Emphasized Insanity

No more bag of links

2010-06-18T00:00:00+03:00

For the past 18~ months or so i’ve been trying to keep a reasonable posting rate of my “Bag o Links” collection. Recently it has become too hard to spare the time needed to bounce my favorite links up, especially due to the fact we are investing most of our ‘extra’ time in Nautilus6 to sketching out a new company website.

Bag o links will be back on the new company site pretty soon i think, but for now it’s on hold.

Bag O' Links - 24/5/2010

2010-05-24T00:00:00+03:00

Phew! it was a long time since i last posted Bago’. Israel keeps me busy.

Dive into HTML5 – HTML5 guide. looks ok.
Very simple parallelization with Ruby – not the best implementation i’ve seen, but will work on small scale solutions.
Ruby’s #inject- i have been using ruby and rails for more than 4 years, and i got how to use #inject only yesterday.
Ruby’s TempFile explained – Avdi’s share on Tempfile.
OrientDB – Another NoSQL implementation. supposed to be really fast.
Rails 2.3.6 changeset – probably my last version.
Ruby VM shootout – interesting.
Upgrading Rails 2 to Rails 3 – wuhoo.
Ruby Proxy Pattern and Dynamic Delegation with ActiveSupport BasicObject – implementation and an excellent walkthrough.
Ruby’s equality operands – a good read.
Write-Through Cacheing is an Essential Part of a Healthy Scaling Strategy – great scaling read.
List of generators for Designers – some are nice.
Testing Javascript with cucumber – ha! nice.
MongoDB master-slave installation – howto.
Feature flipper for Rails – deploy specific features, awesome.

Treasures

jsChat – a nice chat engine using javascript and MongoDB.
Google Fonts API – nice, font-face will get a boost from this one. (here are the fonts)
fancy-buttons – Easily style buttons with beautiful CSS3 features like gradients, rounded corners, etc. Don’t worry the buttons also degrade nicely for browsers with no support. requires Compass though, which is annoying.
ZeroMQ – java based MQ manager. looks great.
ShowOff – presentations made simple. wicked.
Google’s S3? – Storage for developers.
to_xls – convert objects to excel spreadsheets.
KingSOA – KingSoa orchestrates a SOA landscape, by knowing where services live and how to call them.
Linkscape – a library to access SEOmoz’s API.
ActiveCart – a basic shopping cart implementation.
MongoHub – native MacOS MongoDB GUI.

Bag O' Links - 4/5/2010

2010-05-04T00:00:00+03:00

Treasures

A quick example of Facebook’s REST+OAuth in Ruby – simple really.
Guilded -a framework for building web based components centered around current web standards and best practices. i wonder how it will turn out.
CloudyScripts – Scripts to facilitate programming for infrastructure clouds.
Ogit – Facebook Open Graph terminal.
Barista – Transparent coffeescript support for rails 3.
CSS3 for IE – Another attempt.
SuperModel – In-Memory models for Rails.
a collection of MongoDB utilities – is right here.
TwiBot – a Twitter bot in Ruby.
jStackMenu – a really nice stack menu implementation in jQuery.
Sonia – a Team/Projects monitor panel.
Fedena – open source, school/campus management ERP.
Cinch – IRC framework in ruby.

Moving back - Israel and the United States.

2010-04-26T00:00:00+03:00

During the past couple of months i have been busy on arranging a move back to Israel and making it as smooth as possible for both myself and everyone involved in Nautilus6. I have been in the US for the past 2.years and i can honestly say i have achieved what i wanted in this country, recession or not it was THE most important and valuable decision i have ever made.

Preface

This post is basically meant for Israelis, why them? because Israel holds some of the highest ratio of talent/web developers ever, but due to some reason which i will specify later something get screwed around the way and the state of web in Israel (most of it) is equivalent to the situation that the internet jargon refers to as “like it’s 1999”.

This post is meant to show the situation of things as they are, through the eyes of someone that broke out of that cycle and tried to make it in a different way, hopefully helping others to achieve the same thing and by that making the Israeli web, products and internet related community a better one.

What i was missing in Israel

I am developing web applications since 1998 (except a 3.years.long period between 2003-2006 in which i served in active army duty). Being an auto-didactic person i basically learned everything i knew back then from books in hebrew, friends who knew a little better and by simply trying it myself. My efforts ended up with Dealcenter.co.il who was sold in late 2003.
You can all see, sucks really bad codewise, even if considered as something i did in 2001-2002 and i am afraid, it is still a considered as a valid standard in the Israel websites view, here is for example YNet one of the top news portals in Israel.

