Sometime in the last couple of weeks, the Yammer AIR client stopped fetching new messages. I’ve grown to really like the service, especially since it delivers a running stream of commits to the Git repos I’m interested in, so I broke down and wrote my own client.
All right boys and girls, I’m all for quality releases and everything, but Cortex Reaver 0.2.0 is raring to go. Just gem upgrade to get some awesome blogging goodness.
I threw together a little jQuery tag editor last weekend for Cortex Reaver, since hours of google searching turned up, well, not much. Feel free to try the demo and use it for your projects.
I re-wrote the Ruby Vodpod bindings for the new API I’ve been writing. It’s available as a gem:
cr:codegem install vodpod</cr:code>
A bit of context, in case you haven’t been keeping up with the real-time web craze:
RSSCloud is an… idea* for getting updates on RSS feeds to clients faster, while decreasing network load. In traditional RSS models, subscribers make an HTTP request every 10 minutes or so to a publisher to check for updates. In RSSCloud, a cloud server aggregates several feeds from authors. When feeds are changed, their authors send an HTTP request to the cloud server notifying them of the update. The cloud server contacts one or more subscribers of the feed, sending them a notice that the feed has changed. The subscribers then request the feed from the authors. Everyone gets their updates faster, and with fewer requests across the network.
I’ve been working a lot on Cortex Reaver lately, with several new features in the pipe. I’m using Vim for awesome syntax highlighting, refining the plugins/sidebar infrastructure, creating improved admin tools for long-running tasks (like rebuilding all the photo sizes) and fixing several bugs in the CRUD lifecycle. All that comes in a slick new visual style, including a new stylesheet/js compiler which makes page loads much faster (eliminating something like 20 external HTTP requests in the non-cached case). Finding time to really sit down and hack on CR has been tough lately with all the grad school/work stuff going on, but as new users are coming on board I’m motivated to keep improving.
I just found out that after six months of fighting with the insurance legal teams, they actually paid almost all of my implant surgery bills! That still leaves the initial dental work and however much for the crown, but I’m $4500 less in the hole for the whole debacle! Wooo!
Oh, and San Francisco is great. I’ll post about that in a bit.
Rails, what were you thinking? You went and wrote your own ridiculous JSON serializer in pure Ruby, when a perfectly good C-extension gem already does the job 20 times faster. What’s worse, you gave your to_json method (which clobbers every innocent object it can get its grubby little hands on) a completely incompatible method signature from the standard gem version. You just can’t mix the two, which is ALL KINDS OF FUN for those of us who need to push more than 10 reqs/sec.
Then there’s awesome behavior like this:
Reading the PHP documentation has convinced me (again) of what a mind-bogglingly broken language this is. Quickly, see if you can predict this behavior:
<cr:code lang=“php”>
It’s midnight, and the car is almost packed. All our stuff in one little minivan, moving back to the west coast! Oh man it’s exciting! Should be there in a little over a week.
I love hard science fiction. Actually all science fiction–Grace and I bonded over our love of the ridiculously cheesy Sarah Connor Chronicles this past year–but I remain fascinated by the darkened, measured futurism of Clarke and Asimov. I remember spending hours pouring over my dad’s copies of 2001, Rendezvous with Rama, The Caves of Steel and Ringworld. Phrases from these books formed the literary substructure for my whole life–and there’s something about the phrasing of those books, and the science fiction movies from the late seventies to early eighties, which remains poignant. The last survivor of a far-orbit spacecraft punctured by micrometeoroids, in the long months until rescue, turning as all listeners do, to Bach.
That’s why I enjoyed Moon so much. One man, serving out a three-year contract on a lunar mining facility, alone. No one to talk with save recorded messages from his wife and newly born daughter, and the company of a vapid, invariably rational finite-state automaton. If you haven’t seen the film, I strongly recommend it. It is best, however, to go in as blind as possible.
I released version 0.1.3 of Construct today. It incorporates a few bugfixes for nested schemas, and should be fit for general use.