tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-103818932012-01-29T22:38:23.364-08:00A web developer, architect, & aspiring RESTafarian's thoughts on software, web tech, entrepreneurial endeavors and some creative ideas. Mark's current focus is on developing elastic & RESTful Ajax applications on the Cloud with the following technologies: OO and unobtrusive JavaScript using the Prototype JS library, jQuery, and on the server side prefers to write OO code in Ruby, Rails; Amazon EC2 AS3 SimpleDB; mySQL; -- currently learning a new language each year and groking UnixMark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.comBlogger1551100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-54006801291589148652010-08-08T00:18:00.000-07:002010-08-08T00:28:13.043-07:00

My thoughts on web application development, especially in the realm of Ruby on Rails, Heroku, the cloud, Ruby, Rails, Memcache, PostgreSQL, No-SQL, iPhone, and other topics are being shared now on http://MarkHolton.com

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-78842643070378916152010-04-03T13:43:00.000-07:002010-04-03T13:46:53.262-07:00

...took these pics at 9 a.m. in suburbia, Washington. A buddy and I headed out to the Apple store, the line was around the block for *reserved* iPads. Many of these people had undoubtedly never seen or touched one, but were buying one. There was a separate line for unreserved. A handful of police on hand to keep the peace.Amazing brand to compel surburban-ites out of their homes on an early

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com22tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-87304455452064863792009-12-25T11:02:00.000-08:002009-12-25T11:39:56.691-08:00

Merry Christmas! My gift to you is sharing some home networking and backup information!The Dream:...will start with a dream. This is... the Cadillac of home storage. The Drobo with SATA option. Considered it, but didn't go this route for our home network due to price. But you should check it out:http://www.drobo.com/products/drobo-s.phpSATA, hot swappable, plenty of space for the next decade

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-41000009331223568132009-12-18T06:33:00.000-08:002009-12-18T06:35:16.191-08:00

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/18/dns_twitter_hijack/A bunch of servers exist throughout the internet which map friendly human readable names (twitter.com, eyeonmajors.com) to IP addresses. These are DNS servers (Domain Name System servers) -- phonebook for the internet. When you type in "tigerwoods.com" to see his latest transgression admission, along the way DNS is queried and you are

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-65959051418595251332009-08-09T13:22:00.000-07:002009-08-09T13:25:13.663-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqHcm66s-kc...since August 4th, decided to step it up. Watering, raking (a lot of dead grass), overseeding... took a picture every day. Hopefully in a month it will be all filled in. Plan to continue to log it with pictures every day or two, grow the slide show.Better improvement in ~4-5 days than expected, it's filling in nicely. The 16 point sprinkler ($14.95) in

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com55tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-91232099166902276542009-08-05T17:04:00.001-07:002009-08-05T17:06:53.486-07:00

Maybe not "cool" to say so, but MySpace++. Love the initiative to push forward with Microformats. µFormats ftw http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/myspace_to_bet_its_future_on_open_standards.phpHere's how MySpace's plan is unlike what Facebook is doing. The updates will be marked up for the types of activities they represent with standardized microformat code, beginning with the events format

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-18718232552165972892009-08-05T10:51:00.000-07:002009-08-05T10:52:57.127-07:00

This is non-software related, but brilliant:http://www99.epinions.com/review/Pulsating_Pattern_Master_Sprinkler/content_137910324868Was hoping someone already invented something like this, as I have a non-circular lawn ;) Bought it. Very reasonable price, I hope it works well.

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-69887038363348298422009-08-05T10:49:00.001-07:002009-08-05T10:49:58.379-07:00

..class names in XHTML are for semantics, not presentation. Yes, provide presentation with CSS calling out the class name, but the main purpose is for semantics.http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/goodclassnameshttp://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/contentPresentation-26.html

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-33945459620950023892009-08-05T10:48:00.000-07:002009-08-05T10:49:01.219-07:00

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/innovation-in-video-on-web.html...high quality, searchable video programming on the web one day = inevitable. Surely Google wants to be at the epicenter.

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-6210774625215367652009-08-05T10:43:00.000-07:002009-08-05T10:47:46.640-07:00

This is pretty lame:http://daringfireball.net/2009/08/ninjawordsIn other words, not only must the dictionary be censored — a dictionary — but even after being purged of “objectionable” words it would only be considered with a 17+ rating. Even after agreeing to these terms, it took another two weeks for Ninjawords to appear in the App Store. According to Crosby, “We gave in and said fine, hoping

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-73102335268093024612009-08-05T10:38:00.000-07:002009-08-05T10:41:55.181-07:00

Exciting times. VMWare is everywhere, so is cloud computing. For now I'll settle for being able to consistently build and deploy web apps on an elastic cloud (Heroku) in my spare time, but things are moving fast, which is fun to observe. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/13/google-loses-engineering-director-who-once-caused-steve-ballmer-to-melt-down/

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-20280708340856444772009-05-25T23:09:00.000-07:002009-05-25T23:19:36.944-07:00

Messed around with Erlang for like the sum total of 2 hours over a year ago. But have decided recently that I'm going to sit down and little by little work towards learning it. It just seems like a great complement on the back end with Ruby, especially with items like CouchDB bubbling up. It's also fun and mind bending exercise to learn new syntax, along with a different language. Erlang is

