Rails is now 3.0.0. What this really means that I don’t have to use that annoying –pre to do install Rails, just gem install rails. I’ve been using Rails 3 on just about all my projects, so hopefully this just means they fixed the bugs.
Ruby 1.9.2 Released
Ruby 1.9.2 is now without beta or rc tag, but officially released. The only thing that I noticed that affects my code is that $: no longer includes current directory. Other than that, I’ve been using it for quite some time and love it.
Here’s the content from the release announcement:
Ruby 1.9.2 is mostly compatible with 1.9.1, except the
following changes:
* Many new methods
* New socket API (IPv6 support)
* New encodings
* Random class that supports various random number generators
* Time is reimplemented. There is no longer the year 2038 problem.
* some regexp enhancements
* $: no longer includes the current directory.
* dl is reimplemented on top of libffi.
* new psych library that wraps libyaml. You can use the library instead
of syck.
Daughter 3.0
Just became a father of a lovely girl for the third and final time. Will try to produce some cool stuff coming weeks when the dust settles.
I wonder how others deal with the fatherhood and geekery…
Meet Raphel
Ah, remember the days when we had to write programs to draw things and figure out the memory space for… Well, now that Flash is out of style, meet Raphael.
From their website:
Raphaël is a small JavaScript library that should simplify your work with vector graphics on the web. If you want to create your own specific chart or image crop and rotate widget, for example, you can achieve it simply and easily with this library.
Raphaël [ˈrafēəl] uses the SVG W3C Recommendation and VML as a base for creating graphics. This means every graphical object you create is also a DOM object, so you can attach JavaScript event handlers or modify them later. Raphaël’s goal is to provide an adapter that will make drawing vector art compatible cross-browser and easy.
Raphaël currently supports Firefox 3.0+, Safari 3.0+, Opera 9.5+ and Internet Explorer 6.0+.
Here’s a short screencast of the demonstration I recorded.
Raphael Demo from Joon You on Vimeo.
