lunacy - Home

Newsflash

2008-07-17T05:11:00Z

Playing catchup a bit, things have been hectic since the California move. Seems about time for a quick updated.

I am now a software engineer for Plinky, Inc. I am pretty excited about the position and what we are working on, but I can't say much more than that at present.

Unfortunately, for now, feedish has been put on the back burner while I reevaluate my approach.

Fortunately, I've become the de facto maintainer of the couchdb adapter for the DataMapper Ruby ORM. There is still plenty of work left there, but I'm pleased to be making advances quite regularly.

I have a couple other projects in mind/in the works, but nothing I can really show at the moment. Just thought is was about time to make a 'proof of life' post.

googleajax

2008-05-25T06:43:00Z

So I got to reading about the Google AJAX apis the other day. It all started with the Feed API and degenerated from there. Over last weekend I put together a Ruby wrapper for the apis so that I could play with their rest interfaces. At the end of the day it supports feeds, search, and translation.

Grab it with:


sudo gem install googleajax

Or check it out at on github.

feedish private beta

2008-03-24T01:16:00Z

UPDATE: I let the next few users in today, email now and I'll get you in as soon as I can. Space is limited...

I'm not quite ready to roll out the feedish beta, but I'm getting really close. If you are interested in getting in, email me at monki+invite@geemus.com.

Much thanks to caboo.se for the inspiration to do beta signups this way. I wanted to have a list of people to bring in when it was ready, but I am too wrapped up in polishing and features to worry about a beta signup system.

backgroundrb after_create

2008-02-27T06:56:00Z

I had setup a background worker so that after a model was created it offloaded some heavier processing to a background worker so you wouldn't have to wait. I could get it to run just fine if I ran this process separately, but within the after_create it always failed.

The setup was that the after_create called the worker like so:

def after_create
  MiddleMan.ask_work(:worker => :new_model_worker, :worker_method => :init, :data => self.id)
end

I figured that after_create meant it should have been saved, everything should be hunky dory. In the logs it even said it was failing to find the model with the correct id(so id was getting set). It was driving me nuts, until it occurred to me to try and call reload in the after create before the worker call, like so:

def after_create
  reload
  MiddleMan.ask_work(:worker => :new_model_worker, :worker_method => :init, :data => self.id)
end

And suddenly it works, right as rain. I still don't know exactly why this is necessary, but it works. Hope it does for you too, and I'd love to hear an explanation in the comments.

Rails Edge Timezones

2008-02-09T22:03:00Z

UPDATE: in_current_time_zone was removed and in_time_zone now defaults to the current timezone
When I work on feedish I generally start coding sessions by using piston to make sure I'm on the bleeding edge. Which is dangerous sometimes, but gives me a chance to try out new stuff in a pretty low pressure environment (since feedish has a user base of, um 2 at the moment). I'll open it up for more people eventually, just not quite there yet.

So yesterday I decided to take advantage of being on edge and use the new timezones code, since I had been dreading and putting off doing timezone stuff for a while. Ryan Daigle had a nice write up of the change, but I found I still had a couple questions when I got down to it. So I just wanted to include my notes on switching from the plugins to the built in edge stuff to help ease the transition for others.

First things first, make sure you have the latest tzinfo gem installed:

sudo gem install tzinfo

Now if you have the tzinfo and tzinfo_timezone plugins installed, delete them. Otherwise you get confusing errors.

Now then, you'll probably still want to make sure your database is using UTC, so make sure this is in your environment.rb:

ENV['TZ'] = 'UTC'

While you are in there you'll want to set the default timezone for your application as well:

config.time_zone = "Central Time (US & Canada)"

Now activerecord will be off and running, so any records you load will automagically convert times to the default zone.

Times that don't come from activerecord are not so nice though. You'll need to take care of these yourself. Two things to remember here. How to get now and how to convert regular times to the current time zone, those would be here:

# Time.now converted to current timezone
Time.zone.now
# Convert a time, in this case now, to the current timezone (same result as above)
Time.now.in_time_zone

Finally, to customize the time zone on a per request basis you can add this to your application controller:

# Change to the Hawaii time zone (if only it were that easy to travel there)
Time.zone = "Hawaii"

That should pretty much take care of it, enjoy.

gamer score

2008-01-24T08:37:00Z

I've been known to play a little xbox live from time to time. Currently my time seems to be split between rock band and assassins creed, with a strong leaning toward the former. Anyway, I saw my gamer score today and thought it seemed pretty appropriate given my general thoughts about microsoft(for the most part they do xbox and live well, but I can't say I'm a big fan of a lot of the other stuff they do). So I thought I'd include a screen grab from xbox.com for posterity. Enjoy...

I wouldn't steal, but I might copy...

2008-01-23T05:40:00Z

Anybody who has talked to me much about copyright know that I'm a bit of a nut about it. I'm not going to go into it at the moment, but I must say I'm annoyed as hell every time I see that damned "you wouldn't steal a..." things at the beginning of dvds. Downloading and stealing are not the same thing.

I'm not saying we should take as much copyrighted material as we can grab, but I think we should encourage each other to share instead of taking turn vilifying one another. So I was glad to see this video from the European Green Party espousing a quite similar view.

<object height="373" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/2ux4uhxdewU&rel=1&border=1"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/2ux4uhxdewU&rel=1&border=1" height="373" wmode="transparent" width="425"></embed></object>
via BoingBoing

backgroundrb + capistrano ftw

2008-01-21T21:23:00Z

UPDATE: Latest version of script includes the port number(2000 by default) in the pid name.