Sad. i knew.

Israel is considered as the growing ground of many successful startup (ICQ is the best worldwide example, but there are a lot more) and basically is even referred to as the Startup nation so why the level of product is usually that low?

Why israeli web sucks?

We all remember the browser wars. a silly tech war that all it did was basically set the internet and advancement back for a couple of years. Israelis, RTL language users to be precise suffered a little more than the rest of the internet users. As RTL language users, we had to use unbelievably stupid methods in order to code using our native language to Netscape, basically printing and storing all text backwards. yes. !sdrawkcab stxet eht lla gnirots.

IE on the other hand didn’t have that problem and provided a better solution in that day as a browser, a solution that basically drove all the Israeli developers to code specifically to IE something we see that exists up till’ this day.

Microsoft did nothing to fix the problem, instead, Microsoft endorced that behavior by providing almost no choice for people to code for IE, use explorer (worldwide actually) and even took over parts of the educational syllabus in Israel which even now-a-days, contains Microsoft specific studies. and that’s the main reason i believe that is causing almost every developer in Israel to code only for IE, work with Access as a database and choose .Net. Israel is not a “Startup nation”, it’s a Microsoft nation.

But what about those bad practices? using tables for layouts? inline style? i think the source of this problem is the Hebrew reading material which is old, outdated and basically wrong.

The books show examples on non-semantic, table-packed, standard deprived code which they designate as “Valid”, “Professional” and “correct”. The evil syllabus does not stop at those books but also in colleges and private schools that aim to teach “Web development” but teach barely 2 hours of CSS, 1 hour of basic HTML, and 20 hours on how to drag/drop controls on Visual Studio.

Sadly i have seen more than i would have wanted to, pages that weigh more than 5mb, completely wrapped with .net’s VIEWSTATE and contain more than 900 db queries. (900!!!).

Bad practices are everywhere, but the problem is that in Israel there is no authority which will guide the herd into the right direction.

.. and why the Israeli web is awesome?

Because there are people who try to make it better, i got to know a few excellent people in Israel that are capable of providing an excellent solution and also share my view that something needs to be done in order to make Israel a better place for web developers and internet users. Elad Ossadon, Lionite and a few more very good examples for people who know web as it supposed to be, not as a “OMFG LET’S WRITE THE NEXT FACEBOOK IN TABLES”.

Why am i coming back?

For the time being, Nautilus6 is successful even beyond my wildest dreams i had in mind when i started it 8 months ago. I owe a huge part of my blooming as a good manager (i hope, results say so) and better programmer to the Ruby on Rails community and specifically to the RailsBridge.
The RailsBridge members helped me close the gap between what i thought i can do to what i now know in every step of the way: making better products, choosing the right tools, opinions and the most important i think, the approach.
RailsBridge showed me that learning and asking for help is not something you can fear from, and giving back either by giving a daily average of 1.hour on the #rubyonrails channel to help newbies, sword fighting with Radar on one of the bugmashes, getting the best slides on rails/ruby from Brian Hogan, occasional enlightenment by Mike Gunderloy or an occasional “do this the right way” talk with Eric Davis, Dan Pickett or Pratik (i think the estimated cost of a chat with all those people on a business rate would cost about 2000$/hour, and they do it because they love to help).

The list of people that i had and still have the pleasure of working with in RailsBridge is too long for specify each, i urge each and every one that is working with Ruby on Rails to come and see how it’s like on our IRC channel on Freenode (irc.freenode.com, #railsbridge)

I am coming back to Israel to form the exact some model. Join those people around and try to make a better, fully focused community that will divert the general population direction towards a better internet, on all it means:

Forcing standards. actively.
Providing guidance, courses and tutoring for developers.
Breaking into the educational system and provide a better selection than the current “only Microsoft tools”.

While Nautilus6 will continue to exist in its current status and form in the US, another branch of Nautilus6 will be formed in time in Israel and will assume responsibilities for all of the above.

