Expressica::Blog

Since last one year, there is quite a bit of Ruby and RubyOnRails development happening in India. Still the biggest thing missing here is the official Ruby and Rails meet-ups like RailsConf and RubyConf. Being in Ruby and Rails community since last three years I’ve been attending many events in India but couldn’t find any of them Ruby centric. And in one of the past event I and Manik decided to have an event focusing fully on Ruby and RubyOnRails.

And here we come. We are organizing the first RubyFunDay. Its going to be one of its kind of event in India. There would be sessions on some of the really hot topics…

• Flex + Rails
• Internationalization in Rails
• FxRuby+AR
• Facebook APP + Rails

If you like to have Fun with Ruby, you are most welcome to attend the event. To attend the event, you would need to register online for the event. Its going to happen in a very decent venue, and we are hearty grateful to Impetus Technology for sponsoring the venue. I am sure you would enjoy a lot in the event.


More good things in the event apart from Ruby and Rails includes the printed Ruby Ts … cool yeah ?

RubyFunDay is going to be a pure Code Burning Station. Every session would be full of live code demonstrations.
If you would like to present a session at this event, register online for it and send me an email with your topic’s details on [surDOTmaxATgmailDOTcom]. The only constraint we have is, it should not be mere presentation, you will have to show the live code in the session.

For registration and more details on the event please visit here

I would really appreciate if you blog/tweet about the event and help spreading a word about it. If you do, please add the tag/category to the post as “rubyfunday”.

If you would be there, and get time, I would love to speak to you. You can recognize me easily, its very simple, I wear Jeans and T-shirts mostly

See you there with more and more Ruby.

After a long silence, Simple Captcha is back in move now. Simple Captcha 2.0 will be here very soon.

Here are some very useful features coming up with Simple Captcha 2.0

• Ajax based refreshing of captcha image — a much awaiting one!
• Full control on the image font — now this is fun-do! You would be able to use any font.. yeah literally any font. The overview of this feature is that you would just need to put .ttf font file in the plugin’s directory and that is it. Cool yeah ?
• Better control on the default values and settings via simple_captcha.yml file.
• Ability do define/undefine case sensitivity.

Its been around three months I am practicing Martial Arts. I have refined my kicks and punches to some good level, punches comes out with new kind of energy now ;). Just now started having the one-on-one fight practices. On last weekend, while fighting with an opponent, I got a minor hair fracture in my right feet’s thumb. It was a solid kick though on his knee, but since shoes are not allowed in practice I got the reaction of the hit as well. I had a great joyful fight.. one of the big scene was when I hit hardest punch and it made my opponent’s right hand’s two knuckle joints swollen and that was the end of the fight. Though I didn’t feel good for him at the first place, but actually this is why we were there at the dojo.

Right now along with some interesting Rails projects and personal Ruby coding(an interesting mesh up of ActiveRecord and Socket Programming) also enjoying the broken bones :).

I upgraded the dist to Hardy Heron, the Ubuntu 8.04. And my experience with it so far has been very satisfactory.
Its much more stable now. I found various stuff already bundled which previously I had to explicitly install. For me the good things bundled…

Firefox 3

Hardy provides Firefox 3(beta) by default, comparatively its a super fast browser now. I am desperately waiting for Firfox 3 final release. Once I was a bit upset to see that the Firbug is no more compatible with Firefox3 but then I found Firebug’s release 1.2 which works fine with Firefox3. Till yet have not found any problem and both are working fine. Firefox3 is certainly quite faster.

Ruby 1.8.6

Provides Ruby 1.8.6 (patchlevel 111). Good!
The libmagick is also available but still the RMagick needs to be installed the way I posted here.

Pidgin

A one stop shop for almost all the messenger services like gtalk, aim, yahoo, irc and many more. In previous dist I had to install gaim.

This new ubuntu is operating quite faster and I am enjoying it a lot.

Announcing the release of this tiny useful plugin AutoTags.
A couple of weeks ago I travelled to Mumbai in train which was a long 17hrs journey… and I utilized that by coding down the idea while travelling. So here it comes…

AutoTags, an open source project, is a plugin for RubyOnRails applications to automatically generate the relevant tags for the provided content. Its quite simple to use and provide easy integration with ActiveRecord. The plugin is very useful for social applications, community websites and all those networking applications where there is a scope of user generate content to be tagged. No more heck for the admin to sit and add the tags to the content or waiting for the users to add the tags to their content.

For installation and usage read here.

If you liked the plugin then please recommend me on workingwithrails.

The ruby is getting changed and improved a lot with every release. No doubt the existing demerits of rails are soon going to be history.

Currently for my rails applications I am running Ruby1.8… and exploring 1.9 to get ready as we are heading with nice speed in the rails developments. Modrails has already started making waves all around.
Soon I would be publishing a couple of posts on threads, processes and sockets in ruby… here is a bit on how they are going to be different in Ruby1.9.

In Ruby1.9 the threads implementation is going to be really different than what we all know/do in Ruby1.8. The Ruby1.8 uses a single native thread and runs all Ruby threads within that… which certainly protects the Ruby threads to take on much responsibilities and to completely leverage the hardware with multiple processors.

