mike.mainguy

After reading the recent blog post by Amazon about their "cloud enabled" browser called silk, I went into a minor panic.  I couldn't find any immediate information about the rendering engine or any technical details about what they actually doing.  After some digging I uncovered some job postings that seem to confirm they are using webkit for their rendering and are leveraging SPDY on the network protocol layer. This is great news for developers as webkit is already well established and most of us won't be immediately impacted by SPDY (well actually, your ajax experience might be impacted, but that's another topic entirely).  All told this isn't as big a technological change at the front end and is more of a story about amazon trying to use their infrastructure to make the mobile browsing experience better.  Frankly, this is a scaled up and modernized version of what blackberry did years ago (are they still doing that?). NOTE to Silk team -- please impl...

Git and most of the workflows I've seen on the internet are not designed (or well thought through) for most agile development.  By agile development I mean a small (1-10) team of professional developers all working together in short cycles (1-3 weeks) delivering functional software. Why is git not designed for agile?  Because git, or more importantly, the workflows most readily apparent on the internet all focus on the idea of isolating changes or playing around with branches instead of getting stuff done .  This is great if you have a benevolent master who's sole job is to integrate disparate changes into a common code base (you know, someone like Linux Torvalds), but awful if you have a team of 10 people hacking away on a common codebase.  Aside from some very epic fails in the cvs and svn designs, git by itself doesn't really help in this situation.  I'd dare to say that git actually gets in the way 3x more than it helps. To make matters worse, if you per...

I've been working on a cross platform mobile application for keeping track of how much time I spend doing things. Basically a consultants helper to make sure I'm spending appropriate amounts of time doing the things that move me forward and keep me aware of how much time I'm spending doing things that aren't going in the right direction. Anyway, having done mobile web development and knowing the pain there, as well as having put together a few android/iOs "hello world" applications, I did NOT want to go down the "build 3 different versions" road. I understand that there are compelling reasons to do this, but there aren't compelling enough to do it (in my situation). Knowing that there are a number of solutions in this space, I narrowed it down to things that seem to have #1 the most innovation and #2 the highest potential to NOT be a dead end career wise. My list was narrowed down to titanium mobile , rhomobile , and phonegap . First off, t...

Anyone using a mac for software development has probably run into the need for some gnu/open source software that isn't pre-packaged. One of the great failings of Mac OSX is it's lack of a real package manager. Luckily, users stepped up and built some solutions: Fink, MacPorts, and HomeBrew. I've never used fink, but I hear it's pretty good. Being also a debian/ubuntu guy, I'm familiar with apt-get so it's probably a decent tool... but having no direct experience with it I can't really comment. This brings me to the two tools I HAVE used: Macports and HomeBrew. I started off with macports because it was the one that had the packages I was looking for. On advice from folks I was working with (I believe the comment was "why are you still using macports, everyone is using homebrew now"). I downloaded and started using HomeBrew, but frankly, I'm unimpressed. As far as I can tell, the only reason anyone would use homebrew is if they stumb...

I recently started a new Rails 3 project and was going to use devise for authentication. While very powerful, the documentation was a touch confusing for me and all the other blog posts kept confusing me. What follows are my steps to get up and running with a minimum of effort and thinking. Step 0, put devise into your Gemfile and run bundle install Next, Generate the devise install scripts $ rails generate devise:install Devise will spit out: create config/initializers/devise.rb create config/locales/devise.en.yml =============================================================================== Some setup you must do manually if you haven't yet: 1. Setup default url options for your specific environment. Here is an example of development environment: config.action_mailer.default_url_options = { :host => 'localhost:3000' } This is a required Rails configuration. In production it must be the actual host of your application 2. Ensure you have defined root_ur...

Looking through cloud literature, it seems we've run out of three letter acronyms (TLA), so we're now using four letter acronyms (FLA?). Chief among these are the "as a service" acronyms which describe what level of stuff is handled by the provider. Wikipidia has some sort of explanation buried in the cloud computing page, but I thought I'd give the abridged version. At the lowest level is "Infrastructure as a Service" (IaaS): You get a virtual server with connectivity to the internet. Examples are Amazon ECS and Rackspace Cloud . In these offerings, you can install almost anything you want (you typically get root access in some manner) and can even install the operating system of your choice. This is a good choice if you're a sysadmin who just doesn't want to muck around with physical hardware. The next level up is "Platform as a Service" (PaaS): You get some sort of development platform hosted remotely and you have a mech...

In ruby 1.8.7, the following works Michael-Mainguys-MacBook-Pro:~ michaelmainguy$ irb ruby-1.8.7-p352 :001 > foo = {"foo","bar"} => {"foo"=>"bar"} ruby-1.8.7-p352 :002 > foo["foo"] => "bar" ruby-1.8.7-p352 :003 > In 1.9.2, it fails rather curiously. Michael-Mainguys-MacBook-Pro:~ michaelmainguy$ irb ruby-1.9.2-p290 :001 > foo = {"foo","bar"} SyntaxError: (irb):1: syntax error, unexpected ',', expecting tASSOC foo = {"foo","bar"} ^ (irb):1: syntax error, unexpected '}', expecting $end from /Users/michaelmainguy/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.2-p290/bin/irb:16:in ` ' ruby-1.9.2-p290 :002 > Matz/et-al, get it together... this is a pretty significant change and probably warrants a deprecation warning instead of a mysterious fail that in no way indicates what is really happening. This will seriously dampen adoption of th...