One of my favourite discoveries of late has been CoffeeScript. If you’re not familiar with it, CoffeeScript is a simple language that compiles down to javascript, in theory saving you a reasonable amount of developer time. My first introduction to it was back when it was a rubygem but at that point I never really put in the effort to learn it until Chris Lloyd did a rocking presentation on it at Railscamp 7 in Canberra. Fresh with inspiration from actually seeing it in action, I decided to take the time to write some code and see how well it fits in with my workflow. Continue Reading »

For quite awhile, my goto choice for permalink / slug / seo-friendly url's in Rails has been friendly_id. If you haven't seen it it, I highly suggest checking it out - it's a self-proclaimed "Swiss Army Bulldozer" of slug and the like, making it simple to support pretty much any common slug variation out of the box. Continue Reading »

Just a few days ago (on the 6th of Nov. to be exact) Webjam 9 occured here in Perth as a part of WA Web Week (and more specifically, after Edge of the Web on the same day). Having missed out last time they came to town, I took this webjam as a chance to prototype an idea and show it off. Continue Reading »

Like all good spare time projects, my most recent - Marvin - was created to scratch a particular itch. I'm usually a fairly regular visitor in a particular ruby oriented chat room. One of the things that we'd talked about adding as a group was an IRC bot - in particular, something which would let us keep logs (with a searchable web UI) as well as a few other niceties (e.g. a Twitter bot). With that in mind, I spent some time hacking on it. To be brutally honest I wasn't a bit fan of all of the. Continue Reading »

If you're one of the people I talk to regularily / hang around online in the same sorts of places then no doubt you've heard me talking about the ACM Collegiate Programming competition. If not, the basic gist of it is simple - Teams of 3 compete in a period of 5 hours to solve a set of programming challenges - most heavily algorithms based. You're given one computer to use between the three of you, your choice of 3-4 languages (Java, C, C++ and Delphi - I say 3-4 because Delphi / Pascal is conditional on where you take part) and you then compete. It starts out in regional contests and then proceeds to an international level with teams from each country. Continue Reading »

Short and sweet today - just a quick glance at Tickets with a Twist; A new site I've been building (n.b. I didn't design it) for Yut Media. Enjoy! Continue Reading »

Welcome to the first in what is hopefully the first in a series of posts introducing some of the stuff we use behind the scenes for Ticket’s with a Twist. Today we’re going to talk about two open source libraries: One for Ruby and one for Javascript (including my own little wrapper around it). Continue Reading »

I've been quite lazy with the whole blogging thing recently - mainly because University has kept me bloody busy but also because most of the stuff I was working on was either assignment / exam related (which is over now) or because it's been under wraps. First off, you can expect some more posts in the coming weeks - there's a lot of exciting stuff going on and I've finally fixed a bug in Eoraptor that had been there for a few weeks that prevented me from posting posts. Continue Reading »

For the last month or two, I've been building a new site called "Ponder" for a University project. The site itself is simple a ground up redevelopment of the site I built for RailsRumble - "Insight" - but with the added twist it's been built on jQuery and a bunch of other technologies (You can see a list of all the resources I used etc on the site itself which I will post once marking has been completed). Continue Reading »

Just a quick eoraptor / this blog pimping tonight. One of the features I've been planning to implement for a long time - projects - has now been implemented. It's basically a really easy way to have a structured project page with integrated logos etc. Nothing big but nice to have none the less. Plus, it puts me one step closer to open sourcing the site. Continue Reading »