rPlanet Creators

rPlanet 1.0b1 Released!

blah — 2005-10-21T16:46:07Z

You can get it at our RubyForge project. The readme file still needs some work, but otherwise it’s looking good.

Also, I used the CSS from Planet Ruby! (which currently uses the Python implementation of Planet) for our distribution. Being as I couldn’t find out who maintains that site, I just added a comment to the CSS file giving them credit and asking the maintainer to email me. If you’re the maintainer, send me an email!

anecdote

blah — 2005-10-20T08:06:49-07:00

Funny Story: at RubyConf we had just come back from Ruby's Diner the keynote was about to start. I was wearing a paper hat I had gotten at Ruby's, and it was getting a lot of comments. Then a Japanese fellow sat down next to me, started talking to me, and took a photo. The thing is, this fellow looked a great deal like Matz. (creator of Ruby) I was pretty excited, thinking I had the chance to talk with someone famous.

Anyway, after we had been talking for about five minutes the real Matz got up and gave his keynote, and I realized he wasn't the guy I was talking to. I don't mean to offend this man--we had an interesting talk--but I was a little disappointed. While I know they probably really don't look much alike, to a ang-mo^Wgaijin like myself they could be long-lost brothers. It's not obvious in the photo, but their beards are quite similar.

This made me laugh for a long time

Multithreading? Why not?

blah — 2005-10-20T04:02:38Z

After adding multithreading to the To-do list on our RubyForge site, I estimated it would take about 2 hours to implement. Then I checked out the chapter on multithreading in the online PickAxe. It is so ridiculously easy. It took me 10 minutes to add. After adding multithreading, I did some rudimentary profiling. Here are the results:

Before multithreading:

real    0m34.489s
user  0m8.721s
sys     0m1.421s

After multithreading:

real    0m8.398s
user    0m6.297s
sys     0m0.785s

Yes, folks. It reduced execution time from 34 seconds to 8 seconds. Amazing. I don’t think I’ve ever had so much return for so little effort.

Edit:
The performance gain wasn’t actually that great. It was only about twice as fast rather than four times as fast. I forgot to delete all the cached files the second time around. Actual time turned out to be around 13 seconds.

rPlanet now has local image caching

blah — 2005-10-20T00:05:08Z

That took longer than I thought it would. Requires some funky regex search and replaces, but it works! Next on the list is to add multithreading to the url fetching. After that we’ll probably make our first source release at RubyForge.

Local image caching

blah — 2005-10-19T09:07:09Z

It’s taken a while, but I almost have image caching implemented in rPlanet. The only problem is that the image files themselves are somehow being saved in a manner that corrupts them. I’m using open-uri to open the url to the file and am saving it to a file:

def cache_image(url)
  fname = \"image_cache/\"   image_name(url)
  File.new(fname, \"w\").write(open(url)) unless File.exists?(fname)
end

Currently don’t have any idea about this. I’ll have to look into how you’re supposed to save binary files to see if I need to do anything special…

RSS date support

blah — 2005-10-18T23:55:01Z

It’s official. Blog RSS feeds that don’t publish dates are just plain stupid. We’re timestamping posts that aren’t already at the time they’re fetched to get around this in rPlanet. This will work great eventually, but this means that all the posts from feeds that don’t support dates are marked as being posted when they’re initially fetched. As I said before, this won’t be a problem anymore because we’re caching posts and restoring them when we fetch again, so the timestamp will be preserved. So, for a week or two we’ll have an inordinately large number of posts by people at the top. Oh well.

Improbable Poetry

blah — 2005-10-18T18:24:07Z

Have you always wanted to write poetry, but never have time? Well, here’s a solution looking for a problem: The Statistically Improbable Poetry Generator. Design (and the story of its creation) still forthcoming, but for now all your computer-mediated poetry-writing dreams can come true. Try it, you might like it.

rPlanet at RubyForge

blah — 2005-10-18T06:04:26Z

We now have a project set up at RubyForge. None of the code has been imported into CVS yet, but you can get to the project here.

Adding an RSS feed for rPlanet

blah — 2005-10-18T05:48:39Z

This evening I’ve been working on adding an RSS feed for rPlanet. I decided to use the built-in rss/maker library to do it because we were already using simple-rss and I didn’t want to make the project dependent on yet another gem. Sadly, the longest part about the whole process was figuring out how the blasted library worked. The only thing useful I found was a post on a japanese ruby list. I was able to piece enough together after a healthy dose of trial and error to get it working. Luckily, all of the code was in english.

