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The Tulsa Hackathon is steaming ahead. The night is still young!

People have gone from standing to sitting, staring intently at backlit screens and making things happen.

Here are some more pics...

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So far the Tulsa Hackathon, an all-night programming drive benefiting needy Tulsa non-profits, is going underway and going well.

We had an excellent catered meal, project presentations were made, and teams have been formed. People seem to be figuring out team member responsibilities and getting started on the various projects.

I'll write a couple more blog posts as the night progresses. Here are pics thus far:

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I wanted my own Campfire-style web chat room, so I created on with node.js and socket.io that runs on Heroku. Robot images are thanks to robohash.org.

Enjoy. github.com/seven1m/robots-chatting-with-other-robots

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Introducing jqtal, my tiny jQuery plugin that provides a different way of doing client side HTML templating.

jqtal is different because it is a part of and lives alongside the HTML itself. An example might help:

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Hey friends, I wanted to let you know I will be giving a presentation on Backbone.js at the next TulsaWebDevs meet-up.

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Red Dirt Ruby Conference in nearby Oklahoma City was even better this year than last, and that's saying a lot.

The format of RDRC is unlike any other conference I've attended. The key difference: each speaker (excepting keynote speakers) only talks for 18 minutes and that's it.

Speakers are grouped, four at a time, into a theme. This year's themes (for day one, which is all I was able to attend) were Ruby Implementations, Rails 3 Extensions, Rails Redux, and JavaScript. So in all, I saw 16 presentations in a single day, plus keynotes!

For us with A.D.D. fueling our disorder with wifi-enabled laptops at hand, coercing presenters to condense their subject matter down to a mere 18 minutes is like switching from a charter bus to high-speed rail -- you get to the destination considerably faster. As @JEG2 put it, if a speaker can't get to the point in 18 minutes, then they won't in an hour either.

Keynote speaker Aaron Patterson (@tenderlove) gave an entertaining and honest look into the core of Rails development, and the challenges that go with it. I don't envy his position on the core team.

Dr. Nic Williams (@drnic) gave a compelling call to action for people to join or start Ruby user groups in their communities. Dr. Nic's style is disarming and delightful alternating with hysterical and off-the-wall. Looking around the room, I saw few if any laptops open during his speech.

The best of the 18-minute talks were about alternative Ruby implementations Rubinius and MacRuby, Rails plugins OmniAuth, Haml and Sass, and finally JavaScript alternative CoffeeScript. But by far the best regular talk was from Jeff Casimir, titled "Fat Models Aren't Enough." Jeff's speaking style was engaging and provocative -- so much that he received more than one middle finger from the audience! But it was all in good fun, and that brings me to my most favorite part of the conference...

The fun. RDRC is upbeat, energetic, and just plain fun. People are just friendlier in Oklahoma than some other places I've been (even if those same people came from the other places, it seems). RDRC makes me proud to be an Okie.

After the day was done, many of the conference goers packed into a hotel suite and started hacking. This was the icing on the cake for me, because I met many amazing people who do creative work everyday. Inspiring stuff.

Thanks to James Edward Gray II and his wife Dana, and to the army of people I'm sure it took to pull this off. See you guys next year!

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# hack to auto compile sass when Jammit runs in Dev/Test mode

require 'haml/util'
require 'sass/engine'

module Jammit
  module Helper
    SASS_TIMESTAMPS = {}

    def include_stylesheets_with_sass(*packages)
      unless Rails.env.production?
        paths = Dir[Rails.root.join('public/stylesheets/*.scss')].select do |path|
          next if path =~ %r{/_[^/]+$} # skip partials
          t = File.mtime(path)
          if SASS_TIMESTAMPS[path] == t
            false
          else
            SASS_TIMESTAMPS[path] = t
          end
        end
        paths.each do |path|
          Rails.logger.info("Compiling #{path} with SASS.")
          engine = Sass::Engine.new(
            File.read(path),
            :load_paths => [Rails.root.join('public/stylesheets')],
            :cache      => false,
            :syntax     => :scss
          )
          File.open(path.sub(/scss$/, 'css'), 'w') { |f| f.write(engine.render) }
        end
      end
      include_stylesheets_without_sass(*packages)
    end

    alias_method_chain :include_stylesheets, :sass
  end
end

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I created a free micro instance on Amazon EC2 a few weeks ago. Today I remembered it and thought I would tinker around a little, only to find out that when I logged into AWS console, I had to "re-activate" my account using a phone number. Hmmm, that's weird. I distinctly remember doing that two weeks ago. So I jumped through the hoops and got logged in again to discover that my instance was gone, my security group was gone, and my elastic ip was gone. Gone. No trace whatsoever.

