has_many :thoughts

Below is the schedule I came up with when going over the sessions available this year at RailsConf… Going to try to make these, if not switch with Colin so we cover the conference well… very glad to see some advanced classes! Would have loved a REAL advanced Rspec session though.

8:30am Thursday, 05/29/2008
Meta-programming Ruby for Fun & Profit Portland Ballroom 252
Neal Ford (ThoughtWorks), Patrick Farley (ThoughtWorks) Ruby is the revenge of the Smalltalkers. Not since Smalltalk has a language had such powerful meta-programming facilities. While this may seem like a minor feature, it turns out that surgical meta-programming allows solutions to problems that are clearer, more concise, more maintainable, and take orders of magnitudes fewer lines of code. Read more.

1:30pm Thursday, 05/29/2008
Powering AIR Applications with Rails Portland Ballroom 252 Tony Hillerson (EffectiveUI), Daniel Wanja (Nouvelles Solutions, Inc.) Adobe’s AIR platform offers developers familiar with web technology the tools to create desktop applications. Come and learn how to drive an HTML and a Flex AIR application with Rails using RubyAMF. Read more.

10:45am Friday, 05/30/2008
Entrepreneurs On Rails Portland Ballroom 251
Dan Benjamin (Rails Machine) Many of the people working with Rails are independent developers, doing freelance work or running small development shops. This makes sense – Rails provides a great framework for an indy developer, making it easy to work with with designers and other developers. Read more.

11:45am Friday, 05/30/2008
Hosting and the Woes Portland Ballroom 255
Ezra Zygmuntowicz (EngineYard), Jamie van Dyke (Engine Yard), Tom Mornini (Engine Yard) What are the day to day issues with Rails hosting. How can they be solved, and what are the best practise methods of avoiding them. Engine Yard have extensive experience with high volume Rails applications and would like to talk about what we’ve learned and what our customers have learnt. Read more.

1:50pm Friday, 05/30/2008
Faster, Better, ORM with DataMapper Portland Ballroom 256
Yehuda Katz (EngineYard) This session will cover using the DataMapper ORM with Ruby on Rails, and go in-depth into its code. It will focus on integration with Ruby on Rails and provide an advanced-level overview of the codebase and design philosophy. Read more.

2:50pm Friday, 05/30/2008
Rubinius – Under the Hood and Behind the Curtain D135-136
Evan Phoenix (Engine Yard), Brian Ford (Engine Yard), Wilson Bilkovich (Engine Yard) Rubinius is a virtual machine built from the ground up to provide a robust, high-performance runtime for Ruby code. The Rubinius team is guiding the development of 20,000+ specifications that define the Ruby language. Read more.

4:25pm Friday, 05/30/2008
The Launch: Dos and Don’ts of Real Life Deploys Portland Ballroom 255
Chris Wanstrath (Err Free) There’s more to launching an app than “cap deploy”—the process is as much a psychological challenge as a technical one. So, what does it take to launch an app you can depend on and be proud of? With a handful of production launches under his belt, Chris will talk about the big picture and little details of bringing your site to life. Read more.

10:45am Saturday, 05/31/2008
Assembling Pages Last: Edge Caching, ESI & Rails Portland Ballroom 256
Aaron Batalion (Hungry Machine LLC) When working on scaling Rails to millions of users/day with complex personalization, caching becomes essential. This talk will cover edge caching, edge side includes (ESI) in Rails, and partial page caching higher in the stack. It will also cover ESI as a fabric for assembling heterogeneous applications into a single, cacheable web experience. Read more.

11:45am Saturday, 05/31/2008
Advanced RESTful Rails Portland Ballroom 252
Ben Scofield (Viget Labs) Designing RESTful systems in Rails carries many benefits. It is not a problem-free approach, however; there are accessibility issues with the standard conventions, and some functions are more difficult to map to resources than others. In this session, we’ll look at solutions for these (and other) problems that arise when you take REST beyond the standard examples. Read more.

