Just some pics. :-)

My 1st generation Macbook Pro is starting to show its age, but tonight I used my birthday money in an effort at rejuvenation. 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.

Back in 2005, I uploaded a bunch of crude little pictures to my Flickr account [edit 12 years later: this account is gone] 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. Only took me five years. Enjoy. Update: Various sizes and scalable versions are available in the whiteboard_icons git repository.

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.

I wanted to understand the Facebook REST API better, and decided I needed a simple wrapper for it. HTTParty to the rescue again!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.

I just updated my Greasemonkey userscript that generates usage graphs for Tarsnap. The graphs are now prettier: The script lives here.

Continuing with my HTTParty, I've created a fairly simple Flickr API wrapper for Ruby: flickr_party. This one was a bit more difficult than the Campaign Monitor one, but still fun nonetheless. Why reinvent the wheel? It's fun.I always learn something. Sometimes I learn to not reinvent the wheel.But sometimes I learn so much more. The libraries out there I spent 10 minutes looking at didn't seem to fully support application authentication.

Update: This was renamed to campaign_monitor_party. First of all, HTTParty is simply amazing. That is all.Second, Ruby never ceases to amaze me regarding its power and tools for meta-programming. "method_missing" is just too cool. Third, I created a 20-line wrapper class for the Campaign Monitor API this weekend (using HTTParty). The code and the gem is over on GitHub: http://github.com/seven1m/campaign_monitor_party.

I’ve been working on a little experiment lately… a Ruby domain-specific language for generating Cascading Style Sheets called CascadingRubies. It’s an internal DSL, meaning it uses plain Ruby syntax, like this:Output:Being just Ruby, of course, you can mix in variables, arithmetic, require external code, hit the database, or whatever. The guys on the Tulsa.rb mailing list have provided some great feedback, and from that I’ve released the the second gem version (0.

sudo aptitude install libavahi-compat-libdnssd-dev sudo gem install technomancy-dnssd -s http://gems.github.com require 'rubygems' require 'dnssd'