Finally, i can say i had fun most of the time and i hope to continue and be an active part of that awesome community, form something better in Israel and hopefully,

retire by the age of 30. :)

Bag O' Links - 22/4/2010

2010-04-22T00:00:00+03:00

API for direct deposits – a discussion on StackOverflow about the ways to pay users back, when your application requires something like that. i’d add PayPal’s MassPayment option if you can handle the fees.
Grease your suit – some excellent tips on how to ninja-tweak your testing stack in Rails.
Easy API Key authentication with Restful Authentication – as a recent Authlogic dropout, i am happy with RA. This article is yet another example on how easy it is to integrate an extension to RA when this time it’s an API Key authentication feature.
IronRuby drops – does it make a sound – a view over the .Net community approach and ruby, interesting read.
HTML5 Overview – Slides – in HTML5/CSS3.
Making RIAs crawlable – by Google. i don’t like it.
Modeling Documents in a DocumentStore Database – some ideas on how to model your data, twisting the idea behind documents a little bit. not sure i agree.
Getting started with MongoDB – A new post series, interesting to see into to what it will develop.
Quick simple examples to common JS tasks – in Mootools, Dojo and jQuery.
MongoDB cookbook – some useful recipes.
Moving from a relational DB to MongoDB – good tips.
Facebook new API – Now with OAuth support and “OMGLOL WEB3.0”.. sigh, maybe it will suck less now.
preloading Javascript and CSS without execution – neat.
lambda VS. Proc.new – simple example.
Animated landscape with jQuery – that’s nice, could be awesome if the weather would match some kind of an API to the current one.
Creating web based visualizations – 4 ways and examples.
Rack Apps vs. Rack Middlewares – maybe one day i’ll care.
Javascript tips i wish i knew before – nice.
Formatting CSS – The definitive guide – excellent read.

Treasures

ActiveSupport::SecureRandom – not many people are familiar with this AS tool, a useful code generator.
Programming for Kids – A community book like those old BASIC books where kids typed in source code to play a game. Fork and write!.book is here
akihabara – HTML5 Arcade games engine. this. is. fun.
OAuth2 gem – is out, with the new Facebook API example.
iCuke – Cucumber support for iPhone development.
GoogleSharing – pulling the “kansas city shuffle” on Google.
jsPlumb – visually connect between DOM elements. wicked.
require_gist – require a Github Gist. lolz.
House of Buttons – a collection of awesome UI buttons.

Bag O' Links - 13/4/2010

2010-04-13T00:00:00+03:00

i’ve got 909 tickets but a rant ain’t one.

Rails. you know it right?

yeah, sure you do, if you are using this blog most odds are that you are using rails or at least interested in it a little bit.
In my opinion our lovely Rails is a little bit sick, it has too many stale/open tickets/patches that somehow managed to skip the radar in the entire Rails 3 luau.

Well, uncle Rails needs you!

I am not going to re-write or repeat what my friends Ryan Bigg, Dan Pickett and Kristopher Murata wrote, but i’ll just say this.

find some free time and help make Rails a little better.
yes, even you, the person that started working with Rails 3 days ago can help, ask us how.

I am not hiding the fact that i am deeply disappointed with the way some of the decisions were made within the Rails 3 marathon, but that doesn’t mean that i am going to give up that easily and you too, the person who is frustrated with Rails 3 bugs, compatibility issues and black holes can join in and try to help us bring it back to the way we all like it.

now, for the fun stuff.

Treasures

HoneyPot-Captcha – Honeypot captchas work off the premise that you can present different form fields to a spam bot than you do to a real user. Spam bots will typically try to fill all fields in a form and will not take into account CSS styles.
jStorage – a simple wrapper plugin for Prototype, MooTools and jQuery to store data on browser side.
Storable – Marshal Ruby classes into and out of multiple formats (yaml, json, csv, tsv). Solutious actually have a bunch of other interesting tools.
Instant Blueprint – quickly generate HTML, CSS and even a JS lib of your choice.
Holland backup framework – another great release from Rackspace, this time it’s an Open Source backup framework.
reviewr – send code review requests using git. minions, prepare yourselves.
Updated pimped command line – barking iguana is one of my favorites.
Modernizr- pretty awesome, a “conditional” CSS/JS solution for HTML5/CSS3 support in browsers. wicked.
Websockets with Ruby – examples.
…and WebSockets for inferior browsers – guess which ones.
Apotomo – build rails applications using widgets/“cells”. looks interesting.
FailIRC – IRC server and client.
OHM – Object-Hash-Mapping. store objects in Redis.
ice_cube – Recurring dates DSL. that’s… nice.

Bag O' Links - 4/4/2010

2010-04-04T00:00:00+03:00

Automatically open last page for failed cucumber scenarios – shows what webrat sees when a scenario fails.
25 most dangerous programming errors – some good tips and pointers.
Oracle uses SQLite to wrap Berkeley DB – a good sign?
CSS Sprites best practices – using sprites the way interwebs gods intended.
Facebooker tutorial – every time one of those comes out, an angle is burned to death.
18 signup forms – cool ideas.
Ruby access control – only a guideline? – a view on ruby’s protected and private scopes.
What does ‘scaleable database’ mean? – James Golick with another view on recent hype.
Bundle me some sanity – instead of ranting, this guy suggests a way to make bundler and RVM play nice.
Rails applications SSL checklist – what you need in order to setup SSL for your application.
CSS generated content techniques – the content attribute exposed.
Scalr – self-scaling hosting environment with amazon EC-2.