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-32238319614979918292009-02-18T23:43:00.000-08:002009-02-19T00:01:40.928-08:00

...since I'm going to have to speak Spanish in Alhambra, CA during the AT&T work stoppage... I might as well incorporate that into my web applications and "make lemonade" as the saying goes.That's just a positive spin on having to go there. We coincidentally have homework due next week related to internationalization.Been writing the Depot app via the PragProg book in Rails, but am doing so via

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-77268704262249084052009-02-08T15:14:00.000-08:002009-02-08T15:27:47.556-08:00

An example of what I'm using for EyeOnMajors to elicit customer feedback, ideas, etc.http://getsatisfaction.com/eyeonmajors

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-31912408556046098132009-02-03T14:12:00.001-08:002009-02-03T14:12:46.028-08:00

I have loop that makes server-side Ajax calls on each iteration, and returns data. This could be 50 iterations, 500, 5000, whatever. Upon each iteration, I update that particular row with a server-side response (i.e. "success" or "fail"), and then update the total count processed ("26 out of 432 processed"). -- I update the innerHTML of a div or span, and another div showing the total number

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-527450750535519362009-01-28T13:56:00.000-08:002009-01-28T14:03:13.696-08:00

I have been suitably convinced...http://gist.github.com/54177

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-37185320973782720792009-01-28T11:47:00.000-08:002009-01-28T11:53:36.786-08:00

I have read the following books (some more closely than others). I'd recommend each of them for various reasons. All have been helpful in understanding many of the pragmatic concepts baked into Rails, understanding the Ruby programming language, and web development in general. I hope you have a chance to check them out on your own path of learning!:MarkRESTful Web ServicesThe Ruby Way, Second

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-36187254006123843142009-01-22T17:02:00.001-08:002009-01-22T17:03:55.716-08:00

Daemon, by Daniel Suarez. This looks like a really fun read, going to grab it! Check it out.

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-64473500411131331912009-01-16T00:27:00.000-08:002009-01-16T00:31:03.077-08:00

...yup, it's time... no more mysql gem... Should have done this earlier, but no better time than the present to implement......this weekend...going to convert any [current 'carl_spackler'] database queries that are mysql-specific, into ActiveRecord calls. This way, someone is just one adapter change away from using their database, any db they want that ActiveRecord supports, with Spackler. ...

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-56103431426207509372009-01-11T12:42:00.000-08:002009-01-11T12:46:50.498-08:00

...all tests passing... ...collecting all 2008 PGATour data, and more Euro data now...There are ZERO orphans in the 2008 PGATour data right now. Have collected each and every player's data for 36 tournaments in 2008. Including any other 3 part names.The Player class is not in its ultimate form, but it is there and it splits names appropriately... still doesn't flatten special wacky characters

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-42311591516909663092009-01-02T13:53:00.000-08:002009-01-02T13:54:58.109-08:00

Vote for GitHub as best bootstrapped startup in 2008. It takes 2 seconds and they are truly deserving:http://crunchies2008.techcrunch.com/votes/?nominee_id=8&category_id=2

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-23275903321099229972008-12-29T11:11:00.000-08:002008-12-29T11:20:31.414-08:00

Been working on a variety of data collection tools, and plan on continuing to do so. It's fun, I'm getting some things done, and it helps exercise the brain. Through all of these exercises:Starting to realize, the hardest part about collecting data from the web... is not grabbing the data (Nokogiri makes that pretty easy)... it's making the data fit into the 'holes' you want it to fit in. Not

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-84913913457444352552008-12-25T11:23:00.001-08:002008-12-25T11:45:21.980-08:00

Irish annihilate HawaiiWhat a phenomenal game for the Irish yesterday in the Hawaii Bowl. Clausen was perfect, completely accurate 401 yards through 2.5 quarters, 5 td passes. Armando Allen runs back a kick for a TD, Golden with 2 bomb TD catches, and one punt run back (called back for roughing, too bad).The Irish looked dominant on both sides of the ball, and special teams. By far the best

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-30914214848143628592008-12-23T13:33:00.000-08:002008-12-23T13:35:26.592-08:00

I see this as great news for the Ruby and Rails and Merb communities... what are your thoughts?Yehuda Katz post is a great rundown:http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2008/12/23/merb-gets-merged-into-rails-3/comments/24239#comment-24239http://yehudakatz.com/2008/12/23/rails-and-merb-merge/http://rubyonrails.org/merb

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-29010244348052063472008-11-24T13:09:00.000-08:002008-11-24T13:10:48.193-08:00

Dear Google Finance,It is possible to include a music feature in your application, specifically in the My Portfolio section? I would like to play the music sound of a carnival carousel that goes up and down, up and down, up and down... make it have a downward trend though in the tone.Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!Sincerely,Mark HoltonUser

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-86213483973792553542008-11-21T16:04:00.000-08:002008-11-21T17:30:23.912-08:00

Creating a new open source library hosted on Github, named 'carl_spackler'... it collects data on golf scores throughout the web, and produce a normalized form for each collection. Likely the output will be an array of Ostructs for starters.Similar principle to OGWR, only for weekly tournament scores, not weekly golf rankings. This way anyone can collect both sets of data and use it as they so