1:50pm Saturday, 05/31/2008
Build Your Own Distributed, Self-Configuring Rails Cluster Portland Ballroom 251
Dave Fayram (Powerset, Inc), Tom Preston-Werner (Powerset, Inc.) Fuzed is a Rails server stack written in Erlang that can replace standard mongrel/reverse proxy architectures. It focuses on reliability and ease of deployment in distributed environments. Read more.

2:50pm Saturday, 05/31/2008
Custom Nginx Modules: Accelerate Rails, HTTP Tricks General Portland Ballroom 251
Adam Wiggins (Heroku) Got a Rails app that needs even more speed? Adam Wiggins of Heroku will show you how to write a custom Nginx module to bring blinding speed to critical code paths (and do HTTP tricks that can’t be done with Rails and Mongrel alone), using examples from Heroku’s own authentication module ngx_heroku_gate. Dust off your C compiler and prepare to push the limits of nginx, Rails, and HTTP. Read more.

4:25pm Saturday, 05/31/2008
Metaprogramming and Ruby Internals for Rails Programmers Portland Ballroom 256
Patrick Farley (ThoughtWorks) Rails programmers are Ruby programmers. In this session we’ll cover some useful Ruby metaprogramming techniques as used in real world Rails applications and extensions. Then we’ll dig deep into MRI and JRuby source to gain a nuanced understanding of the implementation details of Singletons, Mixins and the Ruby Object model. Read more.

10:45am Sunday, 06/01/2008
Scaling Ruby from the Inside Out Portland Ballroom 252
Ezra Zygmuntowicz (EngineYard) This is a talk about what it takes to really scale Ruby applications. We will not only examine all the aspects of hardware and web server configurations, we will also look at scaling the ruby interpreter itself. Including performance quirks of MRI and how Rubinius is set to fix a lot of these problems. Read more.

11:45am Sunday, 06/01/2008
Everyday DTrace on OSX: A Guide To Using DTrace for Your Full Application Stack Portland Ballroom 251
Scott Barron (EdgeCase), Chad Humphries (EdgeCase) Have you ever wanted to know why a part of your application is slow? How about how long that query takes? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get this type of information for ruby, rails, and the database server in one place? You can now with DTrace on OSX 10.5. We’ll show you how to best use this tool-chain to debug, profile, and gather more information about your application. Read more.

1:50pm Sunday, 06/01/2008
Building an app in 48 hours – A Rails Rumble Case Study Portland Ballroom 251
Josh Owens (Intridea, Inc/Web 2.0 Show Podcast), Chris Selmer (Intridea, Inc.) So you want to build a Rails app quickly? Competitors in the Rails Rumble had 48 hours to design, develop, and deploy a complete application. We’ll take you through the development processes of the winning four-man Tasty Planner team, and compare it with those of the one-man Your Pet Records team. We’ll discuss techniques, short-cuts, helpers, and Rails plugins that helped speed development. Read more.

Like many, I was disappointed that the Highrise API does not support tagging of people. However, I found a way to easily add the capability to the 37signals-supplied Ruby wrapper class, even if it is unsupported. I added a #tag! instance method to the Person class and used a call directly to the site, not through the API.

class Person < Subject
  ...
  def tag!(tag_name)
    `curl -s -d 'name=#{tag_name}' #{ENV['HIGHRISE_URL']}parties/#{id}/tags`
  end
end

The output is a bunch of javascript to update the page to reflect the change, but one can safely ignore this. The tag is added and everything works great. Not sure how well this would work on Windows, as the curl command-line program is likely unavailable.

We use this method in our latest project to add appropriate tags to people as they are created. It helps us segment people added to Highrise for the project from the rest of our contacts in Highrise.

