Javascript helper tool for HTML AREA March 19, 2009
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A quick and easy tool and reference for the HTML AREA tag.
Developing in Ruby on Rails is like using a Mac April 22, 2008
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I’ve heard this said many times about the OS X operating system: “Every so often you come across a simple feature that makes you appreciate the forethought of it’s creators”
Running BackgrounDRb wasn’t running because the frozen packet gem wasn’t loading. After a little Google research, I came across a nice solution.
I didn’t originally know that you could specify which Rails plugins you want to load or not load by specifying a list of plugins with config.plugins.
So, to ensure that Gems On Rails, and all of the gems froze with it always load first, I added the following to environment.rb:
config.plugins = [ :gemsonrails, :all ]
Gotta love a simple solution like that 
Ruby/Rails Project Nights, Hosted By TSOT – Starting January 8th December 17, 2007
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Image enhancements courtesy of Joey “Accordion Guy” deVilla
We are hosting the inaugural Ruby/Rails Project Night event on January 8th at the TSOT development office. More details and registration information can be found on Joey’s blog entry, or at the Upcoming.org Event page. Some food and drinks will be provided and the presentations by Andrew Burke, the Unspace Team and Joey will surely be worth the trip out.
Our Ruby/Rails Project Night will be monthly event held on every Second Tuesday of every month. Mark your calendars. If you’d like to present at a future event or would like more information, contact Joey at joey.devilla@tsotinc.com.
Find us at 151 Bloor St W, Toronto, Ontario.
Annual UOIT Robotics Competition December 13, 2007
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For the second year in a row, I was given the honor to be one of four judges at the annual UOIT Robotics Competition. The number of competing teams has increased substantially since last years inaugural event, from 6 local teams to 24 teams representing 22 High Schools from as far away as Barrie and Mississauga.
Each teams LEGO Mindstorms robot is built over about an 8 week period. The robots main 2 goals are to stay on the table platform without falling off the side or the diamond cutout in the middle and to push other competing robots off the platform. Each robot is built only from the materials sourced from the LEGO Mindstorms box, and is restricted to a specific size.
This year the event had some great media attention. Discovery Canada was on scene filming the battles and interviewing various members involved. And our local Rogers Cable 10 crew showed up to shoot a short segment.
As a judge, my job was to interview each team and grade them on their design process. An Engineering award was awarded to the team who had overall highest grades from all judges. Pictured above is the robot built by the Albert Campbell Collegiate Institute team. We selected them to as the winners of the Engineering Award for the second year in a row. Congrats! Hope to see everyone again next year!
Ruby Geonames API 0.2.1 – Added find_nearest_intersection April 2, 2007
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The Ruby Geonames is jumping to 0.2.1 already… just released 0.2.0 last night (this morning).
Andrew Turner of High Earth Orbit contributed find_nearest_intersection. Thanks Andrew.
Example:
# get the nearest intersection
intersection = Geonames::WebService.find_nearest_intersection 40.7574053333333, -73.9734773333333
puts intersection.street_1 #=> Park Ave
puts intersection.street_2 #=> E 51st St
Ruby Geonames API 0.2.0 – Added Wikipedia Search April 2, 2007
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I’ve added an interface to the Geonames Wikipedia Geocoding Webservice. It provides the ability to search for Wikipedia articles within a certain distance of a longitude / latitude coordinate, or within a bounding rectangle. See in action here: Ruby Geonames / Wikipedia Articles / Google Maps API example.
Install:
# gem install geonames
Or download at Google code hosting
Ruby irb usefulness March 8, 2007
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Thanks to Amy Hoy blogging about Secrets of the Rails Console Ninjas ruby’s irb has just become even more useful. It’s going to be hard logging onto hosts without Wirble installed from now on.
I haven’t really used the console script in my rails applications, but after playing with it a bit, I’m not sure why I haven’t.
Back in Business March 8, 2007
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The positive: YakAlike and all services are back up and running.
The negative: A whole week of downtime… yuck!
All major hardware components of the main server running YakAlike, Carpool Connect and some other small applications have been replaced. Things started out about a month ago when the server crashed randomly and needed several hard reboots. The road to recovery started with replacement of the CPU fan and hard drive. Then came a complete replacement of all major hardware. The old hard drive was FedExed to me for recovery. Things seem stable now, so hopefully no more service interruptions will be experienced. When those big ad revenues are coming in a more reliable solution will be in place.
I am particularly interested in setting things up on Amazon’s EC2 service. This should eliminate any worries about hardware failures. I’m just waiting for them to allow a new round of accounts to use it.
Geonames Ruby API March 2, 2007
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The Geonames graphical database contains over eight million geographical names and consists of 6.3 million unique features whereof 2.2 million populated places and 1.8 million alternate names. It was created by Marc Wick, a software engineer in Switzerland. He has released it under a Creative Commons license and was nice enough to provide a freely available Web Service to integrate it into your applications.
The Geonames web service has proven itself very useful to me for the development of Carpool Connect. I’m currently using it to reverse geocode longitude and latitude coordinates and plan on using other features of it in the future.
I’ve put together a ruby library for accessing the Geonames Web service and released it under the Apache Open Source license. You can find more information about it on the project page.
To insatall:
# gem install geonames
Example Usage:
require 'geonames'places_nearby = Geonames::WebService.find_nearby_place_name 43.900120387, -78.882869834p places_nearby
country_subdivision = Geonames::WebService.country_subdivision 43.900120387, -78.882869834p country_subdivision
Temporary Outage March 1, 2007
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The server hosting YakAlike, Carpool Connect and some other small services had a hard drive fail in the recent days / weeks. I say “weeks” because it has been failing for a while, but still mostly usable.
Carpool Connect has been moved off to another service provider, while YakAlike will be down until data can be restored off the old hard drive. Sorry for any inconveniences, things should be back to normal, and more reliable within a day or two.