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-29350113524517907042008-11-13T21:21:00.000-08:002008-11-13T21:23:19.615-08:00

Threading in Ruby (and other dynamic languages with a GIL)http://www.igvita.com/2008/11/13/concurrency-is-a-myth-in-ruby/Rails deployment:http://www.loudthinking.com/posts/30-myth-1-rails-is-hard-to-deployNginx + memcachedhttp://www.igvita.com/2008/02/11/nginx-and-memcached-a-400-boost/

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-89515931194682209542008-11-13T19:17:00.000-08:002008-11-13T19:28:44.037-08:00

I, like many others, had Mac OS X before Leopard came out. i.e. installed Leopard separately when it came out. Sometimes that causes some things to err out, because for one example, RubyCocoa was bundled with Leopard, and some gems depend on RubyCocoa depending on what you're doing. Plus it's nice to mess around with RubyCocoa.Found a good post here related to manually building RubyCocoa for

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-61598102427981582552008-11-04T12:25:00.000-08:002008-11-04T12:30:27.322-08:00

Was reading Signal vs Noise today, per the usual routine at lunch. ...they requested that folks describe them, to the layperson:http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1371-describe-37signals-in-20-seconds-or-lessHere was my suggestion:“We build sensible and usable customized web applications for humans… while contributing to open source software that helps people build, deploy and maintain web

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-34395624741132914582008-11-02T11:55:00.000-08:002008-11-02T12:03:32.312-08:00

...Official Golf World Ranking, OGWR...wrote some Ruby code in a Module that grabs the official golf world rankings...use the data as you wish in your own application...released as open source... code: http://github.com/holtonma/ogwr/tree/master/ogwr_scraper.rbtest: http://github.com/holtonma/ogwr/tree/master/test_ogwr_scraper.rb enables anyone to take the active OGWR data and do with it what you

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-47376135625885080692008-10-31T12:16:00.000-07:002008-10-31T12:18:39.594-07:00

Looking into using tenderlove's new library, nokogiri. Looks faster than Hpricot, according to the benchmarks he provides, the syntax also looks really nice.hmmm.... I installed racc, and frex... getting an error when creating the Make file. I really want to try this out. If I figure it out, or talk to someone who knows, I'll post a reply. For now, here is the error I'm getting.-bash3.2.17:

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-82057066662427573872008-10-30T17:20:00.000-07:002008-10-30T17:31:45.889-07:00

- Login to your Github account (free) https://github.com/- go here: http://gist.github.com/ embedding a gist in your blog...- add your code to the gist and click "paste"- click embed, and embed the code in your blog (hopefully it is more useful than this code below!):

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-17524387863110980512008-10-29T21:15:00.001-07:002008-10-29T21:16:58.420-07:00

Going to write some Ruby code to scrape the Official Golf World Ranking... going to release it as open source.

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-42555281281770831252008-10-28T21:26:00.000-07:002008-10-28T21:31:01.482-07:00

Info on Rails 2.1.2: http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2008/10/23/rails-2-1-2-security-other-fixes-bash3.2.17:holts:Tue Oct 28 09:23:10 ~ >> sudo gem updatePassword: ********************Updating installed gemsUpdating ZenTestSuccessfully installed ZenTest-3.11.0Updating actionmailerSuccessfully installed activesupport-2.1.2Successfully installed actionpack-2.1.2Successfully installed actionmailer-

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-4965440343473972852008-10-28T15:16:00.000-07:002008-10-28T15:18:15.794-07:00

This talk is great. Tons of information if you're interested in Ruby, Merb, Rubinius, etc."Engine Yard co-founder Ezra Zygmuntowicz gave a Tech Talk on Monday at Google. He covered some of the open-source projects we’re working on at Engine Yard, including Merb and Rubinius."http://blog.engineyard.com/2008/10/24/ezra-gives-google-tech-talk-on-merb-and-rubinius

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-39638023940015181892008-10-22T16:13:00.000-07:002008-10-22T16:16:27.172-07:00

Browsers are getting faster (see: Google Chrome, see next release of Firefox) with JIT compliation, improved Javascript VM's, etc... but not only that, developers are getting better at writing codez and finding things in browsers... all of it makes the interwebs better: It's good to keep an eye on what is coming down the pike, as they say:John Resig (jQuery author)... is working on Sizzle...