So, we have a working RSS 1.0 feed now. Once I figure out which tags are required for a 2.0 feed, I’ll add that as well. I still need to hammer out how we’re dealing with timestamps for feeds that don’t come with them already. Such a pain. We’ll probably end up timestamping them when they’re fetched. The trick will be preserving that date between fetches…

home again

blah — 2005-10-17T12:54:33-07:00

RubyConf is officially over. It was pretty much amazing. I haven't ever brushed elbows with so much brilliance. My only regret is that I didn't meet more people and introduce myself more. I know it'll only be more difficult next year when there are over 500 attendees. Exponential growth, right? It is quite nice to be home back with my wife, but it was a bummer to have to leave.

To cheer me up, it's been raining. Also, the project that Joel and I have been working on, RPlanet, has been getting some notice, including a mention on RedHanded. That was pretty exciting for my first personal Ruby project. Joel and I had it nearly equivalent with the original Python-implemented Planet within the first day (minus the ultra-liberality of its feed parser), and by the second day were working on one-upping it with comment feeds. (Actually, Joel was working on that; I was busy with trademark violations in the CSS.)

I was just shocked and horrified (ok, I was neither shocked nor horrified, merely disappointed) that Planet Ruby was running on Planet. Hopefully they'll switch once RPlanet gets a little more robust. At least Planet Rails is written in Rails, but I was never too impressed with that site. Its subscription to the wiki feed was a real pain, there was downtime all over the place, and it just felt over-engineered. (Why does an aggregator need a database?) Anyway, I hope to have an RPlanet rubyforge page up and make it a gem eventually. So much to do!

rplanet comment support

blah — 2005-10-17T03:27:32Z

After a couple hours of coding, rplanet supports comments. The original Planet (written in Python) doesn’t even attempt this. So, pretty sweet! We’re currently banging our collective heads against the wall due to the many Rubyist’s blogs that have RSS feeds that don’t syndicate post dates (what the heck?!). Currently, they get punished by being shoved to the bottom. We’re working on implementing caching and datestamping of posts without supplied dates.

#rubyconf on Web2.0

blah — 2005-10-16T17:37:08Z

vinbarne1: can we skip web 2.0? i mean, really, its a bit overhyped - point/counterpoint
JamesBritt: yakoro: Good question
JamesBritt: I'm on Web 2.1
paulymer5: Let's pull a TextPattern and just jump to version 4.
yakoro: web 2.2 here
JamesBritt: Damn
court3na1: 2.1.5rc2
vinbarne1: wha? I'm still on 1.65 :(
yakoro: hopefully we'll make web 2.2 in two weeks, and by the end of november we'll be on web 2.4
bricolage: The magic version will be Web3.11 for workgroups
danp: i'm running web 3.0 in beta right now
JamesBritt: I can't wait.  I have ideas that really need Web 2.4 or better
twifkak: problem is 3.0 breaks too many APIs

ruby is becoming lisp....

blah — 2005-10-15T22:10:09-07:00

I was going to list all the instances today when I had an 'aha!' moment about a new Ruby feature that makes it more like Lisp. Problem is, it's happening too often. I lost track. (When are we getting cons? caadr?)

Matz just finished his keynote, which caused #rubyconf to erupt. Who would have thought a new lambda syntax would elicit such a barrage of heckling^Wcommentry? I personally think lambda (args) { statements } is the way to go, but it should also be given a convenience method to save on typing. Isn't that what Akira said yesterday? Jon Tirsen has a good wrap-up from yesterday's Matz QA--he'll probably have today's up at some point as well.

Here a class, there a class, everywhere a class class!

blah — 2005-10-15T21:55:49Z

Well, Phil and I were working on rplanet yesterday. We probably spent somewhere around 3-4 hours implementing RSS parsing using REXML. Then I discovered that evening that there were already libraries built into Ruby for doing this…

require 'rss/0.9' require 'rss/1.0' require 'rss/2.0' require 'rss/parser'

Alas, this happens far too often. ~~Switching to this library fixed a problem we were having regarding differences in the description tag with post contents~~ (most feeds use “description” but WordPress uses “content:encoded”). ~~The RSS class automatically picks the right one~~. Of course, it took me over an hour to figure how to get the RSS classes working because I couldn’t find the documentation and the examples I found didn’t seem to work when copy’n'pasted.

In the end, using the RSS library made the code a lot more readable ~~and “just worked.” Gotta love it.~~ You can see rplanet in action here. It basically just grabs the RSS feed from supplied bloggers and compiles them into one page. Pretty cool. All written by Phil, Andre, and myself since yesterday morning.

As it turned out, we ended up switching to the simple-rss gem as it was actually documented and allowed me to access the “content :encoded” tag (unlike the built-in rss library, as it turned out).

rubyconf day 2

blah — 2005-10-15T09:07:49-07:00

Check out rplanet!

