Podcasts (Tuesday, May 26, 2009) - These days there are so many useful sources of information for software developers: websites, user groups, message boards, second life events, conferences, not to mention good old print mediums such as magazines and books. In the last few years another interesting means of content delivery has come into play with the proliferation of portable mp3 players... podcasts.
ironruby (Friday, April 11, 2008) - for the last year i've somehow been avoiding doing any ruby work. been writing plenty of python for prototyping as and duct tape for work as well as hobby, but nothing in the way of ruby. one of the reasons i've had the opportunity to write some python is because of ironpython. no matter how much diversity i would like in my professional development the truth is
Now in IronRuby on Rails (Monday, May 17, 2010) - Just a quick note. I've again changed the architecture of this site. It's now in IronRuby on rails, running on Windows Server 2008 with SQL 2008 R2/Solr. Previously I was using django on linux with Oracle Express/Solr which was just one node in a long list of architectures I've used here. Why the change from django? Why the choice of IronRuby-microsoft-ish
Ruby in my Enterprise with JRuby Thanks to JRubyConf (Thursday, October 07, 2010) - Last weekend I went to JRubyConf and had a blast. I left armed with some new knowledge, some new contacts and a new academic appreciation for /whiske?y/. One of the best parts is that I really only had to pay for the hotel because I won the ticket at a Pittsburgh Ruby Brigade meeting. Now, even though I was attending a JRuby conference I wasn't really all that familiar
Faceted Queries on acts_as_solr Associations (Thursday, May 20, 2010) - Recently in a rails app that employs Solr (via the acts_as_solr plugin) I've had the need to produce aggregate counts of entities on the far end of a many-to-many relationship. Essentially a tag cloud. My first attempt was to keep it entirely in ActiveRecord which resulted in a proliferation of SQL command executions. Obviously that wasn't performant. Sure it
Solr Data Access in Ruby with SolrMapper (Tuesday, October 26, 2010) - Recently my employer (The Skunkworx) released our first open source project, SolrMapper. Like the readme says, it's a Ruby Object Document Mapper for the Apache Foundation's Solr search platform. It's loosely patterned after ActiveRecord and MongoMapper so it should feel somewhat familiar. What differentiates SolrMapper from many other Solr libraries is that it's
MapReduce with MongoMapper (Sunday, August 01, 2010) - A number of rails projects I've been working on lately have used MongoDB for a back-end via MongoMapper. In general it seems to do pretty much anything I'd want to do in a typical web app but finding documentation on how to do it can be difficult. One such task I came across recently was performing on-the-fly map-reduce. After implementing it myself I decided to
Full-Text Indexing in Ruby Using Ferret (Saturday, November 28, 2009) - Few things are more useful that a good full-text search. It's clearly the easiest way for users to actively drill down into the content they want. It's also quite easy on the Ruby programmer to implement thanks to Ferret, an Apache Lucene-inspired search engine library. Building an Index The first step to implementing a search is to get an index built.
HTML Parsing with Ruby and Nokogiri (Sunday, July 12, 2009) - Parsing HTML is a frequent and somewhat annoying task programmers are commissioned with occasionally. Activities such as screen-scraping have become rare since the advent of RSS, but still... There's always content out there that you have to get at that leaves you no choice but to parse it out yourself. One of the more elegant bits that I've seen for this purpose
Tale of a Website, from Rails to ASP.NET to Django (Thursday, August 20, 2009) - I hesitate to call it complete yet but for the most part www.chrisumbel.com has been ported from ASP.Net to Django. Sure, there really isn't a lot to this site so no port would have been incredibly painful but I'm quite pleased with the effort level (or lack thereof) required to get it done. Aside from just this port it's been a long and interesting ride for
Mirah, Ruby Syntax on the JVM (Tuesday, March 29, 2011) - Although languages like Java and C# have soured with me over the last few years I still believe their runtimes (the JVM and CLR respectively) are sound. A sizable portion of the code I write for my day job is in JRuby. We get a number of advantages from that. We can use the industrial-strength infrastructure components Java brings to the table and leverage mountains