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Today, my small patch to Rails was applied by the core team. This is only my second contribution to Rails, so I'm fairly stoked about it being accepted.

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class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
  default_scope where(:deleted => false)
end

Person.all
# => SELECT "people".* FROM "people" WHERE ("people"."deleted" = 'f')

Person.unscoped { Person.all }
# => SELECT "people".* FROM "people"

Person.unscoped { Person.where(:deleted => true) }
# => SELECT "people".* FROM "people" WHERE ("people"."deleted" = 't')

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class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
  cattr_accessor :current_site_id
  default_scope where(:site_id => Person.current_site_id)
end

Person.current_site_id = 1
Person.all
# => SELECT "people".* FROM "people" WHERE ("people"."site_id" IS NULL)

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class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
  cattr_accessor :current_site_id
  default_scope lambda { where(:site_id => Person.current_site_id) }
end

Person.current_site_id = 1
Person.all
# => SELECT "people".* FROM "people" WHERE ("people"."site_id" = 1)

Person.current_site_id = 2
Person.all
# => SELECT "people".* FROM "people" WHERE ("people"."site_id" = 2)

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I tend to use rsync when others would typically use a simple cp for copying files. A few reasons:

1. It can be canceled in the middle, and resumed later.
2. It can show a progress bar that (while not perfect) is great for large files or lots of files.
3. It will only copy the changed files and won't clobber already existing directories of files at the target.

rsync is available on Linux, Mac, and there's a binary somewhere on teh intarwebs for Windows.

To use, you almost always want to pass the -a flag, which stands for "archive" -- basically a convenience flag for -r (recursive), -p (permissions), -t (timestamps), and a few others. I can't think of a time I haven't used -a when using rsync.

Following that, basic usage looks like this:

rsync -a source destination

The other thing to remember when using rsync is that it's picky with slashes; if you put a trailing lash on a path, then rsync takes that to mean you want to copy the contents of that path. If, on the other hand, you leave off the slash, it will copy the path and its contents. A few examples will help:

# This will copy the stuff directory (and its contents) to the documents directory
rsync -a /home/tim/stuff /home/tim/documents

# This will copy only the contents of stuff to the documents directory
rsync -a /home/tim/stuff/ home/tim/documents

Some other handy arguments:

• --stats
• --progress

So, to put it all together:

rsync -a --stats --progress /home/tim/stuff /home/tim/documents

And, better yet, rsync can work over ssh (if it's installed on both hosts). Just put an ssh host on the front of either path:

rsync -a --stats --progress /home/tim/stuff tim@foobar.example.com:/home/tim/

or

rsync -a --stats --progress tim@foobar.example.com:/home/tim/stuff /home/tim/

So, there you have it. rsync can do tons more stuff, but this is a great start. If this is all you learn of rsync, you will be that much better off.

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First, a new Seagate hard drive. 500gb, 7200rpm, $99 at Best Buy. It took about an hour to get my machine apart, with all its tiny screws, get the new drive in, and put it back together.

Next, I said good-bye to Mac OS X. I installed the brand new Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, and man it screams on this machine. I'm not sure if it's Linux, the new drive, or a combination. This machine has new life!

Some pictures of the operation are below:

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Back in 2005, I uploaded a bunch of crude little pictures to my Flickr account and called them my "Whiteboard Icons" set. Hundreds of people have, over the years, found them to be useful on their blogs, flowcharts, and more.

Today, I finally added a couple new icons to the set (1, 2). Only took me five years.

Enjoy.

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csv2wufoo.com is a little side project I wrote using Sinatra, my WufooParty lib, and James Edward Gray's FasterCSV lib.

After the tenth time my wife asked me to write a one-off script to import data into her Wufoo form, I decided to generalize it a bit, slap a Sinatra app around it, and give it a domain name (well, there was a little more to it than that, but ya know...)

It hasn't quite been battle tested yet, but hopefully it will be useful to someone.

We love Wufoo at our church and use it almost daily for all sorts of things. Gathering submissions is only one small trick in its bag of 'em -- Wufoo's reporting makes it a really good platform for visualizing flattened data, among other things. Staff in our church use Wufoo in ways they should probably be using Excel, but Wufoo makes it so much easier.

With csv2wufoo, we should now have a better way of getting data into the system.

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FacebookParty (rdoc) is along the same lines as my other _party style api wrappers. I can't take much credit for it though, since HTTParty is what makes this stuff so easy. Slap a pretty class on an api endpoint, and the rest is cake. And cake goes good with parties.

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