No, seriously: check it out: svn co svn://dev.technomancy.us/rplanet.

rubyconf qotd

blah — 2005-10-15T05:02:40Z

jauricchio: Matz is a singleton.

matz: ruby2.0… maybe is like perl6

jimweirich: the fun part of ruby is really figuring out how to make it behave like it really shouldn’t.

anonymous methods, maybe, at the keynote:

_why = def (x=5)
  ...
end

DHH: poking in the eyes of java developers is a fun bandwagon to jump on!

obiejuan: getting the go ahead to deploy from your project manager: good
typing rake deploy while he’s telling you: great
the look on his face when you say “done” : priceless

hero worship

blah — 2005-10-15T05:00:17Z

Ahhhh. Sitting around and watching the rails team finish up the last outstanding issues on 1.0 == very super cool. I can probably die happy now.

big day

blah — 2005-10-13T10:05:42-07:00

News:

Just left for RubyConf! Should be quite an exciting event. This is probably the geekiest thing I've ever done, and I don't expect to surpass it any time soon. I'll be rubbing shoulders with some high-profile folks.
Ubuntu's latest release, Breezy Badger 5.10 just came out today. I've installed it, and I'm quite happy. Lots of slick improvements. One of the most intriguing things is the addition of an OEM installer mode, which will hopefully boost sales of preinstalled Ubuntu boxen. The other changes are pretty subtle--especially hard for me to notice since I've been running Breezy for a while.
Paul Graham has a nice write-up summary of how the Summer Founders Program went. It's very intriguing to see what he's doing and what drives him now that he's essentially "made it".

renovation

blah — 2005-10-10T19:35:07-07:00

New features: RSS and a search provided by Google. It's great: hoodwink.d saves me from having to code comments, and Google does search for me. Now I see why people are so excited about outsourcing.

I saw a nifty presentation from OSCON the other day on what identity means and how that can be conveyed via technology. The presentation style alone is worth watching: it's very vibrant and active, totally avoiding the Powerpoint Syndrome and getting an interesting point across.

AJAX visual effects in Rails

blah — 2005-10-10T08:11:14Z

In Rails, there’s a helper function called visual_effect() that lets you call a AJAX visual effects (surprise). Looks roughly like:

visual_effect(:highlight, "div_id", :duration => 2.0)

When I first tested it, I wanted to use the SlideDown and SlideUp visual effects to show and hide a form. Sadly, it didn’t seem to work (it seemed as if the Rails function didn’t support all of the current visual effects). So, I resorted to manually entering the javascript for it:

new Effect.SlideDown("div_id");

Well, today I discovered that it does, in fact, support the SlideDown effect—it’s just case-sensitive (doh!). This works:

visual_effect(:SlideDown, "div_id")

This is weird because the highlight effect works whether you capitalize it or not… Hopefully, this will be fixed in the next release of Rails…

Grumble grumble

blah — 2005-10-09T06:52:06Z

Well, that was bloody irritating.

So, typo had some really huge schema changes within the last few days, going with single table inheritance for all articles, comments, trackbacks and the like. This apparently cleaned up the code something fierce, which I am very interested in taking a gander at. (ActiveRecord just doesn’t seem to lend itself to STI at all, so I’m really also wondering how it did so much happy stuff to the codebase. Ah well, I’m sure I’ll learn something—typo’s got really slick programmers.) However, those happy (massive) schema changes require a ton of reworking for existing typo installation databases.

So, I, like a really stupid person, just went and svn up@ed, and then went to @rake migrate. Sadly, all is not well in migration-land, and the migration to version 18 tried to do something clever that required a model (Content, the new one) that didn’t exist yet… Content gets generated by the version 20 migration. Crap. That was the point at which I went and looked at the message with the update, and saw the “BACK UP YOUR DATABASE BEFORE MIGRATING” note. So I tried to migrate back down to version 17 (which worked, thankfully), backed up my database, and then tried to figure out what to do next.

After an hour and a half of randomly poking at the migrations and at the database (and having to restore from my backup about six times), I got the bright idea to update just a couple of svn versions at a time, and rake migrate each time. Hopefully, the migration wouldn’t bork if the model file that expected the not-quite-there-yet table didn’t exist yet. Amazingly enough, after a restore from backup, it worked. About 15 minutes of svn up and rake migrate and my database was, miraculously enough, migrated. Happiness. Then I only had to spend another ten minutes wondering why it wouldn’t load up properly… since I hadn’t restarted the server yet, to update the running code to the new version I had just updated to.

