Phil Windley's Technometria | Tag: ruby
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Anti-Perl Social Engineering
Dave Cross has a piece on why corporations hate Perl. He's being a little hyperbolic (as he admits)--not everyone hates Perl, but he's right in noting that there is a backlash against it. He says: I was talking to... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on August 20, 2008 11:13 AM
Doing CPAN Installs Using Capistrano
I've been trying to use Capistrano for application deployment over the last few days, writing rules to do some common tasks, figuring out how it works, etc. One problem I ran into is that I have a private CPAN... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on May 9, 2008 1:17 PM
Scheme and Ruby
Duane Johnson pointed me to a very interesting discussion on Y Combinator about the differences between Scheme and Ruby. This is an excellent discussion--not a flame war--that I found enlightening. The summary, if you don't want to read the... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on January 16, 2008 2:16 PM
Is Intuitive Always Good?
Here's a good, short artcile from Raganwald on the trade-off between intuitiveness and programming languagge expressiveness. Most of the article is a few quotes. The meat is at the bottom. Is Ruby's for loop an improvement over Java? By... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on January 7, 2008 1:54 PM
Top IT Conversations Shows for December 2007
Here are the top ten shows on IT Conversations (by number of downloads) for December 2007: Trust Online Panel 1 - Technical and Regulatory Issues (No rating yet)While the Internet is quickly becoming an indispensable part of our lives... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on January 2, 2008 9:49 AM
Barx: A Proxy Resolver for XRI
Victor Grey and Kermit Snelson have created an XRI proxy resolver in Ruby called Barx. In it's most simple form, a proxy resolver returns an XRDS document when given an XRI. From the spec: "Proxy resolvers enable applications even... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on October 29, 2007 9:25 PM
Starting a High Tech Business: Legal and Banking
I'm starting a new business called Kynetx (nothing to see there yet). As I go through some of the things I do, I'm planning to blog them. The whole series will be here. You may find my efforts instructive.... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on October 9, 2007 9:02 AM
Installing Rails on Fedora
I'm building a virtual machine (VMWare flavor) for use with Rails development. After installing Fedora, there were a few things I had to do to get everything ready. I thought I'd take a minute and document them in one... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on September 21, 2007 3:43 PM
Top Ten IT Conversations Shows for June 2007
Note: Several people asked (in comments) for summaries of the programs. I've modified the program I use to generate this list to add summaries. So, here's the same list with summaries). Here are the top ten most downloaded shows... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on July 6, 2007 4:36 PM
Java Framework Round-Up
Matt Raible of Raible Designs gave this morning's keynote presentation comparing Java Web frameworks (slide - PDF). Matt started off with an overview of the pros and cons of each framework, as he saw them. Java Server Faces or... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on June 26, 2007 10:01 AM
Inline SVG
Sam Ruby puts inline SVG on his blog. SVG is a language for describing scalable vector graphics. Browsers that understand SVG can render the graphics directly rather than downloading a raster-based image with another HTTP GET. Because its tags,... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on June 15, 2007 12:48 PM
Utah Open Source Conference
The Utah Open Source Conference will be held on September 6, 2007 through September 8, 2007 at the West Valley Cultural Celebration Center Open Source Technology Center (Novell). The conference is looking for proposals for 90 minute classes on... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on May 22, 2007 12:43 PM
CTO Breakfast Report for April 2007
Today was bring your child to CTO Breakfast day. Not officially, but with today being Spring Break, there were a few here. I brought my son so he could visit a friend who lives south. Scott Lemon just got... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on April 20, 2007 10:47 AM
Applied Web Heresies: ETech 2007
I really wanted to go to Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Mechanics to Social Software by Amy Jo Kim, but my inner geek won out and I went to Applied Web Heresies with Avi Bryant (slides). I... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on March 26, 2007 2:56 PM
CTO Breakfast for March 2007
We'll hold the March CTO Breakfast this Thursday at 8am in the Novell Cafeteria (see directions here) in Building G of the Provo Novell Campus. At least one person has contacted me and asked if we could discuss what... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on March 19, 2007 9:36 PM
Jeff Barczewski on MasterView
Jeff Barczewski is talking about MasterView, a template engine for Rails. MasterView is a Ruby gem that enables the creation of Ruby/Rails views in standards-compliant XHTML. The problem with Rails views, at least in Jeff's view, is that you... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on March 16, 2007 3:22 PM
Bayesian Networks in Ruby
