I’m currently sitting in Tony Hillerson’s presentation at 360 Flex: Flex and Rails with RubyAMF. It’s been a pretty Rails-rudimentary session, but there have been several useful tidbits (the Awesome Nested Set plugin looks cool, for example).

I’m glad to see promotion of Rails/Ruby as a backend for Flex apps, ’cause that’s just a no-brainer as far as I’m concerned. For some reason it doesn’t seem so obvious to the Java-background-heavy Flex community. I guess some people just really love writing verbose, mind-fucking repetitive code. Power to ‘em, I’d rather GSD.

Tony is the first presenter I’ve ever sheen whose shirt literally matches his non-plain preso slide background. That’s a level of style/detail that I think is badass (seriously).

Categories: Flex, Flex360, RubyAMF
No Comments »

I’d love to make/work on sites like this… wow.http://www.whitevoid.com/

Categories: Cool Stuff
No Comments »

During a brief conversation about SSH clients between guys on my team at work:

PuTTy is like Windows Methadone

Categories: Cool Stuff
No Comments »

DevZone has a Flexible Rails: Flex 3 on Rails 2 RefCard written by Peter Armstrong available for free download. Their registration/”download” process is a bit kludgy and intrusive but the RefCard is worth the effort.

Categories: Flex, Rails, Ruboss
No Comments »

I’ve been uber-quiet lately (in terms of blogging, mind you… I’m still my standard verbose and vocal self) because I’ve been super-busy. New job, new project, needing a new home, etc., etc., etc. However, I’m taking a minute to check in because I think it’s pretty funny that I literally just typed the following at work:

p.methods.grep(/ass/)

One of the guys I’ve been talking with while smoking was on an absolute tear about web accessibility and usability, soapbox-preacher-style. I am totally in the right place.

Categories: Uncategorized
No Comments »

It never ceases to amaze me that the minute almost any new piece of hardware with a microprocessor comes out that it’s followed by an announcement that somebody has figured out a way to put some variant of Linux on it. There are some seriously savvy folks whose technical abilities are amazing but strangely they seem obsessed with putting Linux on everything… because they can. (I actually think this is a cool phenomenon.)

Similarly, Doug McCune has reverse-engineered Adobe’s new special-search-indexing Flash Player which gives Google and Yahoo’s web spiders far greater insight into SWFs (this means there’s been another big step forward in Search Engine Optimization for content in Flash! Woot!). The most amazing part of Doug’s reverse-engineering analysis is that he’s managed to communicate the entire process in just one comic-strip panel. Bravo, sir, bravo!

It’s completely worth a look even if Flash/SEO, etc. isn’t your thing.

Categories: Flash, Flex
No Comments »

Several of us from not_joseph’s San Jose Ruby Hackfest Meetup have been getting together fairly frequently to hack. I’ve created a Google Group for folks in the South Bay area to announce when/where they’re hacking so that it’d be easier to set up impromtu hackfests and get to know other Ruby/Rails folks.

Please consider joining.

Categories: Hackfests, Ruby, Ruby on Rails
No Comments »

One of my internet friends said that she’d like a simple desktop app which would allow her to post to multiple sites like Twitter, Plurk, etc. A little later she plurked about how HelloTxt basically does what she wants except that it doesn’t have a desktop app.

Adobe AIR to the rescue.

HelloTxt has a mobile client interface written in HTML so making a simple cross-platform desktop app was as simple as firing up Flex Builder, adding panel and HTML components, and specifying HelloTxt’s mobile client interface’s URL as the HTML component’s “location.” I then twiddled around with a little bit of styling and config. stuff but that wasn’t necessary to make it work.

<mx:windowedapplication title="Grrrgregg8r" height="550" width="300"
  layout="absolute" xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml">
  <mx:panel headerheight="10" bottom="0" right="0" top="0" left="0"
    layout="absolute">
    <mx:html bottom="0" top="0" left="0" right="0"
      location="http://m.hellotxt.com/" />
  </mx:panel>
  </mx:windowedapplication>

A cross-platform desktop application in five lines of MXML. Pretty dang nifty if you ask me.

A compiled/working version of Grrrgregg8r is available by right-clicking the link below and doing that “save as” thang.

