BenCurtis.com ? Skipping Asset Compilation with Capistrano:

Skipping Asset Compilation with Capistrano

Analyst Watch: Water-Scrum-fall is the reality of agile SD Times: Software Development News:

Organizations are increasingly adopting agile software development methodologies through a combination of bottom-up adoption and top-down change. However, the reality of agile adoption has diverged from the original ideas described in the Agile Manifesto, with many adoptions resembling what Forrester labels water-Scrum-fall.

Open Source Report no. 2

And immediately I forgot to write this up for a few times… So here’s what I’ve been up to the past weeks:

• hubot-scripts. I added a Prowl/NotifyMyAndroid notification script to our work Hubot, that will push every mention of your name to your iOS or Android device.
• rails: I fix a small bug where parts of ActiveSupport were not able to be loaded in isolation.
• simplestats is a small Sinatra app to collect web statistics from your visitors and save them in MongoDB. I wrote this out of frustration with Google Analytics, which is probably very powerful, but all we really wanted to know were some browser usage stats, specifically the width of the viewports of our users. While you could push this to GA with a script someone posted somewhere, I simply couldn’t figure out how to get the results back out…

Open Source Report no. 1

Inspired by Mike Gunderloy’s attempt at doing something for the open source world every day, I figured I should be able to at least do something every week.

So here’s what I’ve been up to the past week:

• watchmen is a new extension for Python’s Fabric library that is aimed at monitoring a set of servers. At the office, we’re growing pretty tired of Nagios, so I did a little test to see how hard it would be to build something better. The actual checks would be pretty doable with this library, though we’d still need to build a webbased dashboard and notifications via e-mail/irc/campfire/sms.
• soundcheck is my unified interface to running tests. I recently came across the need to run a Minitest suite, so I’ve added something to support that. Not quite happy with how it works yet, I’ll probably improve it next week.
• bootstrap I fixed some JS with regard to the buttons, when they are <input type="submit">s, instead of divs with class button.

FakeFS: File system faker to make testing stuff that depends on the FS easier.

Personally, I tend to dependency-inject some IO class when I need to test file stuff.

DocHub:

Much better place to look up stuff than w3schools. I find this a little easier to browse than the Mozilla dev center.

Sprintly

Very pretty scrum tool. I especially like the preformatted form for new stories which forces you to write it in a certain format, I wish Pivotal was a little more opinionated in that area.

How do you hold your Nokia?

How do you hold your Nokia? - The official Nokia Blog:

We’ve found any of the four grips mentioned above to be both comfortable and as you can see, offer no signal degradation whatsoever. This isn’t a feature you’ll only find on high-end Nokia devices either.

I’m sorry Nokia, but you’ve lost your privileges to make fun of others about this a long time ago.

Touching the future: More thoughts on the coming tablet revolution - RussellBeattie.com

Russell Beattie on tablet computing:

Someone on a laptop is usually leaning over, staring intently, clicking their mouse once in a while - all which screams "Do Not Disturb" to those around them. Someone using their mobile has almost the same sort of body language, actually! Head down, shoulders hunched, mobile held close to their eyes, squinting intently at the screen while hesitantly jabbing at various options, or suddenly tapping out a message furiously. Everyone around that person gets the clear signal that they are doing something private and to not intrude.

Using a tablet is completely different! You're usually sitting in a comfortable position, face viewable, eyes scanning normally, with an occasional flick at the screen or other casual movement - this gives a totally different and much more welcoming vibe.

Bookmarks for June 8th

• Air Video Features - Watch video on iPhone/iPad streamed from Mac, transcoded on the fly.


• http-console - Command line HTTP console. Seems to me like every web developer wants this.


• Compojure Template for use on the Google App Engine - For when I deem Compojure ready enough to start playing with it.


• Oh My ZSH - Nice starter kit of zsh settings.

Personal Cloud Computing

Otherland is a science-fiction tetralogy wherein the author Tad Williams writes of a future where everyone has computing devices called "pads". While the story never goes into details of these devices, I can imagine them looking quite similar to what the iPad is currently. In the novel, these devices are the main computing power, and people access them either directly, or use them as processors, interfacing with the web through direct neural connectors. While these neural connectors may be some time away, it got me thinking.

One of the criticisms of the iPad, or tablet pc's in general is that they're missing so much. But what if we were to augment their limited capabilities while you're at home. We already have the keyboard for the iPad, which turns it into a slightly more capable editor.

What if we to fix the problem of processing power by replacing the Mac on your desk with a Mac Mini sized box, ready to supply it's processing powers to your pad, over the air, to any pad on the local WiFi which needs it. Hook a Drobo up to your network if space is an issue.

