I had a lot of things to do last Thursday, Feb-17. I met a friend from abroad 3am at Ben Gurion Airport and spent several hours talking before we went sleep, signed a contract for developing killer web app at 1:30am, and finally gave a presentation at The Junction at 4:30pm.

Vitaly gave an interesting presentation about MongoDB at Database 2011 Conference.

Find the slides inside.

We presented on IGTCloud Ruby On Rails Day today.

http://www.meetup.com/IGTCloud/calendar/15572435/

Agenda was a bit different this time, not only technical presentations but also a few words about modern approach of building web applications.

Find the slides below.

I was working on tests for blender when I came upon a need to mock or stub a back-tick operator e.g. `shell command`.

Apparently this is just a shortcut for calling Kernel method :`.

So the mocking should probably be easier with Rspec mocks or mocha. something like that (didn’t test see below):

@obj.should_receive(:`, "shell command").and_return("....")

But the problem was that I’m using RR. And RR uses a much more succinct and easy to use syntax but in this particular case it was a problem. Consider this:

# This doesn't work. it stubs the :send, not the :`
stub(@obj).send(:`, "shell command") { "...." }

RR has an instance_eval syntax, but with it I don’t know how to pass a block to the back-ticks call:

stub(@obj) do
  `shell command` { "...." } # invalid syntax here ;). 
end

So after some digging inside RR’s sources I got the following working:

stub(@obj).
  __double_definition_create__.
    call(:`, "shell command") { "...." }

The OPEN 2010 conference was very well organized and had many interesting talks.

The side of low level, infrastructure things was presented by people from Red Hat, VMWare and IBM. The buzz words “SaaS”, “PaaS” and the likes were all over the place together with recent hot topic of virtualization.

On the application level there were interesting presentations about Django, PostgreSQL. And of course our own presentations on Ruby, Rails, NoSQL along with a longer, 2 hours “Introduction to Ruby” workshop.

The food was great too. That’s important.

We uploaded our slides with english transcription for some of them on the “we speak” page.

We are giving 4 out of 20 sessions at Open 2010, an Israeli open source conference.

Michael is giving the last keynote and me and Boris will be opening 2 of the 3 tracks: open startup and open enterprise.

I’m going to talk about “NoSQL, when, why, and how” and Boris is giving an introduction to Rails, web development that doesn’t hurt.

After the tracks we will also have a long 2 hour Ruby and Rails workshop.

See you there ;)

P.S. btw, Astrails is sponsoring this event together with a couple of smaller companies like IBM, Red Hat and VMWare :)

P.P.S. Big thanks goes to Raphael Fogel and People&Computers for organizing the whole thing.

I just recently reinstalled my MacBook Pro, this time with Snow Leopard. So I’m again going through various installation problems I already forgot about from few years back when I installed Leopard.

Anyway, just had to hunt down a problem with mysql gem installation on Snow Leopard.

Apparently if you just do ‘gem install mysql’ it seems to install fine, but doesn’t work.

You get “uninitialized constant MysqlCompat::MysqlRes” error when trying to run rails.

The solution is to pass it some arguments for installation:

ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64" gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config

Oh, and of course install 64bit mysql version before that. I usually just download the binaries from mysql.com.

A few days ago I gave a presentation about Ruby for Sayeret Lambda discussion group.

The title was “Ruby is an acceptable lisp” but the message is better served by “Ruby is Better then Lisp … sometimes” :)

• ruby-is-an-acceptable-lisp.pdf
• online html/jpeg version

The html version is just an export from Keynote so nothing fancy, it only knows how to move forward :) Some slides are bigger, so don’t click again if it seems that its stuck (you will have to refresh to go back), just wait a little.

http://markupslicer.com

Supports ERB and HAML for now, vote on site for more formats.

Beautifully crafted, totally free and it’s kinda fun.

We originally came with the idea to skip this dull and dirty manual parsing and thought that others might find it useful as well.

Play with demo project and tell us how was it.

Simple Object persistency library for Cassandra

• Home: http://astrails.com/smallrecord
• Code: http://github.com/astrails/smallrecord
• Blog: http://blog.astrails.com/smallrecord

Motivation & History (you can skip it :)

I was developing an multiplayer online game for a client (TBD: link when released :) and we decided to use Cassandra for performance and scaling benefits. Also the game’s internal data structures mapped very well to key-value semantics.

I did some research but couldn’t find anything that was Ready at the time to be used for development.

About a week ago about 15 people were gathered in People and Computers offices thanks to Raphael Fogel.

Jerry Cheung, nice guy from Outspokes, told everyone how Outspokes was built from the inside and shared his view on building javascript intensive application with Rails as a backend.

Outspokes uses fancy javascript to allow in-browser collaboration of development/design/client teams to request changes, track progress and report problems on ongoing project. I definitely will try it out.

Boris Nadion from Astrails (that’s us in case you were wondering) told the story of our own MarkupSlicer - free to use project we wrote to simplify creating ERB/HAML layouts and partials out of HTML markup we get from our slicing team.

Vitaly Kushner, also from Astrails, made a nice intro presenation about Cassandra - our choice of NoSQL breed. We working with yet to be disclosed client on very technologically challenging project and cassandra is one of many interesting solutions we working with (You can expect a case study on this project in couple of months, as soon as it will go public).

Cassandra Intro presentation

There is a new (0.2.7) version of Astrails-Safe.

New features since 0.2.5:

• default options for gpg now include '--no-use-agent'
• support for 'command' option for gpg
• quote values in mysql password file
• add 'lib' to $:
• [EXPERIMENTAL] Rackspace Cloud Files support

I’ve just read ”Do You Believe In Magic?” and the following quote resonated particularly well:

“It’s not magic. There is no magic involved. It’s just, if you never learnt Lisp, then you never learned to program, and Ruby’s power is exposing a deficiency in your skills.”

I find it to be very true, and I suppose one of the reasons I’m so happy about Ruby is that I learned Lisp and Scheme before.

Even though I didn’t use Lisp for any sizable project. I tried, but I found it to be quite unfriendly and ‘hairy’ in setup, environment and library support. Ruby solved all that for me w/o sacrificing almost anything power vise.

The opportunity: 120 happy dreamers cooking for 54 hours of pure startup joy, well-fed and ready to work. Of course, I’m talking here about Startup Weekend Israel.

The challenge: Come up with an idea that can be implemented in a couple of days, yet is so cool, so innovative, and so useful that I could attract the best of the best.

Read the rest at blogtheblog.jobthejob.com

P.S Now we have some pictures too there, you should check it out

If you follow us on twitter (@astrails if you wondering) you already know that we are at the Startup Weekend Israel right now.

Which is going amazing by the way, thanks for asking, lots and lots of nice people, very creative and energetic atmosphere, food and beer.

Turns out our idea attracted a great team of developers, designers and business developers.