Sat 24 May 2008
The NYTimes OPEN blog talks about their TimesMachine implementation, and how they used EC2 to convert the archive information into something usable on the web. TimesMachine, by the way, is an archive of Times pages going all the way back to issue number one (18 September 1851).
Sat 8 Mar 2008
Leopard comes with Rails, but I prefer to roll my own in an effort to keep my environment stable. As always Hivelogic has the goods:
Fri 15 Feb 2008
Amazon’s S3 Service went dark for a time today. This, of course, effectively shuttered the businesses (or parts thereof) that rely on S3 for online storage. It seems that things are returning to normal, but some customers are upset–and rightfully so. Amazon touted this storage as being pretty much bulletproof; widespread, unscheduled downtime does not live up to that promise.
In Amazon’s defense, this is the first major S3 outage, so their track record is pretty damn good. I’ve been an advocate of S3 for some time, and will continue to be so long as outages like this one do not become commonplace.
This just serves as a reminder that functions relying on web services should fail gracefully. This may be a tall order, if not impossible, for some applications. But, compensating for these sorts of failures should be a major design consideration for developers of applications that consume web services.
Mon 14 Jan 2008
Amazon released SimpleDB to limited beta in December. It’s just what it sounds like, a database to add to Amazon’s stable of web services. I’m a little surprised that SimpleDB does not support SQL, but I can understand why they chose to go in the direction they did.
For the full lowdown, check out Amazon’s SimpleDB page or this article on GigaOM which sums up SimpleDB quite nicely.
Thu 3 Jan 2008
Gregg Pollack, of Rails Envy fame, gave a good presentation on REST web services at the Orlando Ruby User’s Group recently (video here). This is a great primer for anyone trying to figure out what all this REST stuff is about. He also touches briefly on a couple Rails 2.0 features like ActiveResource.
Tue 4 Dec 2007
A taxi passenger recently found out how open NYC’s new taxi computers are to casual exploration. A wayward error message and some ingenuity lead to an open Internet browser and access to the computer’s file system. It’s disheartening to learn that these computers, provided by TaxiTech, are open to the probing of casual users. It is even more alarming when considering that these systems are used to process credit card payments as well. Are customers’ credit card numbers stored on these computers? If so, are they secure? Let’s hope that TaxiTech and its partners have designed a system that does not put customer information at risk when errors occur.
I also wonder how all these Windows machines riding through the streets of New York are patched and upgraded. Is there an automated updating scheme, or are they wide open to attacks from the Internet until someone gets around to patching the machines?
Until these questions are answered, paying with cash might be the best option.
via City Room
Sat 1 Dec 2007
BUG is an open-source, hackable hardware platform from Bug Labs. It is not only cool, but it also may be the holiday gift for the geek/hacker in your life. Keep an eye on their store as they promise to be open this year.
Robert Scoble recently spent some time at Bug Labs HQ in New York and has three videos to share (below). I was more excited about the BUG after watching the first five minutes of video than I have been reading the Bug Blogger for several months. No disrespect to the Bug Bloger here, I just think that the videos show how close these things are to getting into people’s hands. Very exciting.
via Webreakstuff
Sat 24 Nov 2007
Dan Benjamin at Hivelogic has some excellent guides for setting up all sorts of things on a Mac that relate to Rails development. His guide to installing MySQL on OSX is no exception. It takes you through the steps of downloading, compiling and installing the MySQL source code on your local machine. If you want MySQL on Leopard, this is probably the best way to go. There currently is no installer package for Leopard and while there is a package for Tiger, it is not without issues. Besides, it’s so much more fun to compile from source.
Sat 24 Nov 2007
Fallen Rogue has a succinct tutorial on implementing drag & drop lists on Rails. It also touches on implementing acts_as_list. This tutorial and the referenced sample application was good way to get drag & drop lists working quickly in my own application.
Sat 10 Nov 2007
Videos of the Gotham Ruby Conference talks were posted way back in September; I promptly forgot about them. While cleaning out some files today, I was reminded of their existence. I’ve added links to each of the talks in my original Gotham Ruby Conference post from April. Better really late than never I guess. Have fun!!!