Now, the good news, the Ruby1.9 allocates a separate native thread for every Ruby thread. But at this very moment it is not fully functional… as because of some C libraries, used here, are not thread-safe that it will not allow Ruby1.9 to take control on multiple native threads. Still, great signs of improvements in these directions… It has been mentioned that this restriction will be removed in the upcoming versions of Ruby1.9 and there will be full fledged implementation of multithreading in Ruby with multiple native threads, and the charm of parallel execution… means a lot more scope of improvements for all related libraries, frameworks built on the top of Ruby.

I was reading something about how to avoid the distractions and the article exemplified it using a scene from the Indian mythology ‘Mahabharata’ where the Guru Dronacharya asked all the students to aim at the bird’s eye sitting at a branch of the tree, then he asked what you can see… most students replied they can clearly see the branch, tree and the bird… only Arjuna said he can only see the bird’s eye… At that very young age he had learned the willingness of how to avoid the distractions which are joyful to you.

Here in this post I admit that gaming, especially playing ‘Tekken3′ is one of the biggest distraction for me. As whenever I spend continuous hours on work, I get the time out and start playing ‘Tekken3′ which surely very much joyful. But, actually I know I make reason to myself to play that game and not actually to take some time off to have rest. Playing game certainly gives some enjoyment but not exactly the rest, I still be in the same position on my desk, sitting on my chair, and playing the game instead of doing the work… so its almost that I am doing work and not giving rest to my body. So, basically I was not willing enough to say that the game is a distraction for me… instead I kept on saying that I am playing it to take a time out of the work, But its for sure a wastage of time. And now I am sure enough to say its purely a wastage of time as I have made a resolution to say NO TO GAMES. I am in my 20s and need to conquer many of my dreams and need to work really hard to do so… which will certainly require killing of all these distractions in my life. And I’ve started very well by signing off from games… Though its true that I have a dream to run a Gaming company… and if I would be able to do so… the Gaming will also be my work
So, to take time out from my work I would rather now read my newspaper and I can now allocate the time I used to spend in reading newspaper back to work. Reading newspaper is a required task to be accomplished and would not be a reason to take a forced time out from the work… moreover I can relax while reading newspaper that I couldn’t do while gaming. I must say I have dumped a biggest distraction of mine.

There are a couple of ways described in acts_as_solr documentation for the logical search, with AND or OR operations. But I needed to dig a bit into the code as the documentation is not complete and doesn’t suggest all the possible implementations of making the complex Logic Gates for searching.
Here I am consolidating various possibilities of Logical Search…

Find all blogs with category ruby or rails

  Blog.find_by_solr("category:rails category:ruby", :operator => :or)

another way

  Blog.find_by_solr("category:rails OR category:ruby")

Find all blogs with categories ruby and rails

  Blog.find_by_solr("category:rails category:ruby", :operator => :and)

another way

  Blog.find_by_solr("category:rails AND category:ruby")

Grouping for more precision

NOTE: mind the grouping using parenthesis, you might get unexpected results without proper grouping.

Find all blogs with categories ruby or rails with author Sur

  Blog.find_by_solr("(category:rails OR category:ruby) author:sur")

Find all blogs with categories ruby AND rails with author Sur

  Blog.find_by_solr("(category:rails AND category:ruby) author:sur")

Find all blogs with categories ruby or rails with author Sur or David

  Blog.find_by_solr("(category:rails OR category:ruby) (author:sur OR author:David)")

Find all blogs with categories ruby and rails with author Sur or David

  Blog.find_by_solr("(category:rails AND category:ruby) (author:sur OR author:David)")

For Rails applications I am using THIN on my local machine since a couple of weeks and found it better than Mongrel. I’ve started replacing mongrel with THIN on servers as well. THIN leverages the best of the available resources… It uses mongrel’s parser along with the Eventmachine and the Rack Ruby libraries which together provide better speed, greater requests/sec and certainly consumes lesser memory.

Install THIN by issuing

  sudo gem install thin

THIN accepts more or less similar switches as that of mongrel. You start THIN by issuing

  thin start -p 9090 -d -e production

-p — port, defaults to 3000
-e — environment, defaults to development
-d — daemonize mode

THIN provides an in built support for clustering and running multiple servers for the same applications. You can start say 3 servers for the single application by providing the -s switch as…

  thin start -p 9090 -d -e production -s 3

And similar to mongrel it will start three servers on the ports 9090, 9091 and 9092.

Today’s market is the market of the Design but the technology. Not only related to the web applications but in a very generic sense. The greatly designed application basecamp turned Rails into a favorite framework of numerous programmers all over the globe. But the non-tech end users who are using basecamp don’t even think on which tech it has been built. Its all design and usability that matters. If you are in product business, the technology matters when it comes to scalability. A lots of frameworks offers good scalability… Rails applications are now even much more scalable. The great thing, which certainly adds up much a +ve biasing to select Rails as a framework of choice is the boost it adds to the development speed for a product business. But, for a services and consultancy most people opt for whats in demand in the market. I really like working on rails, naturally in consultancy it gives good business and in product it adds up a speed which second to none.
But the only thing which is mandatory to be on top with any tech you select for your product is the design and the vice-versa doesn’t stand here.

Great words from great design enginners…

With the market being ultra-competitive and high on style, it is not enough to just have a good product — it has to score good on looks too.

Design gives the consumer an experience and not just a product, which, in turn, leads to a loyal customer base. This is one area where investments are small when compared to the benefits a company can get out of it.

It takes time fort a startup to realize the worth of design. A startup is also, more often than not, cash strapped and thus does not have funds to invest in designing, which is an area that requires huge investments.