Grrrgregg8tr - An AIR “microbrowser” for HelloTxt

Categories: AIR, Cool Stuff, Flex
1 Comment »

There’s gonna be a hackfest in San Jose at Hyrdration this Saturday at 9:30 p.m.. As always, I’m totally looking forward to hanging out with the folks who usually show up to this and I’m totally going to be there, though perhaps I won’t be wearing bells. I’ll probably be there a bit earlier than 9:30.

Adam (whom I met at Barefoot last night), if you’re reading this, please attend if you can… I think you’d be an especially good fit with some of these cool cats (who put up with me)!

Categories: Uncategorized
No Comments »

Peter Armstrong’s new book Enterprise Flexible Rails (which is all about Ruboss and is co-written with Ruboss badass Dima Berastau) was released to Manning’s Early Access Program today! Chapter one is available as a free PDF download.

If you only buy one book this year… well, maybe this isn’t quite ready to be it… but if this book ends up being even 1/2 as good as Peter’s Flexible Rails book then we’re in for a mammoth treat.

There’s a worth-reading announcement ’bout the book (since Peter and Dima are Canadian, I should have probably written “aboot” ;)) on the Ruboss-Framework Google Group.

Categories: Flex, Ruboss
No Comments »

I went to Josh Susser’s session The Great Test Framework Dance-Off yesterday afternoon. It was a great survey of Rails Test Frameworks and I appreciate his take, which I summarize as “if it helps you write tests, then use it.” Exactly!

During his presentation, someone suggested turning down the lights so that it’d be easier to see his slides. Susser joked: “Hey, if we do that they you won’t be able to see me!”I shouted “we don’t need to see you, ’cause I have a tattoo of you on my arm.*”

Susser retorted “it’s nice to have fans!” and resumed his outstanding presentation.

I was sitting next to my new friend Harlan and asked him if he’d draw a smiley face on my arm (with eyebrows and a subtle eyebrow piercing) and put “Susser Rox!” underneath it. When the presentation was over, I went up to Susser and said “dude, I’m serious… check out my tattoo!” and rolled up my sleeve.

Harlan took this picture, which I think clearly shows how Susser responded:

I really love being a tiny guppy in the huge Rails Community lake.

* I think I did my standard “stammering” thing, so I may not have actually said precisely this, but it’s definitely what I meant.

Categories: Cool Stuff, Ruby on Rails
No Comments »

Today at RailsConf I got my ass kicked… in the good way.

The first whooping came during TJ Murphy’s session: Flexible Scaling: How to Handle 1 Billion Pageviews. Strong blows include:

• “SELECT-less Reads”
• Tons of interesting info. about using the Amazon Cloud
• His monthly server costs for Warbook (an awesome game built in RoR which has a bazillion Facebook users) and their monthly income (more than the server costs)
• Caching/memcache, ActiveRecord tweaking
• He essentially did Warbook by himself, assisted by the almighty power of Google and folks who are willing to help by providing pointers to good info.

I got a chance to talk to him for a moment afterwards and told him that I really enjoyed playing Warbook until the jackass 13-year-old gangs started to beat my solo-self to a pulp repeatedly. I also mentioned that I was grateful for that because that experience took my smack-talking to the next level.

The second bit of major beatdown came during Erik Kastner’s session: Microapps for Fun and (Micro) Profit (his addition, not mine!).

• Learning and self-gratification (in terms of making what you want to make) is personally profitable, and a worthwhile endeavor. I cheered inside when he said that his microapps have made $7 with Google AdSense.
• Limiting your project to one day makes you toss features that aren’t actually needed and gets something into the world.
• Rails isn’t the hammer for every web application nail… there are good reasons to use Camping, Sinatra, Merb, etc. (and even better… sample code demonstrating how to use Sinatra.

The especially painful Chuck Norris Roundhouse kicks were Erik’s comments regarding get your stuff out in the world now. Pare down, do the minimum you have to, get your alpha OUT. (As he pointed out, this is nothing new… Getting Real, “Real Artists Ship,” etc., etc.) It was a message I needed to hear.

Amy Hoy also chimed in about shipping now vs. entering analysis paralysis and relayed some personal anecdotes that I’d paraphrastically summarize as:

• It made me feel good to get something done and out.
• It made me more credible… I’ve shipped, so I don’t have to feel like a hypocrite when I (rightly) encourage others to ship.
• It’s just straight-up badass to deploy something you’ve worked on.

I miss my RailsConf2007 posse, but I’m having a great time with my RailsConf2008 posse. I’ve met TONS of cool people, and we’re only half-way into it.

Categories: Ruby on Rails
No Comments »