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-22065175558543071342008-10-17T00:13:00.000-07:002008-10-17T00:25:52.192-07:00

Was back on my Joyent Accelerator (been too long), and hadn't done an update in awhile. Needed to update Rails, among many other gems and was coming across this error whenever I tried updating any gems:ERROR: While executing gem ... (Gem::GemNotFoundException) could not find capistrano locally or in a repositoryRealized I needed to install rubygems-update-1.2.0 from source:$ sudo curl -O http:/

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-61793684828799949452008-09-25T11:39:00.000-07:002008-09-25T11:53:07.644-07:00

I was in Chicago last week, visiting friends and family. It had been awhile since I had been back, great to see the folks, my brother and his family, and some close friends.My wife had been to Chicago before, but somewhat briefly. So we spent a lot of time going to museums, a play at the Chicago Shakespeare theater (great venue!), the Hancock, some restaurants... and of course, some shopping on

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-28407370723684989472008-09-08T21:30:00.000-07:002008-09-08T21:31:47.447-07:00

...thankful, in one respect, I don't own more than a marginal amount of Fannie/Freddie stock in the mutual funds......but boy, it sure worked out for Syrin and Mudd who will each exit with ~$15+ million each. We, the taxpayers, ultimately are paying that bill of course. ..$14 BILLION in losses the last 4 quarters... and it's far from over, as Paulson commits $200B from the Federal coffers to

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-81462979538423004702008-08-11T19:59:00.000-07:002008-08-11T20:03:27.503-07:00

From Russ Olsen's "Design Patterns in Ruby":"Statically typed languages are constantly asking about your parent or grandparent, or perhaps, in the case of Java-style interfaces, your aunts and uncles. In a statically typed language, an object's family tree matters deeply. Dynamically typed languages, by contrast, are meritocracies: They are concerned with which methods you have, rather than

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-39353963864593851952008-08-06T13:03:00.001-07:002008-08-06T13:10:37.669-07:00

Nice overview:http://www.infoq.com/articles/virtualization-intro

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-29520222267698490262008-07-30T10:50:00.000-07:002008-07-30T10:51:04.281-07:00

Share and annotate your videos with Omnisio!

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-73532802251942444942008-07-29T12:46:00.000-07:002008-07-29T14:51:23.288-07:00

http://knol.google.com/k...reading between the lines on this for awhile... Google is seemingly going to move in the semantic direction... this is a step... by referencing a Knol (or a Wiki link or any link to a definition) in an RDF, you define that element in the HTML hierarchy with a real meaning "a shark is an aquatic creature, yada yada". Search for "shark" not only pulls up hyperlinked web

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-90514290643346208152008-07-24T16:15:00.000-07:002008-08-15T10:12:23.681-07:00

This is a very large and involved topic. (great topic! it is part of what makes Ruby so powerful) You can add new methods to a Class on the fly at anytime. Can also overwrite methods at any time. And, in Ruby, this truly means virtually any Class. Including classes like Array, String, etc. Let's say we have> class Course > attr_accessor :id, :name > def initialize( id, name)>

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-25962029929350335142008-06-29T14:02:00.001-07:002008-06-29T14:05:28.777-07:00

Mr. Bill Gates, at his first Kung Fu lesson upon retiring from Microsoft.

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-101326704433502512008-06-27T10:39:00.001-07:002008-06-27T10:40:30.152-07:00

Great insights on Ruby's front end from Kevin Clark's blog:http://glu.ttono.us/articles/2007/06/21/powerset-to-launch-front-end-on-ruby"The simple fact is that Ruby wasn’t the source of Twitter’s woes. As it often happens with rapidly growing sites, they ran into architectural problems. Some design decisions don’t hurt until they reach a massive scale and at that point you have to rethink your

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-25017054494357896192008-06-26T19:05:00.000-07:002008-06-26T19:10:52.721-07:00

...Rumor has it, that Powerset is being bought by MSFT... that can only mean they are trying to go semantic in their search quest... hopefully the great technical and semantic momentum with Powerset will carry on....Powerset is written in all OpenSource -- Ruby, Merb, Rails, god, Mongrel, Mootools, Memcache, Erlang, Fuzed*, YAWS, Hadoop... one of their developers is Kevin Clark, active Ruby/Rails

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-18757928539878935772008-06-23T12:24:00.000-07:002008-06-23T12:40:41.530-07:00

e...using Canvas... this guy created a photo-table-like system. Be sure to click the "show corners" and resize the images on the fly in the browser. Pretty slick (and thought provoking for you image-philes). Then you can export the image as a .jpg. "makes it easy to create highly customized compositions"... yeah yeah, that's cool and all, but beyond this implementation the demonstration of

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-23987211166989135022008-06-19T16:09:00.000-07:002008-06-19T16:11:11.356-07:00

Latest benchmarks by Zimbra team:Safari and FF3 are comparable... Safari wins (barely)...IE7, IE8 are about 2-3x as slow. FF2 is also slower.total time: http://www.zimbrablog.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/browserwars-winner-total_time.pngindividual tests: http://www.zimbrablog.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/browserwars-winner-bar_chart.pnghttp://www.zimbrablog.com/blog/archives/2008/

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-48206411368900395572008-06-17T20:13:00.000-07:002008-06-17T20:19:09.329-07:00

I love Rspec and Rspec-rails. Trying to get much better at it. Also love Autotest. Ryan Zenspider Davis is a prolific genius.Had issues today with a new project running 1.1.4 with autotest. It was easily fixable though.Here was the error:############################################################################Your RSpec on Rails plugin is incompatible with your installed RSpec.RSpec

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-69730686081399356342008-06-17T14:57:00.000-07:002008-06-17T15:03:04.229-07:00

Interesting points about the gap between what we have now, and where much of the potential in Search remains, especially when it comes to the Semantic web:http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun2008/tc20080616_034849.htm...Powerset is written in all OpenSource -- Ruby, Merb, Rails, god, Mongrel, Mootools, Memcache, Erlang, Fuzed*, YAWS, Hadoop... one of their developers is Kevin Clark,