Carl Youngblood is speaking on Bayesian networks in Ruby. He starts by pointing out that building complete logical systems by building rules is necessarily a futile task. The answer? A system that accounts for ignorance and degree of belief... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on March 16, 2007 1:13 PM
Ara Howard: Ruby Queue
Ara T Howard(click to enlarge) Ara T Howard, a research associate at The Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, is speaking about Ruby Queue, a tool for distributing the workload to nodes in a Linux cluster. He wanted... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on March 16, 2007 9:58 AM
Mountain West Ruby Conference
Registration desk(click to enlarge) I'm at the Mountain West Ruby conference today. The venue is the Salt Lake Public Library, which haps a very nice auditorium. There's a good slate of speakers. I'm looking forward to getting some information... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on March 16, 2007 9:19 AM
Controlling Amazon's EC2 with Capistrano and Rake
Steve Spigarelli sent me a link to this description of how to control EC2 from rake, the Ruby build manager. The implementation uses Capistrano, a Ruby utility for executing multiple commands on remote server in parallel. This is very... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on February 16, 2007 3:56 PM
Composition as a Programming Activity
When I started programming, you had four choices on the IBM 370 system that the University of Idaho made available to students: Cobol, Fortran, Basic, and APL. I learned Fortran and Basic, avoided Cobol because it was for "business",... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on December 21, 2006 9:50 AM
Lightbulb: Bringing SAML to PHP
Pat Patterson spoke on using SAML in a "Web 2.0 World." SAML provides a good mechanism for transporting identity attributes. But to use SAML on the wild Web, you've got to support dynamic languages like PHP. Pat has a... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on December 5, 2006 12:29 PM
Building Reservations System - Volunteers Needed
I've been asked by the Heber Valley Camp (HVC) to help them build a reservations system. HVC is an 8500 acre camp east of Heber Utah that is used by young women's groups from the LDS Church. The camp... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on November 26, 2006 12:01 PM
Chatting Up RubyForge
I put up the third installment of the newly launched Technometria Podcast at IT Conversations today. This week Scott, Matt, and I are talking to Tom Copeland about RubyForge. I like the discipline of doing the show regularly and... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on November 13, 2006 3:16 PM
Technometria Podcast Is Reborn
One of the things I've thought IT Conversations needed was a panel-style show that aired regularly. I like that style of show as a listener and hear occasionally from other people that they like them too. So, I started... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on November 6, 2006 2:11 PM
Rails Demo
I put together a Rails Demo for my class that shows them how Rails could be used to do part of what they're doing in one assignment with J2EE. I plan to run through the entire demo Monday in... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on November 2, 2006 3:42 PM
Ruby and Unicode
Kevin Tew and Devlin Daley, two of my students went over to RubyCon last week. When I asked them how it was, they said the usual things people say about a conference, but they only mentioned one presenter by... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on October 27, 2006 7:43 AM
Cardinal: Ruby on Parrot
At the next Provo Linux User's Group meeting on the 8th of November, Kevin Tew will be presenting Cardinal, a Ruby implementation on Parrot that he's working on.... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on October 26, 2006 9:48 PM
Matz Talk on Ruby Design Principles
Last week, Matz, the chief designer and creator of the Ruby programming language stopped by BYU on his way to RubyCon. I was fortunate to go to lunch with him and capture the colloquium talk he gave. I've posted... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on October 25, 2006 3:03 PM
Using OpenID and Liking IT
Norman Walsh is using OpenID in his photodata.org application and liking it. He has Ruby code (not Rails) that you can swipe if you like.... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on October 23, 2006 4:18 PM
Emacs and Ruby
Jao at Programming Musings linked my my post on tools with a nice article on using powerful editors. Jao's post included a link to a screencast on using emacs and ruby by Marshall Vandegrift. I've been using emacs for... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on October 23, 2006 3:15 PM
My HTML Mode for Emacs
Some people have asked what HTML mode I finally settled on. I'm using a customized version of Daniel Pfeiffer's adaptation of James Clark's sgml-mode. Yeah, there's lots of SGML stuff that I don't use, but it has a set... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on October 20, 2006 2:18 PM
When You Pick Your Tools, Pick Those That Can Build Tools
This morning I was listening to Karl Fugel talk about tools developers need and thought about Doug Kaye. Here's why... Yesterday Doug sent out a note to a few friends asking what editor they used to writing code on... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on October 18, 2006 10:17 AM
Rails, Streamlined, and DabbleDB
I've been playing a little with Rails over the last week. This is the first time I really tried to build something I cared about in Rails as opposed to just running someone else's scripted tutorial. I'm having fun... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on October 16, 2006 4:18 PM