The moral of the story: next time I go to upgrade software, I should be not sick.

a terminal is a terrible thing to waste

blah — 2005-10-06T08:35:09-07:00

So I was visiting Luke the other day, and I wanted to show him something on his computer. ... double-click on the Terminal ... and I was rudely informed that I didn't have privileges to open the Terminal since I wasn't an administrator. I mean, it's bad enough that they moved it out of the Applications folder, but blocking access to it entirely is just plain silly. I mean, what's the point of having a Mac if you can't use the Terminal? Sheesh.

What happened to you, Apple? You used to be cool.

Backpack, here I come...

blah — 2005-10-03T20:22:28Z

There’s a Backpack Widget. This is exciting because it means I don’t have to manage all those little reminders and whatnot via web pages…

Ironically, as I find webapps more and more useful, and as ajax makes them more like real programs, I really wish more and more that I have an interface to them that isn’t a web browser. At least I have one for Backpack.

Serenity and Mirrormask

blah — 2005-09-30T17:58:00Z

Whee! Going to see MirrorMask with Phil and Joel and Rachel, and then watch all of Firefly and then go see Serenity. And have We Love Katamari for playing during the times I’m not watching cool stuff. Plan for a sweet weekend.

Go see both movies this weekend, if you can, so they’ll get wider theatrical releases.

Since the world is somehow cooperating with my fantasies this weekend, here is a simultaneous interview with Time magazine of both Neil and Joss at the same time, talking about their movies and what it’s like to not be marginalized and cool for being goofy nerds anymore.

major dilemma

blah — 2005-09-27T17:53:29-07:00

OK, here is my problem. I'm majorly addicted to my delightful three-screen setup (don't try that, btw--it's insecure!) that I have at home, but I'm getting a little antsy from working at home all the time. I need to roam; maybe to work from a coffee shop or something. The problem is whenever I'm elsewhere with my laptop, I always feel the like I'm being crowded into a small 1024x768 elevator.... there simply is no elbow room. Bah--it's my own fault for getting spoiled.

Also, I'm trying to hoodwink this blog to no success. If any experienced druids could give me a tip, I'd appreciate it. (You can wink me at my other blog running Typo; that works just fine.)

fridays

blah — 2005-09-26T12:27:18-07:00

This is too perfect--The Pragmatic Programmers are publishing short, cheap PDF e-books focused on small topics. While the first book is not too exciting for me (I'm a GTK man myself), the next releases mentioned are all areas I'm very interested in. Kudos to the Pragmatic Programmers for breaking the rules of publishing again.

Oh yeah, and it's funny that the tenative cover for a book on QT programming looks suspiciously like the GNOME logo.

new blog

blah — 2005-09-24T12:15:02-07:00

This is my new blog. I've decided I should split up by blog into a personal life-related blog and a more technical blog. I tried before to separate tech stuff from my normal blog, but it was never much of a success. Anyway, this is where I post crazy tech stuff I'm thinking about--hence the term Technomancy.

First thought: Lisp. It's awesome. It's mind-blowing. And there's a really good book on it available for free. I'm using CLisp to write the server this blog is running on, with help from code by Ron Garret. You can see the code on my Trac.

Del.icio.us

blah — 2005-09-21T21:16:00Z

I can’t believe I didn’t do this a very, very, very long time ago. Delicious is what I’ve been trying to do with my bookmarks for the last eight years. How do you categorize a bookmark that’s about web programming, and OS X, and ruby? You add tags for all of them. I’m way behind the curve, here, but it feels really really good to finally have made it to a modern way to handle bookmarks.

Delicious also really drives home the power of folksonomies and tagging in a way that I just never understood before. Mentally understanding how tagging works and thinking it is cool is a long way from suddenly being able to find that bookmark that you only vaguely remember had something to do with CSS…

Hooray.

Not Very Punny

blah — 2005-09-20T03:30:00Z

Today is just one of those days that needs a terrible pun. So here’s my favourite.

One time, there was a legendary explorer who heard about an everliving, landlocked dolphin in the heart of Africa. In fact, it lived so long the natives called it ‘The Whale that would not die’. The explorer set off to Africa, and he hired a guide that was familiar with the dolphin. As he was setting out on his journey, his guide told him that to find the porpoise, he would have to have a sacred myna bird on his shoulder. The explorer bought a bird. They traveled about 10 miles from the lake, when they found a dead lion lying in the trail. The guide said they couldn’t go on because the lion belonged to the government. The explorer said “Hogwash” and stepped over the beast. Police immediately stepped out from behind some trees and arrested him for ‘Transporting a myna across state lions for immortal porpoises.’

If you’ve had an even worse day than me, here are some more puns, just in case.

Rails Redirect Delay

blah — 2005-09-19T21:27:39Z

The 30 second delay when you try to proxy lighty through apache and your rails app sends a redirect is really annoying.

And there’s no way to fix it short of modifying ActionController. Suck.