There are at least four different ways of playing audio in iOS. Each has their own wrinkles and advantages. In this article I briefly compare and contrast some of the differences between the options. For the TL;DR version skip to the table at the end which compares the approaches. (actually, to be honest, I’ve had …
Options for getting JRuby 1.6 to use Ruby 1.9 Syntax
In 2012 and beyond you really want to be using Ruby 1.9 syntax (as per the standard ruby implementation KRI). JRuby 1.6 uses Ruby 1.8 syntax by default, but this can be changed to be 1.9. There are a bevy of different ways to do this. I’ll outline these here, and give you my recommendation on what to do. …
Writing Beautiful RSpec Matchers
thoughtbot have created a really nice set of custom matchers for RSpec. The Shoulda matchers make writing tests for rails models beautiful and clean. It’s easy to do this for yourself using the friendly matcher DSL that ships with RSpec. Let’s take a look at how. …
REST API Design Rulebook By Mark Masse
I’ve been building web based APIs of various forms for a number of years now, interacting with SOAP and RESTful services, and building some myself. It was with some interest that I picked up the book REST API Design Rulebook, getting it from the O’Reilly blogger review program. The book provides a decent set of information …
Mobile Design Pattern Gallery By Theresa Neil
Patterns and pattern languages are a contentious topic among developers these days. Stemming from an overuse of them, and using fancy pattern names to excuse overly complex code, they are not the miracle cure they were thought to be 10 years ago. That said, having collections of things that work can be useful, and having …
Planning for Big Data
Planning for Big Data presents a series of short articles on working with Big Data. Big Data being the large datasets that are available today. My first experiences with big data date back to last century, working on Large telecommunications datasets. In those days the ideas were to create star schemes and denormilised relational data models. …
Backbone.JS on Rails
A while ago I made a post Two tricks for getting Backbone.js to play well with Ruby on Rails. It was good at the time, but probably not the place you really want to be reading. For the best information go to quora, and read the answer to the question How well does backbone.js work with …
Thoughts on Prayer
Kristin’s recent “Drive-By Faith Healing” has lead to me thinking quite a lot about prayer, faith and healing. As a committed Christian I am convinced that God is real, and that prayer is effective as a means of communication with God. I have also experienced God’s answer to prayer, and am convinced that God can …
How to get OpenSSL in Ruby 1.9.3 working on OSX 10.7 (fixing the Segmentation Fault with Ruby OpenSSL)
update – this needs to have a recent version of RVM – it works with rvm 1.10 but not with 1.6 – do an rvm update first. When using the mighty cobweb web crawler on my OSX 10.7 with Ruby 1.9.3 I was getting a seg fault in net http: net/http.rb:799: [BUG] Segmentation fault A …
It’s Not Luck – Eliyah Goldratt
Updated following feedback from Joel-Henry GROSSARD in the comments below. It’s Not Luck is a sequel to Eli’s first book The Goal, and follows the same basic strategy, following the career of the protagonist, Rogo, teaching us along the way the thinking and business principals that Eli sees as key. I really enjoyed the book. …