Matz Speaking at BYU
This Wednesday at 3pm (note the time change), Yukihiro Matsumoto, aka Matz, the creator of Ruby will be giving the colloquium in 1170 TMCB. The colloquium is open to anyone who's interested in attending. I suggest getting there early.... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on October 16, 2006 9:08 AM
CTO Breakfast Report for September
Carl Youngblood told us of his experience as the sole technical person in a small construction loan wholesaling company. He's building a Rails application to automate the process and using an Indian outsourcing company to do much of the... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on September 26, 2006 2:40 PM
Crying Out for a RESTful Service Interface Description Language
Dave Rosenberg is frustrated with Web 2.0 apps that don't play well together: If you haven't seen any of the 37 Signals stuff, it's great. Easy to use, well-designed etc. But even they don't offer a completely integrated suite... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on June 29, 2006 11:54 AM
Less is More
Jason Fried is the CEO of 37 Signals, a company that's garnered attention for delivering great Web-based tools like Basecamp and Writeboard. I've used these in my lab at BYU to great effect. At IT Conversations, however, we found... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on June 5, 2006 10:32 AM
March CTO Breakfast Report
This morning's CTO breakfast had around 30 people in attendance. As always, the conversations was geeky and varied. Here are a few things I took notes on. We had a discussion of Ruby and how it's always at the... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on March 30, 2006 2:42 PM
Effective Scheming
I received an email from a former student who's caught the Scheme bug. He says: I took 330 from you last year and I really enjoy coding in Scheme. I do any class project I can in Scheme --... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on March 20, 2006 3:23 PM
Rails and Ajax for Page Application Development (ETech 2006 Tutorial)
I'm in David Heinemeier Hansson's tutorial on Beneath-the-Page Application Development with Rails. His Rails tutorial from last summer remains one of my most viewed blog entries. He starts out noting that AJAX is the most important innovation for the... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on March 6, 2006 2:43 PM
ETech Tutorials
I'm at ETech, just waiting for the the first tutorial to begin. I'm signed up for two today. This morning I'm going to A (Re-)Introduction to JavaScript taught be Simon Willison. This afternoon, I'm going to Beneath-the-Page Application Development... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on March 6, 2006 9:18 AM
BYU RUG Report
I wasn't able to go the BYU Ruby User's Group meeting last week, but Lee Jensen went and filed this report: I went to the BYU RUG Meeting last night in Provo. The guest speaker was Eric Hodel part... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on February 13, 2006 1:58 PM
LISP Ecosystems
I criticized Allegro yesterday at Between the Lines for a business model that sells programming language development environments like they were enterprise software. Programming languages and their development environments are free in the 21st century--at least that's how most... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on February 10, 2006 7:41 AM
Eric Hodel at BYU RUG
The BYU Ruby User's Group is meeting tonight at 7pm in 120 TMCB. The guest speaker is Eric Hodel from Seattle Washington.... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on February 8, 2006 6:27 AM
Ruby on Rails and OS X
Devlin Daley gave a presentation in our 601R class on Rails so that we could discuss frameworks and the choices Rails had made. While he was talking, I poked around a little since I wanted to get Rails going... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on January 21, 2006 12:25 PM
Most Popular Posts for Fourth Quarter
Here are the most popular articles from Technometria in the fourth quarter of 2005 and the percentage of all page views they accounted for: Video iPod and Tivo - 6.41% How to Start a Blog - 5.25% Using VLC... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on January 10, 2006 8:32 PM
XRI, XDI, and Identity
I flew down to Oakland today to attend Andy Dale's XDI Workshop (slides and video available, eventually, on the wiki). XRI's one of those things I've wanted to understand better and I decided that going to a workshop with... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on December 5, 2005 4:56 PM
NumSum and Other MicroApplications
I've been playing with a writable Web application called NumSum, a Web-based spreadsheet. Here's a little test spreadsheet I created. They have a "blog this" feature which creates an iFrame of the spreadsheet. Here's what it looks like: Go... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on December 5, 2005 11:17 AM
IIW2005 Talks
If you missed IIW2005, or were there and wanted to hear something over again, the audio from the conference is now online. A big thanks to Scott Mace for recording the workshop and post processing the audio. You can... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on November 14, 2005 8:32 AM
BYU Ruby User's Group Report
I went to the BYU Ruby User's Group meeting tonight. Devlin Daley (one of my grad students) gave a demonstration of Rails by building a movie database application. He did a good job. There were about a dozen people... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on November 9, 2005 8:04 PM
Monads in Ruby: Yum!