I've had some ongoing issues getting capistrano and backgroundrb to play nice. So I thought I would do something about it today. I found a nice starting point from some one else. But I wanted to use invoke_command, so that it would be (hopefully) a bit more universal and use/not use sudo as neccesary. Also, if there is no pid file backgroundrb stop doesn't do anything other than fail and stop the execution of the rest of the chain. So I wanted to make it skip over the stop command if the pid file did not exist. So, without further adou here is what I ended up with.

  namespace :backgroundrb do
    desc "stop the backgroundrb server"
    task :stop, :roles => :app do
      invoke_command "sh -c 'if [ -a #{current_path}/log/backgroundrb_2000.pid ]; then #{current_path}/script/backgroundrb stop; fi;'", :via => run_method
    end
    
    desc "start the backgroundrb server"
    task :start, :roles => :app do
      invoke_command "nohup #{current_path}/script/backgroundrb start -d", :via => run_method
    end
    
    desc "restart the backgroundrb server"
    task :restart, :roles => :app do
      deploy.backgroundrb.stop
      deploy.backgroundrb.start
    end
  end

Comments and suggestions on how to improve this or make it more universal are greatly appreciated. Hope it can save somebody else some of my headaches.

Not Myspace

2008-01-18T19:35:00Z

I've long avoided myspace, allowing brief forays to interact with friends who somehow seem reluctant to simply email me. I could never exactly spell out why it didn't work for me. But a recent article had a rather poignant quote that seems to help.

"MySpace, with its cluttered layout, can suggest an online incarnation of the broken-windows theory—surface disorder begetting actual chaos." - The New Yorker (via 37signals).

If users don't worry about the appearance and quality of their surroundings, why should we expect they will worry about the way they treat others? At the very least it sets a poor precedent. I think it tries too hard to be something for everyone. De facto community standards of usage provide stronger feelings of community, but I think myspace is too far along to adopt them now. I just hope the next generation of pages can learn from the chaos.

Rails Changesets

2007-11-26T21:34:00Z

This is kind of dumb, on my part, I admit. But maybe it will let somebody else save face a bit.

For the longest time I had wished I could have a changeset only version of the rails trac timeline, and had thought I would need to right something to filter it for me. Turns out the options are all there and I just overlooked them. Here is the link changesets only rails trac timeline. Now I can stay on top of changes to edge without needing to wade through all of the tickets.

backgroundrb - failed to find slave socket

2007-10-13T19:40:00Z

Ugh. Another madness inducing bug that I post in hopes that others will have easier Googling.

I was trying to spawn backgroundrb processes. Scheduled processes worked, but when I spawned new ones they sometimes do, sometimes don't work. And I was seeing the "failed to find slave socket" error. Couldn't figure it out and Google wasn't immediately helpful. But here is what it appears to break down to.

When it creates socket files in /tmp to it truncates the worker key onto the end of your workers name. Well, there is a limit to how long that file name can be before it blows up. Looks like the name of your worker class, including underscores, needs to be 25 or less characters or it will create an invalid file name and blow up.

See also this ticket, which doesn't mention this error specifically but pointed me to the apparent answer. Hope it saves others my headache for the last week or so.

Read it!

2007-10-02T14:26:00Z

Progress continues nicely on my feed aggregator. Also, of great note is that I landed the domain name I wanted for it (feedish.com). It currently is just hosting a kind of proof of concept as I flesh out functionality and look into getting a designer on board. I'll write more about that, but I wanted to say something about getting the domain name, since the whole process went amazingly smoothly.

I had found to my dismay that feedish.com was already registered to someone else and had been for quite some time. I also noticed, however, that it had simply been a parked domain for quite some time. I approached the owner and asked them about the possibility of acquiring the name. After ensuring that my service wouldn't conflict with their own, similarly named service, they simply allowed me to have the name.

The kind souls that let me have my new favorite url are the guys behind feed.us. It is a centralized CMS system that lets you setup content in one location and then pull content to any number of other hosts. I have been a bit too swamped to do much with it, but it seems like it would be really useful for maintaining multiple remote sites. Anyway, thanks again guys, it is much appreciated.

Not dead!

2007-09-25T23:29:00Z

I've been extraordinarily busy with various ventures, but it seems like about time to check and and start posting a bit more regularly about what I'm working on.

Most notably my main gig with ImThere continues to go really well for everyone involved. We just pushed some updates over the course of the last week and the boss wrote an article about how we got to where we are that landed us on vitamin. I was glad to help out editing it and helping push out a number of the updates to get us there.

I am also continuing to work on my own projects and my attempt at a feed aggregator(I am calling it feedish) is really coming along. Still a number of things I need to figure out how I want to approach, but the main functionality is there. I'll post more about what I have cooked up there. I think it will be a breath of fresh air in what seems like an area that is rather lacking in innovation. More as I figure it out.

Reemployment

2007-08-10T17:59:00Z

I have been busy, and hence quiet lately.

I was hired by Ramped Media to work on imthere.com. We are rolling out all kinds of new features and I think it is going to be a really great site. Really exciting time to be joining them, and its keeping me pretty busy, hence the recent silence.

In other news, some users were kind enough to point out some bugs in the user-owned tagging portions of acts_as_taggable_redux. I think they have all been smoothed out, so it is hopefully an even more complete and robust tagging solution than before. As per usual if issues come up, email me and I'll sort them out. Thanks.

Edgy

2007-07-24T14:12:00Z

Holy crap, my patch made in into rails edge. I'm in core now! It is good to be in core...