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-63153211551553127292008-06-17T12:03:00.000-07:002008-06-17T12:11:41.232-07:00

intriguing... definitely plan to keep an eye on this!!http://mooseyard.com/Jens/2008/03/macruby/http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/03/macruby-objectivechttp://ruby.macosforge.org/trac/wiki/MacRubyhttp://ruby.macosforge.org/trac/wiki/MacRubyTutorialhttp://ruby.macosforge.org/trac/wiki/WhyMacRubyhttp://ruby.macosforge.org/trac/wiki/MacRubyRoadmap

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-64705081343675734782008-06-11T12:21:00.001-07:002008-06-11T12:21:51.118-07:00

Interested to learn that Tim Berners Lee (inventor of the WWW)... developed the first web browser and first server using NeXTSTEP ... didn't know that.Some background: NeXTSTEP, which was built ontop of BSD Unix and ontop of the Mach kernel... many know this was the precursor to OS X.NeXT (the company) wrote NeXTSTEP, which is an operating system and set of development tools. Included in that is

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-54951871685018811392008-06-11T11:24:00.001-07:002008-06-11T11:24:57.585-07:00

...Smalltalk VM running on the iPhone in 93 days... sweet effort!... wonder what others will follow for other languages...http://news.squeak.org/2008/06/11/squeak-on-the-iphone/It turns out, the more I look into it... Objective-C seems really cool, and enticing. ObjC is a series of SmallTalk style object extensions to the C language. It's dynamically typed like SmallTalk (and Ruby). There is

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-55963935007714045012008-05-31T13:51:00.000-07:002008-05-31T13:52:19.548-07:00

...my notes from the RailsConf keynote for anyone interested... a lot of non-software wisdom by DHH... i thought it was an impressive talk. Not a lot of ego in this (i.e. not interested in taking over the world, etc... more interested in pragmatic fundamentals). Very refreshing and inspiring. ...hopefully they recorded it and posted it on ConFreaks in the coming weeks... it was entertaining

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-52236347934968961922008-05-18T10:25:00.001-07:002008-05-18T10:38:18.310-07:00

Congrats to the Rubinius team! This is awesome news!http://blog.fallingsnow.net/2008/05/17/rails-on-rubinius/http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/05/rubinius-runs-rails

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-15762229197095828092008-04-30T11:05:00.000-07:002008-04-30T11:32:43.864-07:00

There are many exciting happenings in the Ruby world. It will be interesting to take some of it in at the end of the month at RailsConf in Portland.There's an eye on the future with Rubinius which is incredibly exciting and promising -- you should take a look too, and at least understand that team's ambitious and very worthy goal. You've probably read the recent happenings here and here -- its

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-25920835073155021172008-04-17T11:22:00.000-07:002008-04-17T11:24:55.211-07:00

Heard about this yesterday in my weekly Ruby class … looked into it last night… Amazon’s music service http://www.amazon.com/MP3-Music-Download/b?ie=UTF8&node=163856011 http://www.amazon.com/gp/dmusic/help/faq.html/ref=sv_dmusic_0 better than iTunes -- DRM free .mp3’s. Copy and play with impunity once you buy. As many computers as you want. Unlike iTunes which has the 5 computer

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-45536442079650843392008-04-11T22:25:00.000-07:002008-04-11T22:47:27.729-07:00

Per the Pragmatic Programmer directive, I've been learning a language a year for the last couple of years... Python is very likely the next language I grok:http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2008/04/introducing-google-app-engine-our-new.htmlAt the same time though, I am focused on Ruby development still now. My goals are to master building and deploy highly scalable Ruby-based web apps in Rails

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-75370877110984548352008-04-08T21:49:00.001-07:002008-04-08T21:49:28.403-07:00

http://rubyconf2007.confreaks.com/

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-21320018250879987442008-04-08T21:15:00.000-07:002008-04-08T21:23:42.472-07:00

Listening to the Ruby on Rails podcast... Rubinius developers have already demonstrated native threads running. Not only that, each Rubinius VM you spawn can have green threads. First preview of 1.0 release of Rubinius (running Ruby 1.8) will be May 15th. Right around the corner. 1.0 will not includethe native threads, but they are planned for 2.0 release of Rubinius. Likewise, Ruby 2.0 with

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-58311423368363173372008-04-08T21:03:00.000-07:002008-04-08T21:05:25.412-07:00

...can't wait for this. Rubinius 1.0 Preview is, according to the following, expected on May 15th:http://rubinius.lighthouseapp.com/projects/5089/getting-started

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-357104653585392632008-04-05T18:14:00.001-07:002008-04-05T19:24:41.201-07:00

Today I am going through the program and session information at RailsConf and figuring out what I'll be attending Thurs, Fri, Sat, Sun, May 29 thru June 1st.Thurs:7:30 a.m : Continental Breakfast - Exhibit Hall E8:30am-12:00pm - Design for Developers - A Hands-On Workshop1:30-5:00pm - Powering AIR Applications with Rails7:30pm - ? - Birds of a feather sessionsFri:8:00 a.m.: Continental Breakfast

