Spoken

Posted by Daniel Tue, 16 Oct 2007 14:47:00 GMT

Posted by Daniel Wed, 05 Sep 2007 00:25:00 GMT

Posted by Daniel Wed, 15 Aug 2007 23:27:00 GMT

Steve: As with any great product, there have been several things that make it special — the idea, our product owner, the process, etc. The most important to me though is the Team.

Luke: Ript lets you tear stuff off the web just like you tear something out of a magazine. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Wendy: For the past year, our team at Oxygen has been working on several projects. Most of which are internal, providing tools for the Oh! channel to operate. One of them, Ript, is something completely different.

Posted by Daniel Wed, 08 Aug 2007 19:43:00 GMT

If you work with designers and others on projects and you store all the work artifacts in Subversion (which a lot of folks consider a requirement for safety and agility) have a look at ZigVersion. It is by far, the best Mac client I’ve used. Getting started is painless and common functions are easy and quick.

I did experience a crash ro two with an imported working copy, but that might be something strange in that working copy. We’ll see.

I do wish there was a simplified interface for the truly non-savvy that eliminated some of the choices and options. Something that totally centers around getting the project, and updating it (whether by adding or modifying. Acts which should be transparent to that type of user.) But short of that, this is a nice clean client, and I’ll be testing it with my wife this evening.

Posted by Daniel Tue, 07 Aug 2007 01:41:00 GMT

I was playing around with script/console for a few minutes at the end of the day at work… and I wanted to check a couple of assumptions… one is that YAML is available! So hard to read ActiveRecord objects like this:

=> #"", "updated_at"=>"2007-06-05 21:11:37", "route"=>"", "title"=>"test",
 "ride_type"=>"road", "id"=>"1", "elapsed_time"=>"21:11:00",
 "created_at"=>"2006-06-05 16:55:00", "mileage"=>nil}>

can be displayed like this

--- !ruby/object:Ride 
attributes: 
  partners: ""
  updated_at: 2007-06-05 21:11:37
  route: ""
  title: test
  ride_type: road
  id: "1"
  elapsed_time: "21:11:00"
  created_at: 2006-06-05 16:55:00
  mileage: 

simply by typing this: y Ride.find(1)

Naturally it works with any object…

Second cool thing I looked up was Mike Clark’s post about the app.class for experiencing your app and exercising controllers…

And the last thing is is that if you need to change your code, instead of killing and restarting the console you can type “reload!” and it will do just that.

Posted by Daniel Thu, 14 Jun 2007 19:51:00 GMT

At the TED conference, a holy cow technology demo video for Photosynth. Ridiculously awesome technology. Enjoyed the Seadragon underpinning ideas as well. In short, architectural rendering can be generated from a database of source pictures. Something like Notre Dame which is constantly photographed can be stitched together. Just go watch the video. Crazy good stuff.

Today, Dave talks about social cameras which seems to dovetail nicely. I'd love to stitch together event pictures so that you can see the whole instead of just my perspective, including the case he discusses.

Clearly, large searchable photo collections are in incredibly powerful tool, and social ones like flickr will become awesomely powerful tools.

The first thing that leaps to mind are sports events where ten of thousands of photos are taken or historical event recreation. (Imagine the power of this tool applied to a cataclysm such as 9/11?)

When people ask what's the use of all the cycles we have on our desktops I see stuff like this.

Posted by Daniel Wed, 30 May 2007 20:08:00 GMT

Posted by Daniel Wed, 16 May 2007 20:34:43 GMT

A long time ago I started writing code because I needed solutions for *my* problems. Not thirty other problems which made it difficult for me to get stuff done. I like getting stuff done.

Ruby continues to attract me after nearly 4 years. I’m amused at how little Ruby I’ve actually written. It’s the nature of the problems I solve with it, in combination with the incredible power of it’s terseness and well written libraries.

For example, a client has data in a MySQL database. The app that put it there seems to have gone missing in a move, and until recently the data was not required. As these things go, it went from “huh?” to “sound the alarms” in short order. My solution to their emergency? Roughly equivelant to:

require 'rubygems'
require 'active_record'


ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(
        :adapter => 'mysql',
            :host => '127.0.0.1',
            :database => 'something')

class User <ActiveRecord::Base; end

User.find(:all).each do |f|
  puts "#{f.name}'s email address is #{f.email}"
end

Sure, someone wrote a lot of smart stuff that I relied on… but isn’t that always the case? Well, it is for me. But that’s very little code to set up an ORM and return a useful object.

I recently worked with a C# implementation of the Active Record pattern and was amazed at how much more code (and config) there was involved in getting the same result. That’s not a knock on C# or even the implementation, but it seems that it is in the nature of Rubyists (and Ruby) to produce such minimalist design. I enjoy that.

Posted by Daniel Tue, 15 May 2007 15:02:00 GMT

Posted by Daniel Mon, 14 May 2007 16:02:03 GMT

There’s some code I’ve been meaning to publish. Little helper things, examples, some BDGs. Maybe start a open source project or two. So I did a bit of house cleaning this morning, set up a repository and a simple site.

It was also a chance to play with some new software that I’ve been meaning to test. I finally had the chance today. Not bad. But it didn’t thrill me either, so I’m not going to mention it by name. I may have to dig deeper before it makes sense.

The theme is “minimum”.

There’s nothing published yet. Heh.

Posted by Daniel Wed, 09 May 2007 01:01:17 GMT

Posted by Daniel Thu, 26 Apr 2007 11:48:00 GMT

Posted by Daniel Fri, 20 Apr 2007 16:56:17 GMT

Posted by Daniel Fri, 20 Apr 2007 16:47:54 GMT

Posted by Daniel Thu, 05 Apr 2007 16:16:00 GMT