From the monthly archives: August 2007
I’m always interested and impressed by good examples of design and exciting ways to display information. Here are two links you need to check out and keep around when you need inspiration:
- 45 Excellent Blog Designs: The title says it all. There is good mix of simple and clean design along with more elaborate designs.
- Data Visualization: Modern Approaches: There are few here that are obtuse in my opinion, but I would kill to get a graph of how my music tastes evolved and varied over the last 10 years such as this.
Popularity: 11% [?]
Every time I write a post, it seems I spend a large amount of time putting the links in. My last post contained seven links and it feels like it took an eternity to put them in. I have to open another browser window, google the page, copy the link and then paste it in my post. For some reason, it feels like a very tedious process. I’m wondering if anybody has any tricks they use to make it faster? How do you manage all the links in your posts?
Popularity: 6% [?]
I just changed my iMac G5 to a MacBook. There are lot of instructions on installing Ruby and Rails on a Mac on the net, some of them not quite up to date. Here is what I find to be the easiest way to do it.
- Pop your Mac OS X install disc 1 and install the xcode tools. (this installs an old version of ruby)
- Download and install MacPorts
- open terminal:
sudo nano /etc/profile
Prepend /opt/local/bin: to PATH, so it reads:
PATH="/opt/local/bin:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin"
This is to make sure the new version we are about to install will get used instead of the old one.
- Make sure MacPorts is up to date:
sudo port selfupdate
- Install ruby and rubygems:
sudo port install ruby sudo port install rb-rubygems ruby -v
This last command should give 1.8.6. If you see 1.8.2, this means it is still using the version installed from the OS X cd. Make you correctly updated your PATH.
- Install Rails:
sudo gem install rails -y
You might also want to install subversion right now using ports:
sudo port install subversion
(Note: at the time of writing, Rails is at version 1.2.3 and Ruby at 1.8.6. )
Popularity: 6% [?]
Tuesday night saw the birth of the Montreal On Rails user group in a small room on the Mcgill campus. It was a lot of fun.
The first presentation was by Marc-André Cournoyer, Standout Jobs Ruby Guru, entitled “How to make your tests faster”.
Marc-André started with a very funny introduction. I don’t know how to describe his intro. He should turn it in a video for all to see. First part was a demonstration of caching results from external apis (he used twitter as an example) to a file to make tests go really fast on your development machine. You then add a flag so the build machine uses the actual api. You get the best of both worlds: fast tests when developping, but you also validate that the api didn’t change. I just started a project monday that is gonna connect to 3 apis, so the presentation was very timely.
The second part was about a plugin he is developping called InactiveRecord to stub out the access to the database for your test. You can find the slides to his presentation along with the code here.
Second presentation was from Carl Mercier of Karabunga. It was a small tutorial on HAML, a templating engine for Rails. You can play online with HAML here. The latest version released a couple of weeks ago seems to have fixed a lot of performance problem (30% slower than rhtml instead of 1000% slower). I will have to give it another try soon, along with sass, which is haml for css.
Suggestions for improvements:
- Bigger room for more people, but also more open space to make it easier to socialize, and a room where donuts are allowed
- Wiki on montrealonrails.com so people can post suggestions for topics that would interest them for presentations
- Maybe we can have a round of quick presentation (2-5 mins) if let’s say you want to present a small plugin or a ruby trick. This could help orient discussions after the main presentation. It would also allow more people to talk and present themselves, in a less intimidating way than a full blown presentation.
- Maybe someone is crazy enough to want to videotape the presentations?
I can’t wait for the next edition!
Popularity: 19% [?]
