Andrew's (Tumbling) Interwebdiary: Archive

Jun 21st

My Own Damn Fault: Sinatra::Base.run! !=... →

Ever had one of those problems that makes you feel like a complete idiot? You tinker and tinker and it’s still there. You recreate an entire configuration file from scratch trying to figure out the…

Mar 15th

Cocoa, CoreData, and XCode are sucking my will to...

Recently I tweeted this and got a reply from @pilky asking what in particular was bothering me. Since I had more than 140 characters of gripes, here we go. Before I get into full rant-mode: I’ve liked my iPhone development experience and Cocoa is a compelling platform. I’m willing to admit that I might be spoiled. And before you jump to conclusions, yes I am a Ruby developer...

Nov 6th

1 note

Seventeen Years Ago in Hampton Roads

Excerpt from today’s Ledger-Star Let’s take a moment to remember an event that occurred on this day 17 years ago: the day Mt Trashmore exploded. Thanks to Tommy Griffiths and Henry “The Bull” del Toro of WNOR, the only members of the local media with the courage to report the seismic anomalies and chemical irregularities, thousands of lives were saved. Though...

Apr 1st

Mysterious DM-Salesforce Issue Solved!

I did my good turn for the day and wrote up a Salesforce issue on the dm-salesforce project wiki that held me up for an hour or so. If you’re trying to use the ruby datamapper adapter dm-salesforce to connect to a sandbox and you get “INVALID_LOGIN: Invalid username or password or locked out. (SOAP::FaultError)”, you should take a look. The thing that really held me up was...

Feb 27th

Feb 11th

Feb 2nd

XRVG: Vector graphics library for Ruby →

I’m looking forward to trying this out. From its philosophy section: Nearly every programming toolkit that you may find, in any programming language, instanciates shapes with absolute geometrical coordinates. What that means is that if you want to do graphics programming with them, you rapidly get lost in a list of basic drawing primitives with lots of numbers, without being able to...

Dec 18th

Shoes 2 is out! →

This looks pretty awesome. The more Shoes grows up, the more it seems like Ruby has finally found its GUI toolkit.

Dec 8th

Entscheidungsproblem Solved Cheap! →

Something tells me they’re not going to be able to deliver on time.

Nov 25th

Nov 14th

Ruby Proxy, or Roxy →

Very interesting. I could see a lot of code cleanup that could be done with this.

Nov 14th

Classic Neal Stephenson Article →

I was reminded of this recently. When I started my first job at a telcom analysis firm, this was required reading. And even though it was 8 years old at the time (and 12 now) and makes many predictions that never arrived, it’s still a great primer to submarine cables. That and Neal Stephenson is awesome. Fans of Cryptonomicon should find a lot to be entertained by.

Nov 12th

Nov 1st

Little Tip To Make Applet Development Like a... →

So if you’re like me and barely ever tread into the Java environment, you have no clue about things like the “Java Console”. I’m working on an applet right now that uses both JRuby and Lucene, which isn’t that common of a combination. In the 10 seconds that I’ve had it open, it’s already given me more debugging information than I had before. Truly...

Oct 15th

Newspeak » The Newspeak Programming Language →

I saw this on a post by Ola Bini. The thing that impresses me about the language design is the lack of global state. Ola discusses this more on the linked post.

Sep 18th

Obama is RESTful →

Does it matter what kind of technology a candidate uses? Probably not, but it’s nice to know. Besides, we’re allowed to be a little cheeky in the midst of all of the serious coverage.

Sep 9th

Aug 19th

Aug 17th

Boblet: CMS rant →

I see Boblet pretty often on the #radiantcms chat room, where he posted a link to this. I’ve found myself thinking the exact same things while evaluating CMSes. I picked Radiant because of its minimalism and great extensibility. However, it is plagued by a couple of things that I fear are too much of a departure from its original design and implementation (and the extensions’...

Aug 1st

1 note

Background to AMQP →

For a long time I’ve looked for a good description of middleware. Everything I read was some variation on “it connects stuff” or something equally nebulous or buzzwordy. So far this description of the AMQP has been quite illuminating not only on the framework, but of MOM in general.

Jul 30th

Building Your Own AMQP Client →

Jul 30th

amqp — A pure Ruby AMQP client →

AMQP is a Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) protocol. The goal is your standard cross-platform/heterogenous ideal of having a reliable way for different machines, different environments, and different languages all able to play nice. Unlike the RESTful approach, which uses request-reponse, MOMs rely on asynchronous message-passing and queueing. Neither architectural style is going to solve...