Justin had an idea that we should post to Twitter whenever we deploy a new version of our apps to either a staging site or the production app. Turns out, this is really easy with the twitter4r gem. I used a twitter account that Justin created expressly for our internal notices and set its updates to be private. Then I created this task:

desc 'posts to twitter that something was deployed'
task :send_tweet do
  require 'rubygems'
  gem 'twitter4r'
  require 'twitter'
  require 'twitter/console'
  twitter = Twitter::Client.from_config('config/twitter.yml',rails_env)
  status = twitter.status(:post, "deployed #{application} to #{rails_env}")
end

The twitter4r library loads a simple yaml file that contains the username and password of the twitter account to use. And one line of code posts the status update with the name of the app and the environment from previously-defined variables.

That’s it! The great thing about using Twitter for this, as Justin pointed out, is that each one of us developers can consume this information how we choose: IM, Growl messages with Twitterific, SMS, etc. So it’s really just the syndication technology that we’re taking advantage of.

Update

Chris’s comment below prompted me to come up with a new version

I’ve often had trouble keeping track of my voicemail messages. Even though they get emailed to me, the emails don’t have any info about who the messages are from and I have no way of keeping track of if I’ve responded or if there’s an action item.

So I wrote a simple little Rails app to help me integrate my voicemail message into Highrise, the 37signals product which I’ve been trying, and liking, in recent weeks. Their provided REST web service API and accompanying Ruby wrapper made the whole thing way too easy. I have two models:

• Person
• Voicemail

The Person model holds a cached list of the names and Highrise ID’s of the people in my Highrise account. I can update this through a simple link in the app anytime I need.

The voicemails get into the app by a simple little “pipe to program” I added on the mail server. Something like this:

curl -u username:password --data-binary @- http://address.of.app/import

When an email message is received at the voicemail alias, the entire email is POSTed to the address above where it’s consumed with a tiny controller action like like:

Voicemail.import(request.raw_post)

The ‘import’ class method simply uses TMail to parse the message, pull off the attached WAV file, save it to the file system, and create a new Voicemail record.

The rest of the interface is simple CRUD stuff: A list of new voicemails that have come in with a link to delete and a link to save for each one. When I ‘save’ it, I choose a Person from a drop down of all my Highrise contacts and enter a very short 1 line description of what they called about. A note is instantly posted to the Person’s Highrise history with the time of the voicemail, the 1-line description, and a link to listen to the voicemail. If 37signals provided file upload capability through the API, I might just upload the file to Highrise. Or I might not since the WAV’s would eat up my storage space.

I hope to expand this a bit in the near future with a nice interface—perhaps autocomplete instead of a drop down for choosing the Person. And I think I’ll add a way to optionally create a Task in Highrise related to the Note. It would be nice if Highrise color-coded the categories applied to tasks; that way, I could categorize all the voicemail follow-up tasks and color code them so they stood out in my task list. I’ll have to submit that as a feature request.

Update

Here’s a screenshot, per Jason’s request. Click for a full sized version. As you can see, the interface is very modest.

• I’ve linked the person’s name to their Highrise page
• The little note icon on the left takes you to the note in Highrise that was created for this voicemail

I started messing around with Facebook app development today just for fun. Since Rails 2.0 is out, I figured I’d use it. However, I quickly discovered the rfacebook gem is not Rails 2.0 compatbile. It’s still using the old render_text method which is now replaced with render(:text => "").

So for now, I just added this to my application.rb:

  def render_text(text)
    render(:text => text)
  end

Which seems to get me up and running. But who knows how many other little issues like this there are. Perhaps I should switch the app back to the previous Rails version? Or maybe I’ll just push forward and submit patches to rfacebook for these.

# gem update rails --include-dependencies
Updating installed gems...
Attempting remote update of rails
Successfully installed rails-2.0.1

Sweet! The time has come. There goes another weekend buried in geekery. I’m going to spend some time going through the PeepCode Rails 2.0 PDF and playing around with ideas for a couple apps I’m doodling with.