Just ran across an introduction to using monads in Ruby. If you're more of a Schemer, you might enjoy this introduction more.... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on November 9, 2005 10:34 AM
BYU Ruby User's Group Meeting
The BYU Ruby User's Group is having a meeting tomorrow (Wed, Nov 9th) in 120 TMCB at 7pm. They're going to walk through implementing an application (can you say "live demo?") in Rails 1.0. Come one, come all.... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on November 8, 2005 4:29 PM
August's Most Popular
For the month of August, the following were the top three blog posts on Technometria (along with page views): BlackDog Linux Server1,485 Ruby on Rails (OSCON 2005 Tutorial) 1,431 How to Start a Blog 1,410 The Blackdog Linux post... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on September 1, 2005 6:44 PM
CTO Breakfast Report
We had the CTO Breakfast this morning and there was lots of interesting discussion and more people than we've ever had before. Much bigger and we'll need a different room. Here are some things we talked about: China. This... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on August 26, 2005 10:37 AM
Flexibility is Overrated (OSCON 2005)
David Hannson, originator of Ruby on Rails, gave a talk on Rails as a keynote today. Much of it was things I've already covered on the tutorial, but he said something that I think developers too often overlook: Flexibility... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on August 4, 2005 12:28 PM
Open Source Software at Yahoo!
Jeremy Zawodny works for Yahoo! and knows MySql inside-out. He's speaking about open source and Yahoo! There are several reasons Yahoo! uses open source: Flexibility - Yahoo! customizes lots of OSS for its needs Documentation is better in open... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on August 3, 2005 12:09 PM
O'Reilly Radar (OSCON 2005)
Tim O'Reilly's giving the traditional O'Reilly Radar, a talk from Tim about what he sees coming down the pike and the "faint signals of the future" along with Nat Torkington, the conference chair. One of the things that was... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on August 3, 2005 11:55 AM
Ruby on Rails (OSCON 2005 Tutorial)
I went to David Heinemeier Hansson's tutorial on Ruby on Rails this afternoon. David's first application in Ruby was Basecamp. He'd had 5 years of PHP experience and didn't even consider himself a programmer. He claims that even people... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on August 1, 2005 6:02 PM
The Continuing March of Dynamic Languages
Oracle announced Zend yesterday, an integration of PHP with their Oracle 10g database. If I were starting a small Web-based business today, I wouldn't even consider Java. I'd stick with a dynamic language like PHP, Perl, Python, or (gasp)... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on May 19, 2005 3:26 PM
Ubuntu: A New Linux Ditro
I wrote about Unbuntu a new Linux distro from Mark Shutleworth over at Between the Lines a few days ago and pointed to some things Doc Searls is saying about it. This morning, Sam Ruby posted about getting Ubuntu... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on April 22, 2005 11:29 AM
Continuations for Curmudgeons
Sam Ruby does a great job of explaining continuations in his Continuations for Curmudgeons piece. I also discovered through Sam an article on using conitnuations in user interfaces.... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on April 15, 2005 7:59 AM
Sam Ruby on AJAX
Sam Ruby some constructive comments on AJAX. First, use UTF-8 encoding for data. Second, use GET for what its supposed to be used for: getting. These comments are probably more broadly applicable than simple AJAX.... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on March 18, 2005 3:57 PM
Just Use HTTP
Sam is talking about using HTTP. He reference's Tim Bray's WS-Pagecount article on complexity. The assumption is that HTTP is simple. Its not. There are lots of things to watch out for. Starting with identity: when is "a" an... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on March 15, 2005 5:45 PM
O'Reilly's Radar: Remix Patterns
Tim O'Reilly delivers O'Reilly's Radar (click to enlarge) Tim's keynote was on patterns for remixing. Patterns consist of three parts: an issue, a prescription, and examples. Here are some of Tim's patterns (I missed much of it): Issue: A... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on March 15, 2005 9:52 AM
