June 24th, 2008 tkadom
Linked in built a rails app for facebook called bumper sticker which is currently handling a billion page views in a month. This link has a great video discussing lessons learned…
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June 22nd, 2008 tkadom
Drew Yao at Apple uncovered a handful of nasty security vulnerabilities affecting all current versions of Ruby. The details are still under wraps because an attacker can DoS you or possibly execute arbitrary code.
If you are the type who thinks all presents must be opened early, and who just cant stand stuff that is "still underwraps", check out zed’s investigation …
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June 16th, 2008 tkadom
Now you can see what all the buzz is about. PArt one of the maglev talk is now online at vimeo.
MagLev presentation at RailsConf 2008 - part 1 from Monty Williams on Vimeo.
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June 11th, 2008 tkadom
I was reviewing a friends application this weekend and saw a nifty free IPGeocoding gem based off the maxmind geocoding library. If you have ever wondered how websites can guess where you are, then you probably ran into a site that uses IPGeocoding. Essentially your location is guessed based off your IP address. the results are not always accurate, but for a good portion of the userbase they are close enough. You can check out the library using the following steps:
wget http://www.maxmind.com/download/geoip/api/c/GeoIP.tar.gz tar -zxvf GeoIP.tar.gz cd GeoIP ./configure make sudo make install sudo gem install geoip_city wget http://www.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/GeoLiteCity.dat.gz gunzip GeoLiteCity.dat.gz sudo mkdir /usr/local/share/GeoIP sudo mv GeoLiteCity.dat /usr/local/share/GeoIP/GeoLiteCity.dat
use irb to confirm install
require 'rubygems'
require 'geoip_city'
g = GeoIPCity::Database.new('/usr/local/share/GeoIP/GeoLiteCity.dat')
res = g.look_up('69.94.197.133')
puts "lat: #{res[:latitude]} lng: #{res[:longitude]}"
Its that simple! I did notice that upon installing the gem on a debian box, i was receiving a shared object library error. This was corrected by exporting my LD_LIBRARY_PATH to include /usr/local/lib. Alternately you could simply take the libraries that were installed in usr/local/lib and create symbolic links in /usr/lib. A commercial version of their database is available for a fee. (check out maxmind for more info)
once that was working, i decided to take a look at events that might be happening in the area. so i created a basic rails application, installed the eventful gem (sudo gem install eventfulapi), and created a geo controller. i.e.
class GeoController < ApplicationController
require 'rubygems'
require 'geoip_city'
require 'eventful/api'
GEOCODER = GeoIPCity::Database.new('/usr/local/share/GeoIP/GeoLiteCity.dat')
def index
@ip = request.remote_ip
@location = GEOCODER.look_up(@ip.to_s)
eventful = Eventful::API.new('REPLACEME')
@citystate = "#{@location[:city]}, #{@location[:region]}"
@results = eventful.call('events/search',
:app_key => 'REPLACEME',
:location => @citystate,
:date => 'Today',
:page_size => 25)
end
end
this controller pulls events for the location returned. you can access the results in a view
via:
<%= event['start_time'] %> - </td><td><%= link_to event['title'], event['url']%>
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June 4th, 2008 tkadom
Gregg Pollack of rails envy and Orlando RUG fame did this excellent summary video of rails conf 2008 which I found very helpful.
Railsconf in 36 minutes from Gregg Pollack on Vimeo.
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