What's on in Cambridge? now live!

Posted by tomriley Tue, 14 Mar 2006 00:06:00 GMT

My first Ruby on Rails web-app, What's on in Cambridge? is now up and running and open to the public. The aim is to create a useful directory of interesting events in Cambridge (talks, exhibitions, classes, concerts etc) and to do it with some style! Users can add events, tag events, comment on them, express interest in them etc. Eventually I hope to records for different entities such as venue, band, person, organisation with some kind of wiki engine behind it. Currently, there are still a few glaring feature omissions (email reminders being one of them) and several interface issues to sort out but I'm pleased with how the site looks and works so far.

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Setting up ruby on rails and fastcgi on Mac OS X Server

Posted by tomriley Mon, 27 Feb 2006 01:33:00 GMT

Today I set up a Mac OS X Server (Tiger) box to run rails applications with fastcgi, the stock apache (1.3.33) and the mysql gem. So these are the exact steps I took...

Read more...

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All Noodle Heaven tracks are now free!

Posted by tomriley Wed, 15 Feb 2006 00:08:00 GMT

Josh has just updated the site and now all Noodle Heaven tracks are free! If you haven't checked out Noodle, you should give it a try (you now have no excuse!) - I think it's still something quite special. Sadly, Noodle is now a dormant project and sadly all of us (Josh, Tree and me) have moved away from Bristol and have been doing other things for the last year or so. I'm hopeful that Noodle will be picked up again by at last some of the old team but I expect it will make it's return in some evolved form.

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Future of Web Apps Summit (be a snowflake)

Posted by tomriley Tue, 14 Feb 2006 21:06:00 GMT

I was quite pleased with the future of web apps carson summit. Everything ran pretty smoothly. Most of the speakers were very good, although there was a lot of repetition (I think we were told to use clean URLs 3 or 4 times). There was also a lot of talk about building APIs. These are obviously good points but I think the benefits are well understood and I got the feeling that the speakers knew they were addressing a fairly clued up audience. Some case studies might have been more useful than lists of dos and don'ts. I would have liked to have heard about the problems that the guys writing delicious/flickr/google maps etc ran into along the way. Ryan Cason's talk was a bit more like this - an explanation of how Drop Send came about, what the budget was and how he spent his cash. I got the impression he hadn't been coding for a while - almost all the development was contracted out. The emphasis was on building web apps on a budget. In fact, I think the main thing I learnt was that you can't make much money doing contracted web development these days - he got some pretty good deals!

David Heinemeier Hansson's talk was very good. It was the most technical (code snippets!) but also the most philosophical. He tried to get to the heart of what makes programmers happy. Of course, we all know that using Ruby On Rails is the answer to this! :-) But what exactly is it about rails that makes us happy? It has a lot to do with how often you can be a beautiful and unique snowflake. That is, how often you can feel that you are doing something that hasn't been done a million times before or isn't being done by a million other people. David also talked about convention over configuration - one of rails' biggest strengths in my opinion - trade off some unnecessary flexibility for speed of development (and in-built encouragement to 'do the right thing'). Combine that, and many other great features, with all the potential of the Ruby language to produce very elegant code, and everyone can spend more time being snowflakes!

Update: All of the talks including the panel discussion are now available for download (as mp3s).

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Aubrey de Grey on Start the week, Radio 4

Posted by tomriley Mon, 06 Feb 2006 10:57:00 GMT

Not quite topping his Richard & Judy appearance, Aubrey, who works in our department (also as part of the Ashburner group) was on the radio this morning, appearing on the intellectual Start the week with Andrew Marr. Aubrey is into biogerontology and thinks that with a bit more funding for research, effective techniques could be developed for prolonging life indefinitely. His site offers a lot of counter-arguments to commonly raised concerns, for example, what about overpopulation?/only the rich!/immortality etc. It also has a lot of information about how we might go about halting the aging process and actually rejuvenating the body. It's hard to imagine that this kind of research won't lead somewhere. Maybe stem cell research will lead to the first common-place therapies for regenerating organs. Prolonging life indefinitely would require altering the way our cells work and it's obviously difficult to insert proteins or dna into existing cells.

You can 'listen again' to Start the week if you missed it.

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Ninja t-shirt folding video!

Posted by tomriley Thu, 02 Feb 2006 13:32:00 GMT

http://www.jengajam.com/r/shirt-folding

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Carson Workshop Summit - The Future of Web Apps

Posted by tomriley Thu, 02 Feb 2006 12:44:00 GMT

Next Wednesday I'll be in London at the 'Future of Web Apps' summit. There will be 800 attendees (which I think is an increase on the original 500), and you can check out some of them in advance! It should be good. I'm hoping for some nice insight into the world of flickr, google, yahoo, delicious etc. Kim is coming along too which I am glad about although I have yet to totally convince him we aren't headed for a sales pitch!

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Mac OS X compatible Skype handset

Posted by tomriley Wed, 25 Jan 2006 17:56:00 GMT

Full OS X compatibility has been somewhat elusive when it comes to consumer VOIP handsets, but it seems to be arriving at last! If I had my own network connection (too much congestion on our house network) I would probably get one of these posh phones from IPEVO.

Apparently USRobotics 9600 phones can function as an audio device os OS X with these drivers. The IPEVO looks very nice though. Seems to be £25 here in the UK which I think isn't a bad price considering some actual design appears to have gone into it.


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Stanford on itunes

Posted by tomriley Wed, 25 Jan 2006 17:22:00 GMT

Lots of Stanford related digital content is now available on the iTunes music store. For anyone searching, Steve Jobs' 2005 Commencement Address lives next to four speeches by His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama...

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Different background colours for different ssh hosts in any xterm/Terminal.app

Posted by tomriley Wed, 25 Jan 2006 16:28:00 GMT

For quite a while I've wanted a wy to have the background colour of my terminal windows change depending on which machine I'm logged into. For Apple's Terminal.app, there have been a few attempts to implement this by the macosxhints.com community, but none of them look like they will work with nested ssh sessions. The following solution works for nested ssh sessions, doesn't use applescript and doesn't require installation of ssh wrapper scripts. It uses xterm escape sequences to change the window background color. This doesn't act in the same way as changing the default background colour via AppleScript, it just changes the background colour of the shell process. Therefore, any applications that you run will display with the default window background colour. I actually quite like this behaviour.

Here is the solution - add the following to the .profile/.bash_profile on each machine, changing the BGCOLOR variable each time:

SSH_BIN=$(which ssh)
# Alter this number on each machine
BGCOLOR=9

function ssh() {
  $SSH_BIN $@
  reset_bg
}

function reset_bg() {
  echo -n -e "\e[4${BGCOLOR}m"
  clear
}

reset_bg

You'll probably have to experiment with the value for BGCOLOR. The value zero resets the background colour to the default.

One idea (actually, it was Kim's idea) to change the actual Terminal.app window background involves a combination of changing the window title with an xterm escape (seems to work) and SSHing back into the client machine to run the AppleScript required to change the window background. Figuring out the correct IP to connect to might be tricky for nested sessions. I might give it a go at some point.

Kudos to Hugo for his help with this!

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