musings

boilerpipe web service to exctract content from a web page. looks useful for our scraping needs (tags: web-scraping java service extraction) J-_-L | Use fresh Ruby as your shell! (tags: ruby shell tool)

Building iPhone Apps using Titanium and CoffeeScript « Rigel Group (tags: coffeescript titanium iphone) Transparently Cache Network Calls in Titanium « Rigel Group CoffeScript Library for Titanium development (tags: titanium iphone coffeescript)

An update of our production server to Passenger 3.0 worked without problem - kudos to the guys at Phusion! We have changed several parameters and expect our large Rails apps to run faster and better. The main change was that we keep one passenger running for the most used apps, regardless if the app has been idle or not. We’ve had an iPhone layout for StellenAnzeiger for a long time. Intermittently we got Rails “Invalid AuthenticityToken” errors but were never able to pin them down. ...

A few weeks ago we upgraded the RAM on our main server. At that point, I discovered that the external backup drive we use to backup our hosting users home directory was full and no data could be written to it. I never discovered the problem, because df -h always told me that there was plenty of space left. However when I tried to create a file on the drive, I got a ` ...

Preparing for the public demos tomorrow in Lyon… Florian Hanke is here and has been furiously working on his great phony GEM. Phony handles phone number strings and can format them, parse them and do other fun stuff. After this days work, it will be able to tell us, if a phone number is a mobile number, a landline number or a service number. And we need that. Here’s an example of what Phony can do for you: ...

We are using a lot of distributed Sinatra and Rails3 applications in our Mobino project. They speak HTTP-REST and JSON with each other. Because we are using Cucumber and RSpec, we also have some high level integration tests for the APIs. Today I started on cleaning up an API in the Rails app. I wrote a cucumber step to invoke the API. It took me a while to figure out the magic incantation to make the controller retrieve the parameters as JSON: Here’s the relevant part of the step_definition: ...