I finally got around to purchasing a copy of the Rails Recipes book by Chad Fowler and I must say I’m enjoying it quite a bit. So I thought I’d contribute to the discussion surrounding the book with a recipe: Quick and Easy Textfilters. Enjoy!

Rich White has accepted my patch to add graceful JavaScript degredation to his excellent AjaxScaffold for Rails. You can read about it here. I’m also trying to get drag-and-drop sorting working in the AjaxScaffold, though I’ve run into some issues. See Thomas Fuchs’ answer to my issue.

There’s a nice article in today’s New York Times regarding Paul Graham’s VC firm, YCombinator. You can read it here. I wish PG had been doing this with YC ten years ago. I’ve always been interested in startups and have wanted to found my own company for quite a long time. Perhaps I’ll get the chance yet.

Tonight was the second meeting of the Northern VA Ruby Users Group (NovaRUG) — the first was held back in November.

Rich Kilmer spoke about a project he worked on for BBN (who was contracted by the USAF) to coordinate mid-air refeuling missions written in Ruby and Flash (using his alph toolkit).

It was quite interesting to see how Rich went about writing a domain specific language in Ruby — basically he worked to understand the domain really well and began writing his program in this new DSL then he went back and wrote the Ruby code to parse/eval that DSL. The way Rich described it sounded amazing, but also intimidating — I didn’t feel like I could ever do something like that. I wonder if there’s a good resource for learning metaprogramming — perhaps the Pragmatic Programmers will add such a book to their Facets of Ruby series.

After that Rich gave a demo of InfoEther’s new indi software which resides on a USB key and embeds everything necessary to run on Windows or Mac OS X (a Ruby interpreter, Flash 8 Runtime, WebKit, etc). It includes the basic PIM functionality along with games, IM and an on-line store where you can purchase more apps/plugins. It looks quite interesting and I’ll post more about it once they start the public beta.

It looks like future NovaRUG meetings will be on Wednesday evenings (from 7-9pm). And it looks like FGM will continue to host them for the time being.

I’ve uploaded a short Ruby script which uses Google maps to obtain the lat/long given a zipcode. I needed this since the Cartographer RoR plug-in takes coordinates in the form of lat/long and my customers will only provide me with their zipcodes or complete addresses. Obviously in my Rails web-app I’m storing the lat/long in the DB so I don’t repeatedly query Google Maps. The class simply returns a hash and is trivial to use:

{lang=“ruby”} coords = GMap.to_latlng(“90210”) lat = coords[:lat] lng = coords[:lng]

Download zipcode.zip Updated 2007: This has basically been supplanted by the excellent GeoKit for Rails.