Category Archives: Open Source

Deploying CruiseControl.rb with Custom Tasks

Posted on March 19, 2007 by Bill

More and more work is being done by geographically disparate teams these days, so a continuous integration tool like CruiseControl.rb is quite useful. Andre and I could have used this when we were heads down with GeoKit. But better late … Continue reading →

Posted in Open Source, Ruby, Ruby on Rails | 4 Comments

GeoKit: A Tiny Update

Posted on March 12, 2007 by Bill

Its been a while since I tinkered with GeoKit, but when I read this post, I thought I’d take a look at a couple of things that were mentioned. James wrote that it would be nice to be able to … Continue reading →

Posted in GeoKit, Open Source, Ruby, Ruby on Rails | 4 Comments

Taming the Beast

Posted on March 4, 2007 by Bill

In my continuing efforts to work Ruby and Rails into the Enterprise, I’ve been working on adapting Rick Olson and Josh Goebel’s Beast discussion forums engine. Its excellent work on their part and quite fun to play with. My adaptations … Continue reading →

Posted in Open Source, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, YUI | 2 Comments

GeoKit: More Syntactic Sugar

Posted on February 18, 2007 by Bill

We just checked in code which improves the readability of GeoKit’s finders. Its quite obvious from the code, so just take a look at these examples: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 … Continue reading →

Posted in GeoKit, Open Source, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Uncategorized | 6 Comments

GeoKit: Improvements to distance_between and distance_to

Posted on February 14, 2007 by Bill

Over at Earthcode, a request was made to enable the distance_between and distance_to methods to accept physical locations in pre-geocoded string form. I have added this improvement, so you can now do: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 # … Continue reading →

Posted in GeoKit, Open Source, Ruby, Ruby on Rails | 3 Comments

Restore CSS Inspection in Firebug on Windows

Posted on February 13, 2007 by Bill

At work, I work in a Windows XP environment and noticed that Firebug would not allow me to inspect CSS.  Since I do mostly Java, I hadn’t worried about that.  However, today, I had to debug a stylesheet problem in … Continue reading →

Posted in CSS, Firebug, Firefox, Open Source | Leave a comment

CodeRay-ize Your Code into HTML

Posted on February 13, 2007 by Bill

I recently discovered CodeRay as a means to pretty up my Rails-based tutorial examples. But unfortunately, this blog runs under WordPress which is PHP-based, so I can’t use CodeRay here. Or can I? While not the most seamless process, I … Continue reading →

Posted in Open Source, Ruby | Leave a comment

GeoKit: Some Minor Feature Tweaks

Posted on February 12, 2007 by Bill

In the last couple of days, I added a couple of minor feature tweaks. First, the finders will now all accept optional :units and :formula keys to enable you to override the units and formula used by the model by … Continue reading →

Posted in Open Source, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

GeoKit: My First Rails Plug-in

Posted on February 9, 2007 by Bill

This is a follow-up to my last post on distance queries in Rails. Since that post, I’ve enlisted the help of Andre Lewis at Earthcode.com to help super-charge the feature set. If you don’t know Andre, he’s the author of … Continue reading →

Posted in Open Source, Ruby, Ruby on Rails | 8 Comments

Distance Queries in Rails

Posted on January 22, 2007 by Bill

I’m writing an application which has store locator-like use cases. If you’ve ever written anything like this, you know that the SQL can get quite messy. To keep my code clean and elegant, I’ve written a Rails plugin called acts_as_mappable … Continue reading →

Posted in Open Source, Ruby, Ruby on Rails | 1 Comment