Megar (“megaargh!” in pirate-speak) is a Ruby wrapper and command-line client for the Mega API.
In the current release (gem version 0.0.3), it has coverage of the basic file/folder operations: connect, get file/folder listings and details, upload and download files. You can use it directly in Ruby with what I hope you'll find is a very sane API, but it also sports a basic command-line mode for simple listing, upload and download tasks.
If you are interested in hacking around with Mega, and prefer to do it (more...)
Mandrill is the transactional email service by the same folks who do MailChimp, and I've been pretty impressed with it. For SMTP mail delivery it just works great, but where it really shines is inbound mail handling and the range of event triggers you can feed into to your application as webhooks (for example, to notify on email link clicks or bounces).
The API is very nice to use, but in a Rails application it's best to keep all the crufty details encapsulated and hidden away, right? That's what the mandrill-rails gem (more...)
Wow. This year we mark the 20th anniversary of the Visual Basic 3.0 launch way back in 1993.
It's easy to forget the pivotal role it played in revolutionizing how we built software. No matter what you think of Microsoft, one can't deny the impact it had at the time. Along with other products such as PowerBuilder and Borland Delphi, we started to see long-promised advances in software development (as pioneered by Smalltalk) become mainstream reality:
So eBook sales have surpassed hardcover for the first time, and it is no surprise that the rise of the tablets is the main driver.
There's something quite comfortable about having a nice digital bundle of information at your fingertips, like warm buttered toast.
With relatively open standards and the ubiquity of ereaders, the ebook has become ideal packaging for all manner of information, from training manuals to open source project documentation. Or even that book that apparently 81% of us believe we have inside.
I'll miss the curation they provided. Did you know that 8 out of 10 interesting facts I quote at dinner parties I learned on the network? ;-)
And still learning: IT Conversations was the 2nd podcast ever? Apparently Doug Kaye uploaded a feed the day after Dave Winer posted his first example of using the RSS enclosure tag.
I'm not sure the Conversations Network couldn't have remained relevant and valuable for years to come, but it (more...)
It's been a while since I last cranked up mono to compile some C#, and this time I'm on a Mac.
Fortunately, no dramas. The mono team have made it a very smooth process. I simply downloaded and installed the Mono SDK (it is packaged as a standard disk image [.dmg]). That's enough to compile and run simple projects.
$ mcs hello_world.cs
$ mono hello_world.exe
There's a whole cross-platform IDE available now called MonoDevelop and it looks great if you are doing serious C#. Right now though, I was happy enough to build from the command (more...)
Ruby developers are a pretty spoilt bunch these days. The community has overall done a great job of rolling many of the advances in modern development practice into the tools and conventions we unconsciously put to work every day.
Now I wonder what life is like in the Python community? Like many Rubyists, I've played around with Python and Jython on and off. But nothing serious. And although you could get into a pedantic syntax war, I suspect for the most part the Python and Ruby communities don't overlap simply because once you dive into one camp, the only real (more...)
How many times have you seen a webdev job ad that asks for things like:
Minimum 5 years experience in Ruby on Rails, html5, JQuery, Mongo DB, and building andriod and iphone/ipad apps
So it just came up again on a mailing list, and we all had a good lol.
When people ask for more years experience than the technology has even existed, at one level the incongruity simply tickles our geeky funny bone like a classic joke setup.
At another level however - and one that HR professionals the world over still struggle with - specifying job requirements in (more...)
Run gource on a source code repository and it animates the code's evolution. I think I first saw it used to illustrate the history of Python development since 1990, and I must admit my first reaction was cool but probably pointless.
Recently @dmm6319 ran it over our own project, and inspired me to play around a bit with it too.
So after watching our animation a few times I'm sheepishly revising my opinion of gource.
Yes, you probably need to have something invested in the particular code-base to care, and it certainly helps if you avoid the obvious cliche (more...)
Ember is one of the many javascript MVC frameworks that have been sprouting up over the past year, and it seems to offer a nice level of abstraction. I was quite interested to see how it might fit for a Rails/MongoDB application we're currently working on, so a few tests were in order.
I hosted some tests on a Rails 3.2.2 base, and threw in a whole bunch of technologies to see how well they play together. The (more...)
The quest for an ideal javascript framework for mobile web applications has been a bit of a work-in-progress for some time (at least if you cared about cross-platform).
Ever had a merge fail with a fatal: git write-tree failed to write a tree message out of the blue?
It sounds terrifying, but when I got the root cause is quite mundane: file name conflicts in the merging commits that git is not smart enough to figure out without help. And when you fixup your merge, you are left with a commit that's lost one of its parents ("falling off a branch").
If you do much file reorganisation in a project with branches, it turns out this can be quite common (had it a few times on a recent (more...)
Doing more than just talking about viruses: he fires up a few classics in a DOS box and pokes around with a binary editor before looking at current threats and live infection data. Very cool and entertaining. Not many are brave enough to do live demos, but if you watch to the end you'll get to see how prepared he was for failure;-)
Best served with sides of:
Daniel Suarez's Daemon - for the extreme version of how bad things can go wrong,
If you're like me, you have a bunch of trusty (and rusty) shell scripts that you reach for when doing things like testing a new load balancer.
Enough of that! igp (It goes PING!) is a simple command line utility for testing services with a range of common protocols: ICMP, UDP, TCP, HTTP/S, LDAP/S and so on.
This is nothing earth shattering I know, but it's nice to have simple cross-platform (since it's ruby) tool that does all the common protocols in one. Thankfully, most of the work has already been done by the net-ping library - igp really (more...)
Somehow I managed to cheat my way into a line-up of legendary speakers that included Matz himself. Here are the slides..
I spoke about multi-tenancy - what it is and why it's increasingly relevant for Rails development. It dives a little into four of the many approaches and ends with the challenge: Isn't it about time there was a 'Rails Way'?
To recap .. use AddToCal if you want to offer your website visitors the ability to add any events you list or present on your site to their own calendar. It supports Google Calendar, Microsoft Live Calendar, Yahoo! Calendar, 30boxes, any iCal or vCalendar compatible desktop application (and you can extend it to support any special calendar software you might be dealing with).
So a few weeks ago I found myself wanting "soft-delete" in a Rails app. Ruby Toolbox is a little long in the tooth on the subject, but after a little more research I discovered xpond's paranoid project that was just what I wanted:
packaged as a gem, not a plugin
built for Rails 3 (arel-aware in particular)
can be selectively applied to your models
All was cool, except at about the same time we updated to Rails 3.0.3 and it broke (as it turned out, due to changes in AREL 2.0.6 internals).
But there's still an issue that it can't run under Ruby 1.9.x. That's not very good if you are targeting 1.9.2 for your project.
Here's a quick recipe for how you can build a 1.9.2 project with CC, using the wonders of rvm..
# download and unpack CC to /usr/local/cruisecontrol-1.4.0 (or where you like) # for convenience, add .rvmrc in /usr/local/cruisecontrol-1.4.0 to have it run 1.8.7 echo "rvm (more...)
and 
, and maybe tried the 
- for the extreme version of how bad things can go wrong,
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