And let's imagine WiFi-enabled screens (Otherland calls them wallscreens). These would probably be similar to iMacs, but less powerful. Your iPad could be the control hub, a switching station which connects your bluetooth keyboard, the screen and the processing node.

I don't think the iPhone OS is ready for this yet, nor do I have any insight whether it could be made to be. WiFi probably isn't fast enough yet, and there are probably loads of other problems I'm conveniently ignoring. But we're already seeing this become a real possibility. Chuq Von Rospach wrote about coupling Lightroom on your desktop computer with an iPad Lightroom app. The only real problem at this point is getting data to and from your iPad fast enough.

Now, if only that iPad were available over here in the Netherlands…

Golfing with Ruby

Yesterday we held the annual IWI Programming Contest at the university. For this contest, it’s customary to have one problem which is longwindedly described, but extremely simple to write in code. This year, it basically came down to:

• Read a line containing an integer n
• Read n lines containing an integer x, and print floor(x/5)

We started golfing this, and this is what I came up with:

#!/usr/bin/ruby -n
p $_.to_i/5 if $.>1

The tricky part here is ignoring the first line. It took me a little digging through the Ruby documentation to find that $. variable, which holds the current line number of the file (or STDIN) most recently read.

Bookmarks for May 17th

• Maniacal Rage - Photoshop Crash Reports by Garret Murray. I find these hilarious, but maybe I'm just weird that way. Whoops, hold on, "Photoshop has encountered an error while completing your request." Uhm, sure... it's not like I was asking you to do anything though...

Bookmarks for May 15th

• Rubinius 1.0 - Milestone release for this alternative Ruby implementation. I should find time to try this and JRuby sometime.

Bookmarks for May 11th

• TomDoc - A new Ruby documentation style, optimized for plain text readability. Also aspires to automatically generate diffs between versions of API docs.

Bookmarks for May 7th

These are my links for May 7th:

• latex-lab - Webbased editor for LaTeX documents, based on Google Documents.


• Rubular - A Ruby regular expression editor and tester

Bookmarks for May 5th

These are my links for May 5th:

• Tolk - A new translation app for translating Ruby on Rails locale files.
• gitextensions - Git plugin for Visual Studio.

Bookmarks for May 4th

Spent some time today migrating this site to WordPress.

• Postalicious Plugin - I'm using this to pull in posts from my Pinboard account. For Pinboard, set type to Yahoo Pipes and put in any public rss.


• Linked List URL Plugin - I might use this one day. Right now I'm using the Postalicious plugin to pull in my Pinboard RSS feed and publish stuff as a daily post.


• Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin - I'm using this to put the ZenFolio link in my top navigation bar.


• LR2/Blog - Send images to your blog from Adobe Lightoom - This might be useful now that I'm switching to Wordpress.

Bookmarks for May 1st

These are my links for May 1st:

• Jigasawrus - This looks sort-of like an album laid out with jQuery Masonry. I'm going to steal this layout idea for my own albums software, which I should go and write at some point.

Goodbye Blipfoto

It’s been fun while it lasted. Due to growing irritations with Blipfoto I’m moving to my own hosted site. Not to discredit Blipfoto here though.

Any site can be slower for some time while they experience some growing pains. I know that first-hand, having worked at a webhosting firm which became quite popular really fast. We could hardly add more servers to keep up. Recent downtime issues haven’t been my worries.

The problem for me lies in an inherent mismatch between my primary shooting style, and Blipfoto’s rules and philosophies. The one photo a day, taken on that day rule… it simply isn’t for me. While I do strive to shoot multiple times a week, I don’t have the time to do it every day. And when I shoot, I’ll often have multiple great shots. Having my own site means I set the rules, and can post whatever I want, whenever I want to.

The one thing I expected when I came here was actually to find a good community. While there surely is a community, the thing I find lacking is constructive criticism, or pretty much any criticism at all. I’m in this to improve my shooting as much as anyone else, but yet no-one is telling me specifically what they like and don’t like about the shots. “Great shot!” comments aren’t helpful.

Then there’s something nagging me at a more basic level. I have the technical know-how to set up my own site, have everything exactly as I want. As a computer nerd, I like having everything under version control. On my new site, posts are text files which I can edit with whatever I want. I’m pretty sure that in 50 years time, when I’m old and grey, while the software which currently transforms that into HTML files may no longer work (it probably won’t), the text files will still be readable just fine, and I could write a script at that time which extracts the titles and bodies of the posts, and outputs them in whatever format people use by then.

Wanting to have everything hosted under my own domain name, under my own banner is another factor. At some point, I’ll occasionally post a regular blog post. I can’t do that at Blipfoto, and I’d like a one-stop hub for my online presence.

It’s been fun, but Blipping isn’t for me. Hope to see you at my new site, I’ll be working on it in the weeks to come, one thing to do is commenting, but I wanted to switch and keep my pace going.