Behold yonder food.
Click on them for more info, some even have descriptions. Also, flickr is awesome
When Unsure, Food Pics Post
October 27th, 2009OpenID Provider in Sinatra
September 17th, 2009As part of a personal project, I have been working on an OpenID Provider written in Sinatra.
The idea is to make it ridiculously easy to set up an openid provider within a rack middleware stack.
It’s just a single sinatra app without any tests using code I cribbed from the example rails implementation in ruby-openid. But, I intend on rewriting it once I get a better feel for how it should go.
The problem I face is a matter of interface, specifically application programming interface. I want it to be simple to use. But that is alittle complicated underneath.
Today I read The Little Manual of API Design(pdf), which made me think about my approach to building things in, I think, a good way. It talks about the goals of building a good API and boils it down to five things.
- Easy to learn and memorize
- Leads to readable code
- Hard to misuse
- Easy to extend
- Complete
For my app, complete is pretty easy. I’ve boiled the interface down to two main things:
- OpenID Store
- User/Identity
First, for an openid app, you need an openid store to put all the associations, nonces etc.
Then, the meaty bit, the users and their identities. The stuff we are serving up. My current thought is to have one of the app’s parameters be a lambda or Proc that returns the current user, or nil when called with the request.env. So that using it would look somewhat like this.
It’s kind of ugly, but I like it better than some of my other options. One other way I could get the user to the app would be to use rack request hash. I could have users put the user object in the request env before the OpenID provider gets it and tell the provider where to look. But the problem with that is that I would need to add another middleware layer that added the user to the environment. That would look something like this:
Maybe that would be better.
Ultimately I just need to pick something and run with it.
The thing I wonder about though, is what is the most idomatic way of doing this. Using the most rubyish, most Rack like interface would make it easier to learn and memorize.
Windy City Rails
September 12th, 2009I’m going to Windy City Rails today. It should be fun.
Bobcat Classic in VFF
September 1st, 2009
August 22nd I ran the Bobcat Classic‘s 5k in my Five Fingers. 5 kilometers took me 29:50 which I think is pretty good considering I am not in the best shape.
I learned about the run in late July through an alumni association email. It sounded like fun, but I wondered if it was feasible, so I went out and jogged around a nearby park. It didn’t kill me, so I decided to do it.
I jogged about three times a week leading up to it, to make sure I was in shape enough, and to get my feet adjusted to running in my VFF. And it did require some adjustment. Even though I’ve had mine for a while, running in them is exercises somewhat different muscles than just walking around. My calves were unhappy with me until they adjusted to having to do more work.
The course for the 5k was not too bad. It passed through a parking lot and some residential streets and some bike/foot paths. These were the most annoying because of the gravel.
Gravel is about the most annoying thing to walk on in VFF. Small to medium rocks hurt a little when moving at speed. On the other hand, my feet have adjusted to that too, so while it hurts at the time, the feeling goes away fairly quickly.
Overall it was a fun experience and I would like to do something like it again.
Methusela’s Children
July 27th, 2009Reading this post by Charles Stross reminded me of a TED talk I saw a few years ago.
Thinking about these sort of things also reminds me of some of the Heinlein I read when I was in middle school and high school. Lazarus Long is a fascinating character. I remember wondering what it would be like to live so long. I find myself continually amazed reading and listening to people talking about the possibilities that advances in medical science could create.
Went to ALA in Chicago
July 24th, 2009Living with a library science graduate student has its perks.
Two weeks ago I went to Chicago to see the big ALA conference. I came by train, armed with a backpack stuffed with clothes etc. And generally made off with the adventure having.
Friday evening I gathered up all the necessaries I had laid out in the living room the night before and stuffed them in my backpack. I walked to the station, a bit less than mile, through the neighboring neighborhoods.
It was the first time I rode in coach on an American train. It was slower and more cramped than the shinkansen, but felt more train-like with it’s conductors calling out the stations and big diesel engines.
I laughed at the Montana advertisement over the door into the terminal. Something like
– Few People Come Here
+ Few People Come Here
I took a taxi to the hotel. It was a little more complicated than I thought it would be because there were quite a few people on the train–significantly more than there were taxis. Also there were taxi barkers or something trying to get tips from people for helping them get a cab. It was a little crazy.
Saturday Morning 8 am
I snuck in to see Gregory Maguire talk about what he has been doing recently among other things. I wish I had taken notes because I don’t really remember much of it now. Depressing.