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-41076845743206880652008-04-01T16:09:00.000-07:002008-04-01T16:11:44.206-07:00

…I love this attitude. Corwin Brown was discussing the Notre Dame defense here, but it also applies to anything you do, including application architectures and writing applications: Brown intends on not wasting any time this spring working with his young defense. “You can’t afford to waste days or waste time,” Brown said. “It’s one of those deals where every time you’re out there are

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-71824783159810934962008-04-01T12:55:00.000-07:002008-04-01T13:06:27.624-07:00

Over on the Ruby-lang list, there was a discussion which pointed me to Rack. Check it out:Rack provides an minimal interface between webservers supporting Ruby and Ruby frameworks.super simple API for writing web appssingle API to connect to mongrel, fast-cgi, webrickbased on python’s WSGI, which was a good thing for pythonFound this intriguing...using the mongrel handler we can get crazy

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-78381549122814799352008-04-01T12:32:00.001-07:002008-04-01T12:33:25.033-07:00

Nice article by Tim Berners Lee's blog related to his thoughts on the recent Time's article. Insightful blog to read if you're interested in moving forward on this topic.http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/232

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-27904947140328473402008-03-30T15:17:00.000-07:002008-03-30T15:27:05.967-07:00

Really digging Markaby and the potential it has to more easily create html in Ruby. Try to work in some Markaby along with your Erb in Rails. (Markaby is included in Camping microframework I believe... the code is very clean). Currently, I believe the latest version is 0.5 as of this writing. You can install it with a simple:bash-3.2$ sudo gem install markabyRead all about it:http://

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-42815594605969100552008-03-29T13:47:00.001-07:002008-03-30T12:36:34.647-07:00

This is a bit of a blast from the past, but I have been wondering what is brewing with IPv6....http://blogs.zdnet.com/Google/?p=241(for your reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6)It turns out that on "On March 12th, 2008, Google launched an IPv6 version of www.google.com, the most visited page on the Internet, under an alternative host name (ipv6.google.com) -- however that site is a dead

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-85077275931272974302008-03-27T12:37:00.000-07:002008-03-27T13:07:18.314-07:00

I wasn't expecting anything like this until Screaming Monkey... and while that is a different animal, this is very damn cool! Ruby running inside script tags running on browser's JS engine, also running on Flash...available NOW!:http://hotruby.accelart.jp/here's the source: http://hotruby.accelart.jp/js/HotRuby.jshttp://ajaxian.com/archives/hotruby-run-ruby-on-a-javascript-interpreter

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-14608579829140520192008-03-26T17:27:00.000-07:002008-03-26T17:35:11.763-07:00

OpenSolaris …(and Solaris 10) implements ZFS filesystem as of c 2005/2006… ZFS is a 128-bit file system... … to give you an idea of the capability limitations of a 128-bit file system (hint: there are none): -If a billion computers each filled a billion individual file systems per second, the time required to reach the limit of the overall system would be almost 1,000 times the estimated age

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-69038691081746743702008-03-26T15:04:00.000-07:002008-03-26T15:11:33.971-07:00

…ZFS… Zpool… Solaris…. Zones……………Joyent is capitalizing on all of it… my Ruby amigos keep me informed (thanks Riggs!)… some of the Joyent plans look sweet, and they also have the ability to more readily hardware load balance (if the need arises eventually), static IP (dynamic IP only with EC2)… non-stateless deployments (EC2 deployments are stateless and a bit patchy having to hook into S3), …

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-36309242748109501912008-03-25T17:35:00.001-07:002008-03-25T17:36:06.294-07:00

HTTP :GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, HEAD, OPTIONSgrok on!

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-48116955199240080582008-03-25T15:07:00.000-07:002008-03-25T15:10:34.004-07:00

Roy Fielding ...father of RESTAll serious web developers and engineers should give this a read:Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectureshttp://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/fielding_dissertation_2up.pdf"REST is not an architecture, it’s a set of design criteria. REST is very general. It leaves a lot of open space, which practioners have seeded

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-56836417484301304562008-03-24T09:51:00.000-07:002008-03-24T10:00:28.843-07:00

Wow, this session looks awesome. I have to see this:http://en.oreilly.com/rails2008/public/schedule/detail/1095and this...http://en.oreilly.com/rails2008/public/schedule/detail/2021and this:http://en.oreilly.com/rails2008/public/schedule/detail/1859http://en.oreilly.com/rails2008/public/schedule/detail/1779and probably these...http://en.oreilly.com/rails2008/public/schedule/detail/2055http://

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-56517738725767937372008-03-24T09:19:00.000-07:002008-03-24T09:21:56.796-07:00

I’d rather be building elastic and RESTful Ajax applications on the cloud.Go Cougs. Beat UNC (my wife's alma mater... Miami University in Oxford Ohio didn't make it this year, unfortunately).

