Cleveland Podcasting Videoblogging and Ruby on Rails

Source unknown.

IM from my dog

An Introduction to Ruby on Rails

View more presentations from Joe Fiorini.

Talk I gave at the Cleveland Web SIG on June 19, 2010.

There’s been a rumor going around on Twitter:

In ‘BTTF’ Doc Brown sets the time clock in the Delorean to a day 25 years in the future, today is that day.

The […] “TETRIS” game is a simple game […], and soon becomes monotonous and boring.- Nintendo’s Dr. Mario Patent

Intro to Ruby on Rails Links

Cleveland Ruby Brigade

http://www.meetup.com/ClevelandRuby

Installing Ruby

• RVM – Ruby Version Manager (Mac OSX/*Nix only)
• Windows fork of RVM
• Windows Alternate - look for 1.9.1 RubyInstaller

Media

• Free Rails screencasts
• Ruby news in 5 minutes
• Official Rails screencasts

Documentation

• Rails Guides (see “Edge” guides)
• API Documentation
• Official Blog
• Ruby News

Agile Web Development with Rails

http://pragprog.com/titles/rails4/agile-web-development-with-rails

Rails 3 in Action

http://www.manning.com/katz/

Two worlds collide. Not only am I a Rails developer, but I’m also a big fan of Gary Vaynerchuk. Put the two together and you have the makings of a great keynote! Can’t wait to watch.

gary:

Railsconf 2010 keynote

A little bit of cursing here so I am so sorry for that but if u get through that and really listen I think you might enjoy this talk! Whatya think?

HTML5 Video on the iPhone

I said I’d update when I made my HTML5 video demo play on my iPhone. Well, today is a sweet day. Thanks to the good people at PandaStream, I was able to get it working. The key is twofold:

1. The video must not only be encoded H.264, but it needs a QuickTime supported container type. This works fine with FlowPlayer (the Flash player we’re using).
2. The video’s extension must be mp4 or mov. Even with the correct encoding and container, it cannot be flv.

One interesting thing to note: on the iPhone HTML5 videos do not play in-browser, but open up QuickTime instead. They do play in-browser on the iPad.

If you happen to be using PandaStream for encoding (which I highly recommend), or if you encode videos with ffmpeg and libavcodec, check Panda’s documentation for the encoder settings you need.

Oh happy day!

Steve Smith gave a great talk at Great Lakes Ruby Bash on designing code. Not MVC vs. MVP vs. insert your architecture here, but applying visual design techniques to your code. This was very poignant for me with my recent interest in learning visual design. I try to make my code as easy to look at as possible. Steve gave some extremely useful advice such as:

• clean up other team member’s code when you have trouble following it
• name variables and methods positively
  • avoid words like “inactive”, “not”, or “disallow”
• always consider the user experience of your code

In my experience, the most useful technique Steve mentioned was something I like to call “code by wishful thinking”. When I start writing new code I

• write the code as I think it should be implemented
• stare at it for a minute or so
• modify until the API I’ve created would make sense to someone coming in to this view the first time
• implement the methods called from my view in models, presenters, or controller

I’m not perfect at this, but it’s a practice I try to follow when writing new code. Check out the slides from Steve’s talk and start improving the design of your code today!

HTML5 Video iPhone/iPad Roundup

Looking to do HTML5 Video on the iPhone/iPad? Here are some resources that I’ve found today that may help. I’ll admit, I still don’t have a video playing on the iPhone, but I’m working on it; and I’ll update here when I get working. In the meantime, enjoy!

Safari HTML5 Audio and Video Guide (Official Documentation)

Notes on HTML5 Video and iPhone (Jonathan Stark)

Exploring HTML5 Media Elements for iPhone Safari Web Pages (Wrox Publishing)

and finally a general guide to HTML5 Video:

Video on the Web (Dive into HTML5)

Mark knows what he’s talking about here. This is a great description of the “garbage in, garbage out” that leads to the failure of many IT projects (of course by failure I mean over estimate, over budget). Agile solves this problem by expecting that the outputs of the estimation process will continue to be refined throughout the course of the project.

Toyota is known for their manufacturing process. People have studied and emulated it for years. Recently Mary and Tom Poppendieck brought it to software development.  

I assumed Toyota used their reknowned manufacturing process to write the software for their vehicles. Henrik’s article proved me wrong.

My favorite quote from the article:

My conclusion after the trip was “well, now I know that there’s at least one company in the world that can succeed with the waterfall model” and I decided to stop bashing the waterfall model as hard as I usually do. Now, however, with all the problems Toyota are having, I’m starting to reconsider. 

ilovecharts:

brownpau:

everytime you make a powerpoint
edward tufte kills a kitten
(dataviz via heeeraldo)

If you aren’t backing up regularly, read this. If you are backing up regularly, good for you. Now go read this.