Programming for Kids
Don Box is trying to decide which programming language to teach his kids. His list of candidates includes: lisp, ML, Smalltalk, and Ruby. Personally, I'd recommend Scheme in the DrScheme IDE.... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on February 22, 2005 4:24 PM
Cutting Atom Feeds Down to Size
Through Sam Ruby, a pointer to mod_speedyfeed, an Apache 2 module that allows feedreading clients to only download the entries that have changed since the last access instead of the entire RSS file. This could cut the transfer amount... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on September 21, 2004 7:36 AM
RSS is Eating Me Alive (Almost)
Robert Scoble talks about bandwidth costs of RSS and cites it as a reason more and more sites are not giving full text RSS feeds. I was wondering what it cost me, so I looked at my server logs... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on September 9, 2004 4:09 PM
Poor Man's Streaming
I reported on Dana Moore's talk about using Jabber in highly available agent networks for DARPA a few days ago. I wasn't able to go to his and Rich Kilmer's talk yesterday on using Ruby as the control language,... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on July 30, 2004 10:15 AM
OSCON 2004: Dana Moore on Jabber Messaging
Jabber is not just for IM anymore. Conversational interfaces are less structured, more flexible and can be ambiguous. They can support S2S (system to system) as well as they support P2P (person to person). Applications need presence, fault-tolerance, identity, and... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on July 28, 2004 12:16 PM
Atom and the Power of the Human Voice
Sam Ruby has posted slides for Atom (hint: the slide are the link at the very top). Atom is a new syndication specification that competes with RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0. Yikes! Still, I think Sam makes a good... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on December 15, 2003 3:28 PM
Ward Cunningham and Brian Ingerson: The FIT Framework
I was going to attend AyeshaÊMalik's (Object Machines) talk on Best Practices for XML Schemas, but Ayesha didn't show. As an alternative, I decided on Ward Cunningham's talk on Framework for Integrated Tests of fit. I'm glad I did.... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on July 9, 2003 12:27 PM
OSCON 2003
I'm going to be at OSCON, the OReilly Open Source Convention in July. I'll probably arrive on the 8th and leave Friday afternoon, although I haven't made my flight plans yet. This is a big conference with multiple tracks.... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on June 12, 2003 9:05 AM
Language Assignments
Here are your groups and language assignments. Note that I have moved a few people around to even things out. Dig into this and let me know quickly if you can't find a workable implementation of your assigned language.... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on June 2, 2003 4:44 PM
FOAF and Trust Relationships
Sam Ruby is talking about how to use FOAF to have one web site vouch for another web site in response to a request from Dave on keeping changes.xml pure (a SPAM issue, I believe). Sam describes a great... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on May 16, 2003 1:24 PM
FOAF: Friend of a Friend
While I was at the O'Reilly ET Conference, Jo Walsh mentioned FOAF, or Friend of a Friend, in her talk. FOAF is a project of the RDFWeb initiative. According to their website: "RDFWeb is an experimental linked information system,... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on May 14, 2003 4:43 PM
Singularity Hints
So, you'll probably accuse me of living in a cave somewhere, but I was talking with Scott Lemon this morning at a Utah Venture breakfast and he mentioned "the singularity." The look on my face must have told him... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on April 11, 2003 12:26 PM
ALIN - Application Layer Internetworking
I just discovered (via Sam Ruby) Rohit Khare's work on application layer internetworking, or ALIN. Rohit gave a talk at the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies conference last May and has a powerpoint presentation and some rough notes online. What I've... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on December 27, 2002 9:58 PM