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-76297602081103512702008-03-24T08:45:00.000-07:002008-03-24T08:51:36.678-07:00

I dig the new pragprog.com book interface:

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-55927001678503221102008-03-22T14:04:00.000-07:002008-03-22T14:13:41.014-07:00

I disagree with John Lilly. I understand why he objects, but I find that smart move on Apple’s part, not anything other than that. You have the ability to opt out. It’s not a breach of trust. They should use their market share in iTunes to their advantage. FF is in a position where they cannot distribute their browser as easily... but it’s fair. FireFox has done a great job teaming up with

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-65401396746475803562008-03-08T20:20:00.000-08:002008-03-08T20:22:02.918-08:00

RightScale has a set of amazon AWS gems they have written... trying them out...mark-holtons-computer:~ holtonma$ sudo gem install right_awsInstall required dependency right_http_connection? [Yn] YSuccessfully installed right_aws-1.6.0Successfully installed right_http_connection-1.2.1Installing ri documentation for right_aws-1.6.0...Installing ri documentation for right_http_connection-1.2.1...

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-83581454719197610962008-02-24T22:24:00.000-08:002008-02-24T23:21:19.904-08:00

Matz talks about Ruby 1.9 @ a recent Google talk... I took some notes while watching it via YouTube. You can read the notes, and watch the video belowRuby 1.9 -- Released on Christmas 20071.8 - Stable -- daily use, stable, compatible (1.8.6 latest)1.9 - Bleeding Edge -- faster, more powerful, done right, but incompatible2.0 - "Innovation Bait" -- vaporware, Open Source Software should move

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-74963160702561027802008-02-09T11:12:00.000-08:002008-02-09T11:13:33.106-08:00

Has Google Gears or Adobe AIR team considered adapters to language-specific VM's? E.g. client side VM's (for instance, like Rubinius) hooking up to the Gears runtime? The idea being that if you could hook up to a VM running on the client, it could be used to interpret the implementation-specific code -- E.g. a Rubinius VM running on someone's machine, when hooked to Gears, could enable Ruby

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-58716115651802855602008-02-09T10:51:00.000-08:002008-02-09T10:54:11.078-08:00

Wondering about Gears and AIR... starting to toy with both a bit more these days... maybe the following is a worthwhile topic... related to ideas on how to best structure an offline-enabled (AIR or Gears) web app from scratch. Anyway, wanted to throw out a blog post. Feel free to respond to me here or at holtonma (at) gmail (dot) com.Since neither AIR nor Gears runtime obviously has any

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-23994378534576536982008-01-13T20:22:00.000-08:002008-01-13T23:23:43.572-08:00

Been under the weather a little bit... but had a fun day Saturday while watching NFL playoff football and WSU Coug basketball... and did some shell scripting while on the couch with the tv on:...wrote a couple Bash Shell scripts to automatically backup all files on my Mac with rsync over ssh (secure, encrypted connection) each night. The scripts back up the files to two external harddrives

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-7201531985807083902007-12-30T19:59:00.000-08:002007-12-30T20:23:33.499-08:00

...below is a snapshot of some of these I am reading now, some I have read more than once... continue to find all of them very useful. Just finished an awesome Ruby class at the University of Washington taught by Ryan 'Zenspider' Davis, which was phenomenal, learned a ton. Starting the 3 month Rails class next week at UW... as you can see from the books, trying to surround myself with as much

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-1728201165734878332007-12-28T12:01:00.000-08:002007-12-28T12:20:22.269-08:00

Been doing a cursory look at Erlang and Erlyweb for a few mos off and on, keeping track of it via a variety of RSS feeds, articles in the community, toying around with it, etc.Have come to the interim conclusion at present that I don't think Erlang-based Erlyweb will ever be a replacement for Rails, or Django, etc. Building MVC web apps quickly and robustly for the large chunk of market share

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-50758400331183352072007-12-15T20:50:00.000-08:002007-12-15T21:03:20.765-08:00

Nicely written introductory link on RDF and the semantic web if you're curious. To give this some background and context... imo, this is why Google is coming out with it's "Knowls", etc, that was recently reported in the media. a quick summary of RDF: Within in the flavor of XML that is RDF, people/companies creating web pages embed loosely organized 'sentences' of how the data on their pages is

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-10581150889354149592007-10-02T14:04:00.001-07:002007-10-02T14:37:43.876-07:00

The Prize, by Daniel Yergin is a great read. Before I explain further, the book is not about software at all. In a paragraph, I'll get to the software business parallels and ruminate about them. The book is about history, oil, economics, geopolitics. I’d highly recommend it for anyone interested in these topics. The author won a Pulitzer Prize, and is highly respected among many economists

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-76026502858745171432007-09-23T19:23:00.000-07:002007-09-23T22:40:33.838-07:00

Came across JuneBug Wiki tonight while getting a wiki setup on my Mac for a couple projects I'm working on at home. I couldn't be happier thus far -- JuneBug Wiki is pretty slick.First of all, it was as easy to install as it should be. If you already have the proper versions of Ruby, SQLite, and gems installed... it took about 1 minute to install JuneBug Wiki. The directions on the JuneBug

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-53281623016303895222007-09-19T11:18:00.000-07:002007-09-19T11:50:20.159-07:00

Been doing a ton of JavaScript development over the past 3 years, more and more hardcore the last 18 mos, and loving every minute of it. This (obviously) involves Ajax development, along with other client-side development -- basically engineering User Interfaces in ways that make them responsive to users, fast, user friendly, lighten the load on server bandwidth required, and keeping code

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-17308024270969154782007-08-30T13:51:00.001-07:002007-08-30T13:55:49.569-07:00

I'd like to hear from TextMate+Rails users: what tools do you use to Refactor your Ruby code inside TextMate?