Afterwards, Sara and I went into the exhibition hall, fittingly called The Stacks. We looked at children’s books for a while and grabbed some galleys…
Did you know you can get free books at ALA?
Sara eventually went off to some official sessions and left me by myself in the stacks, until lunch.
Initially, I just wandered around. I had this strange suspicion that I would not be able to find an honest to goodness technical software book in the place and I wanted to test that suspicion.(Later I learned that O’Reilly usually shows up, but didn’t this year for some reason)
The reason I wanted to find software books or their lack was that my local public library’s section on software was rather meager and I suspected it had something to do with technical publishers not marketing software books to libraries.
In the end I found a number of technical publishers, but they were mostly peddling their database solutions, and they bring any of their software wares to show off.
Eventually that got boring so I started to talk to the software vendors.
Note: Lunch occurs somewhere in this period.
To summarize:
- numerous data base vendors
- ebook peddlers
- language packages
- SMS gateway services tailored to libraries
- And an awkward demo of a set of keyboards intended to facilitate communications between deaf people
Telling people I was not a librarian, but instead a Software Developer sometimes elicited awe or confusion and other times a kind of oh well sort of feeling.
The best bit of the conference for me was the Newbery Caldecott Award Banquet. I shook hands with Neil Gaiman. I was among the 1200. And Sara got her graveyard book signed.
The second best bits were all the shoe conversations:
“Whoah, those are crazy shoes.”
“My friend and I were wondering, are those comfortable?”
“Cool Shoes.”
Some Final Links
Integrated Library Systems:
Koha
Evergreen
Ex Libris
Cool Org/Com’s sites
Nolo
NASW
RubyNation: Preparing for 1.9
June 25th, 2009David A Black — Preparing for 1.9
“open a 1.8.6 [irb] and you’ll see all the stuff I’m showing you not work”
David showed us some of the differences between the 1.9 and 1.8.6 with live code demos.
generic to_a gone. I’d seen it in the docs for 1.8.6, but never used it. It doesn’t make sense for a number to know how to wrap itself in an array. Seeing it go makes me happy.
Strings
String no longer mixes in Enumerable. Instead of each, et al it has new each_* methods.
- each_byte –again duh
- each_char — duh
- each_checkpoint — gives you the bits for the would be character regardless of encoding
- each_line –duh
"string"[0]
# 1.9
#=> "s"
#1.8.6
#=> 115
str[0] returns a string of length one rather than a Fixnum representing the nth byte as 1.8.6 does. To get the same behavior in 1.8.6 you need to write str[0,1] which is not at all intuitive. I had run into that a few times and always thought it was odd for a language with such an awesome string manipulation toolkit to do.
case statements no longer have the optional ‘:’. when x: blah won’t work, it will have to be when x; blah
rubygems now part of core, so no need to require ‘rubygems’ before requiring a gem. Sweet.
{1,2,3,4} does not turn into {1=>2,3=>4} you always need the hashrockets(=>).
Also, hashes retain insertion order so you can now rely on what use to be coincidental. Cool. This also means that you can use position as well as key to refer to values…which confuses me because hashes can have numeric keys.ruby
Block local variables(let () anyone?). done like so
local_var = 'something to not overwrite'
do |a;local_var|
local_var = cool_intermediate_method a
some_method local_var
end
# local_var == 'something to not overwrite'
String encoding got some smarts. Ruby knows more about how to deal with string encoding in 1.9. David showed us some examples. If you change a string to ASCII and then try to add a Unicode character to it, the system will convert the string’s encoding to Unicode first.
Enumerators.
Like java iterators, only with more awesome. Apparently, these have been around for a while(1.8.7), but I hadn’t used them before. You can do cool stuff like:
e = (1..3).cycle
e.take 5
#=> [1, 2, 3, 1, 2]
e2 = e.each_slice 2
e2.take 5
#=> [[1, 2], [3, 1], [2, 3], [1, 2], [3, 1]]
e3 = e.each_cons(2)
e3.take 5
#=> [[1, 2], [2, 3], [3, 1], [1, 2], [2, 3]]
Then there is the new BasicObject. It is like Jim Weirich’s BlankSlate, but baked in. Objects with no default methods are really handy for building DSLs, like builder.
a = BasicObject.new
p a
#=> NoMethodError: undefined method `inspect' for #<0x8441f94>