Jul 30th

Single Assignment in Erlang →

Single assignment rocks. 99% of the time, if you can’t figure out a way to something without double assignment, you’re doing it wrong. Especially in a functional language like Erlang or Haskell.

Jul 29th

KirkWylie comments on When REST Doesn't Scale,... →

Excellent discussion on the topic of the day, especially if you follow the thread between KirkWylie and chub79.

Jul 28th

Kirk's Rants: Real MOM is Hard; Let's Use XMPP! →

And here’s a rebuttal… Well, I think this will continue to develop further. And that’s a good thing. I for one can’t wait until there’s an open-source, push-button, best-practices, certified, 30,000 mph view, monkey-riding-a-greyhound, super-awesome-#1-booyah solution.

Jul 28th

Dare Obasanjo: When REST Doesn't Scale, XMPP to... →

While I can’t say much for Dare’s musical tastes (see bottom), he raises some interesting points. From what I see, the XMPP vs. HTTP (or Push vs. Pull, depending on how specific you want to get) debate is poised to become the next web-service architecture battle. However unlike SOA vs ROA (or RPC vs. REST), the use-cases and delineation of each’s strengths and weaknesses are...

Jul 28th

Fuzed and EC2 →

Jul 24th

Armstrong thinks he's found Erlang's killer app →

Jul 21st

AtomServer – The Power of Publishing for Data... →

Although I hate how sometimes InfoQ’s articles read like commercials (and this is no exception, but at least it’s for an open source project), this article is still pretty good at explaining why I should care about Atom. Most of the things I’ve read in the past talk about blog syndication or other things for human consumption and, while important, they just don’t excite me...

Jul 7th

The Comonad.Reader » Recursion Schemes: A Field... →

Man, I wish I really understood this… Time to get back to Haskell.

Jul 3rd

Convenience Over Correctness (or Why RPC Lives On) →

Jul 2nd

Charles Petzold: The Annotated Turing →

I’m about 1/3 the way through this now and I’d highly recommend it to discerning programmers everywhere. The book gives a lot of background information that you’d not get just reading the paper by itself. Turing’s paper doesn’t start until page 64 – everything before that is an introduction to number theory (with emphasis on Cantor and Hilbert).

Jul 2nd

CSS Variables →

Coming to a web browser near you. Of course, Webkit is the first to support.

Jul 1st

37signals: An Introduction to Using Patterns in... →

Jun 26th

Jun 19th

Clean Up Your Ruby Code with Ick →

Jun 18th

Setting up msttcorefonts (2.2) … These fonts were provided by Microsoft “in the interest of cross- platform compatibility”. This is no longer the case, but they are still available from third parties. You are free to download these fonts and use them for your own use, but you may not redistribute them in modified form, including changes to the file name or...

Jun 17th

Phusion Passenger migration issues solved!

I recently decided to move a couple of our sporadically used internal applications over to Phusion Passenger (a.k.a mod_rails a.k.a. mod_rack a.k.a. mod_rack that-runs-but-probably-shouldn’t-WSGI). I ran into two problems which I thought would showstopping issues that were Apache related, but upon looking into it where things special to one of my Rails apps. Long story short: both of...

Jun 17th

Another Reason to Abhor Dreamweaver →

Jun 17th

Jun 5th

BeerAlchemy →

Next stop, Flavorville. Population: me.

Jun 3rd

WS-Deathstar for the REST of Us: A Story of Ruby,... →

Sooner or later it’ll probably happen to you: WSDL. SOAP. WS-Deathstar. The horror. You say, “I use Ruby! We’re all RESTful around here, man! My webapp consumes and produces YAML and JSON…

May 6th

GitHub RubyGems →

Death to Rubyforge! Ahem That was a little strong… What I mean, is that I hope this might encourage Rubyforge to update its UI. GForge lacks the clean sophistication of the Web 2.whoa! generation of webapps that Ruby has helped to usher in. Github, on the other hand is the cat’s ass.

Apr 25th

Opening Ruby gems in TextMate →

A nice little shell script (with tab completion to boot!) to easily bring up any Ruby gem in TextMate. This could also be easily adapted to any editor that can be given a directory from the commandline.

Apr 14th

Property Law in the Lord of the Rings →

Apr 8th

HotRuby - Ruby on JavaScript & Flash →

For serious? Wow.

Mar 27th