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-24578221684900734422007-08-27T01:04:00.000-07:002007-08-27T01:30:49.081-07:00

Before you start experimenting with memcached, here's a quick description of the command line options that will be used when starting it up. (note there is no configuration file for memcached).It seems as if the most common command line options are used: -l -d -p -m -cHere is what each of them do, per the memcached man pages: -l Listen on ; default to INDRR_ANY. This is an

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-12326081596859418272007-08-27T00:50:00.000-07:002007-08-27T00:56:02.024-07:00

installing MemCacheD on Mac OS X with MacPorts couldn't be easier:1. as long as you have MacPorts (frmly DarwinPorts) installed on your Mac, just open up a bash shell and type the following:$ sudo port install memcachedBecause memcached utilizes libevent, MacPorts will check to see if libevent-dev is found... if it is not, it will fetch libevent-1.3d.tar.gz from http://monkey.org/~provos/, verify

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-46593913254372365452007-08-26T20:59:00.001-07:002007-08-26T21:27:52.236-07:00

Been researching and practicing with Rails for a little while now, and went through the process of updating my setup on my Mac book pro (Mac OS X), as well as on an Ubuntu (Dapper, 6.06) test machine (actually a test VM).Most of this is similar to what you would find inside of "Agile Web Development with Rails" by the esteemed DHH and Dave Thomas (by the way, if you're interested in Rails

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-8679612882607946462007-08-23T23:38:00.001-07:002007-08-24T00:16:57.471-07:00

Check out memcached, if you're into researching ways of making your web apps speedy through clever database caching. (used by LiveJournal, Slashdot, Wikipedia, SourceForge). Very very cool.By having your app first check the memcache instead of going to the database directly, you reduce the overhead that is inherent with ACID properties in relational database management system transactions. --

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-77064548220680119392007-08-21T23:04:00.000-07:002007-08-21T23:34:06.860-07:00

...if you drive a Mac, check out Shiira. Came across it during a Rails/Capistrano Peepcode by Geoff Grosenbach (which are all awesome, btw, if you're interested in Rails development. Peepcode is like a microwave oven for learning).I had seen Geoff using Shiira in a few PeepCodes and decided to give it a whirl... it has some interesting features, and is SUPER FAST on my MacBook Pro. (that's a

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-36612772857609447692007-08-01T12:19:00.000-07:002007-08-01T12:24:07.172-07:00

This dude is cool. A Titan.I highly recommend skating over to Ajaxian.com and queue-ing up the podcastHewitt …orig worked at Netscape since 2000 …… DHTML ever since… worked on Netscape 6 and 7… …then helped create FireFox (he says “we wanted to create a browser that didn’t suck”)… pretty much single-handedly created Firebug (which pretty much every Ajax dev uses nowadays)… created Parakey

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-53877546352016441382007-08-01T01:13:00.000-07:002007-08-01T01:15:03.742-07:00

Howard Armstrong ...a true genius, and incredibly driven man. ...an earth mover. He was made, not by politics or marketing, but by his own authentic understanding of the science behind his inventions, and his effort to drive them to fruition. What an innovator. Most of Armstrong's life was a phenomenal inspiration. But he was ultimately broken by David Sarnoff, his long time colleague. RCA's

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-81015468773093438252007-07-22T16:03:00.000-07:002007-07-22T16:30:39.707-07:00

This is the way I am possibly pointing towards for hosting of my Ajax apps developed in the [not-too-distant] future. At the very least, going to research this a good amount: running a Rails Virtual Machine (or multiple clustered VM's) on Amazon's EC2. I am currently using AS3 not only for backups, but for cross-domain resource loading (static images and JavaScript files). The value presented

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-44037746190051250782007-07-18T11:53:00.000-07:002007-07-18T11:55:06.776-07:00

For those of us interested in Google Gears:http://www.onlamp.com/lpt/a/7055http://www.onlamp.com/lpt/a/7057

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-82874297752647639562007-07-17T22:06:00.000-07:002007-07-17T22:51:45.333-07:00

I wish there was more chatter lately about JSONRequest, and similar secure XSS proposals.We can all think of legitimate reasons why as a developer we'd very much like to be able to request and return data from remote sites, and am EAGERLY awaiting the dust to settle on this issue. Because of the security model of XMLHttpRequest, this sort of data exchange is not possible due to the 'same origin

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10381893.post-52034167258314650982007-07-17T09:47:00.000-07:002007-07-17T10:05:25.965-07:00

Was fishing around the Ajax Experience website (wishing I could be there! getting married in less than a month, can't make it), and came across the following link to a wealth of information from the 2006 year -- conference presentations, videos, etc.http://ajaxexperience.techtarget.com/resources/html/presentations.htmlThe Ajax Experience is one conference I plan to budget for in terms of dollars

Mark Holtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18031910098133967657noreply@blogger.com0