Treasures

Phat – ASync rails application – rails application + fibers + EventMachine.
TextMate bundles – lots of bundles.
SimpleGeo – Geodata API service, looks neat.
lolcalhost – a hacky little command line emulator.
RGraph – neat HTML5 graph library.
xkcdfools: mock a UNIX terminal in jQuery – i actually intended something like that to be the next theme for this blog, i guess XKCD are quicker than me.
AwesomePrint – Pretty print your Ruby objects with style and in full color and proper indentation. in other words, death to y something
Limondae – sinatra for PHP infidels.
Denied – sinatra for python infidels.
Resume – a little sinatra application to run your resume wild.

CannedCukes - Share your features!

2010-04-02T00:00:00+03:00

In the past few weeks i had the pleasure of working on some projects from the kind that i like to call “OMFG WHO DID THIS!?” projects, also knows as Rescue projects.

We usually take the head-first dive into the testing pool when we first encounter such horror, but when we came to do it pretty often we kind of created a “Feature wiki”: a preset list of cucumber’s .feature files that can be moved and shared between applications.

We didn’t keep the *_step files because the actual implementation varies between applications but the main concept, the feature, stays as is.

So then, i created CannedCukes, a horribly-graphically-designed application that allows users to share their features and scenarios with others, and by that improving overall community testing_fu skills.

i hope so, at least :)

For now you can only add your own features and scenarios, search other scenarios and download them as text.

later me or the army of collaborators the will rise will code:

A gem that will ease feature submission directly to the application from a project root.
a way to fork someone else’s scenario and add it to one of your own features.
BETTER DESIGN OH GOD PLEASE. i am really bad with colors. :)

If you want to join me, just fork away and pull request (yes yes, it’s on github :) ).

Bag O' Links - 26/3/2010

2010-03-26T00:00:00+02:00

Treasures

BlueLight – an extension to Clearance that includes roles and some administration roots.
API King – an API providers aggregator.
CloudCache – offers simple and affordable on-demand caching.
Impl – Javascript ORM (requires HTML5).
Notifo – a Ruby wrapper for Notifo, allows sending push messages to mobile users.
Artifice – A few weeks ago i made a gem that used sinatra to mock a webservice, wycats wins with this one.
MooTouch – the MooTools clone of jQTouch.

Bag O' Links - 21/3/2010

2010-03-21T00:00:00+02:00

Rails developers needed in Israel.

In a few weeks from now, Nautilus6 is going to get a new shiny branch in Israel. This obviously means, that we need some new kick-ass Ruby on Rails developers to fill our new team.
We are basically looking for people that love web, love to make cool applications and are not afraid from taking up challenges every once in a while. We offer a full-time position in various aspects of web development (Yeah you javascript ninjas and designers are welcome too) and we don’t even force you to come and work in an office so if you want to stay home, that’s fine.

I am aware that there is a currently low Ruby on Rails developer count in Israel, therefore we do offer some training plans for those who currently work using other frameworks and development stacks and introduce them to eternal happiness and joy.

General requirements are pretty much standard:

Having prior experience with Ruby on Rails is a HUGE plus.
Knowing your way around CSS (2, 3 is cool too), Standard HTML and Client side libraries (Preferably Mootools).
Database and general data layer solutions (noSQL).
Advanced knowledge in professional aspects of web development such as Scaling and optimizations of existing application.

Currently we are working on several internal developments and on world wide client applications, it’s never boring basically.

Now, on to the interesting stuff :)

Treasures

redis-objects – Map Redis types directly to Ruby objects.
DateJS – something like Chronic for javascript, awesome date and time management.
Typhoeus – As a pro Net::HTTP hater, i find this one really nice.
Who needs HAML? – “when you got YAML”, thinks Jose Valim.
Resty – Little command line REST interface that you can use in pipelines (bash or zsh).
jsChat – JSON-based chat that has web and console clients, and a server.
Ruby Audio info – ruby-audioinfo glue together various audio ruby libraries and presents a unified API to the developper. Currently, supported formats are: mp3, ogg, mpc, ape, wma, flac, aac, mp4, m4a. some writes are available too.
CloudFront asset_host – Easy deployment of your assets on CloudFront for Rails.
Redis CheatSheet – weee.
Ruby-warrior – a ruby AI game.
Random Key generator – random password generator.