Peteon Rails

My slides from the presentation “Intro to Spatial Programming” are now available. You can download them as:

A 20MB Keynote ‘o9 file
A 10MB PDF file (transitions and animations will not work)
A 52MB Quicktime Movie ar 1024×768
A 9.1MB Quicktime Movie formatted for the iPod and iPad (640×480)

I hope you enjoy the slides. If you missed my [...]

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You keep using that symbol. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Today, I’d like to describe something I like to call: The Inigo Montoya Attack. It is the implementation in code — often with good intentions, but sometimes simply because of ignorance — of an algorithm which masks one clear, [...]

I’ve recently made public the first cut of functionality for Oracle Spatial support in Fragility’s Spatial Adapter for ActiveRecord. It’s not ready for prime time, but it’s useful enough to open up to collaboration. As soon as I finish up complete spec tests and a couple of refactorings, I plan to issue a pull request [...]

I’ve been using TextMate to develop Ruby on Rails applications for a very long time. But as of today, I’m abandoning TextMate.

After making the decision that I couldn’t continue to work in a professional setting with an editor that contains so many productivity-sapping limitations for me, I decided to switch.

Find out what I tried, and what I ended up using.

When I build Twitter OAuth apps, I usually register three apps. One for development purposes, one for staging and user-acceptance testing, and the production application. Each of these registered apps will have a different Twitter OAuth Consumer Token and Secret. Instead of writing procedural code to set the right tokens up for each environment, or [...]

@alexanderkahn asked me via Twitter whether I’d be pushing VoteFu to GemCutter. To tell you the truth, I hadn’t really thought about it. But, it does seem to be what all the cool kids are doing.
Want to see how easy it was to move to GemCutter?

ping:$ sudo gem install gemcutter
Password:
 
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There’s a lot of established debate and best practice around how to populate your database with the initial reference data it needs in order to operate. I’m not going to rehash that here. If you’re interested in the options available for seeding data, read Luke Franci’s article on Rails Spikes. Many people I work with [...]

I took the MyQuotable example code down from github for a little while because I’d hosed it up trying to convert it into a facebook application. A few users have emailed me in the past month or so asking where the code is located.
I’ve just republished the source code, so you can again download [...]

Because they already know the answer to the burning theological question that has ignited fury around the globe for thousands of years.

[pete@me.local log]$ which god
/usr/local/bin/god

Scrum Masters embarking on a project or converting a team from conventional development to Scrum often run into one big roadblock: convincing the stakeholders to use Agile Estimation techniques. One of the most important and success-inducing things you can do when estimating an Agile project is to abandon the “hour” as the unit of estimation [...]