We are heartened by the stories we are reading of 43 Things users in London. The interweb is amazing for bringing us closer together, where we can cheer folks on across the big pond, and share the photos together on Flickr. We spent yesterday arguing in our office about how to make the world a better place, while our world was reminding us it...

We’ve been hard at work on our next release (codenamed “Tootietails”) and we are really grateful to everyone who has helped us out with some early testing. So by way of introduction, the next new thing from the Robot Co-op is a little site we call 43 Places. It’s a way to share stories about great places in your city and...

We’ve been hard at work on our next release (codenamed “Tootietails”) and we are really grateful to everyone who has helped us out with some early testing. So by way of introduction, the next new thing from the Robot Co-op is a little site we call 43 Places. It’s a way to share stories about great places in your city and...

Here’s the current themesong for what we are brewing at the co-op (hint: check out the top goal today over on 43 Things). Little Room Well you’re in your little room and you’re working on something good but if it’s really good you’re gonna need a bigger room and when you’re in the bigger room you might not...

Here’s the current themesong for what we are brewing at the co-op (hint: check out the top goal today over on 43 Things). Little Room Well you’re in your little room and you’re working on something good but if it’s really good you’re gonna need a bigger room and when you’re in the bigger room you might not...

I use Keyword Assistant with iPhoto to tag all my photos before uploading them to flickr. Unfortunately it has the unfortunate habit of running back to a compatibility mode when run on a version of iPhoto which it doesn’t know about. This means Keyword Assistant won’t make new keywords until the author releases a new version. There...

I use Keyword Assistant with iPhoto to tag all my photos before uploading them to flickr. Unfortunately it has the unfortunate habit of running back to a compatibility mode when run on a version of iPhoto which it doesn’t know about. This means Keyword Assistant won’t make new keywords until the author releases a new version. There...

On ruby-talk Pistos started a thread on Method Size – Best Practices based on a previous post by me where he asks what a good method size is. Ara responded with: i think this is a bit silly really, i have several image processing programs that are 5000 lines of code. the longest method is around 100 lines and alreadys calls 20 other...

A couple weeks ago I came across a discussion of whether test-first development was an impediment to creative flow based on an entry by Frank Sommers. When I first started testing I found testing was an impediment to my flow. I didn’t know how to write my programs to be easily testable. My methods were too big, too coupled or just plain...

Now with imap_flag! sudo gem install IMAPCleanse I’ve even got fresh IMAPCleanse RDoc! In short: imap_cleanse removes old, read, unflagged messages from my IMAP mailboxes. imap_flag flags messages I find interesting so I don’t have to! They can even do this for you, too! Next up is Part Three of my Plan for Total Email Domination...

File.open 'dump' do |fp| Marshal.load fp end Is much slower than: File.open 'dump' do |fp| Marshal.load fp.read end Because the former uses IO#getc and the latter operates directly on a String. I learned this tonight while helping profile code at a Seattle.rb hacking night.

File.open 'dump' do |fp| Marshal.load fp end Is much slower than: File.open 'dump' do |fp| Marshal.load fp.read end Because the former uses IO#getc and the latter operates directly on a String. I learned this tonight while helping profile code at a Seattle.rb hacking night.

Much longer than it should be as the serialization of objects is buried inside a couple of huge methods. One tricky bit was having to mark DRbObject as not responding to #yaml_initialize, the other was marking a few undumpable classes as undumpable by YAML. I’ll post it tomorrow when I have more brain.

Much longer than it should be as the serialization of objects is buried inside a couple of huge methods. One tricky bit was having to mark DRbObject as not responding to #yaml_initialize, the other was marking a few undumpable classes as undumpable by YAML. I’ll post it tomorrow when I have more brain.

At MindCamp 2.0 I was asked about how you would replicate a TupleSpace. I whipped up the following implementation: class Rinda::TupleSpaceReplicator attr_accessor :debug attr_reader :local_tuplespace, :remote_tuplespace def initialize(remote_tuplespace, templates) @local_tuplespace = Rinda::TupleSpace.new @remote_tuplespace = remote_tuplespace...