Scott Watermasysk

Flexibility and Power

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 09:49:50 -0700

Flexibility is the ability to change how software works; power is the ability to do more with less effort.

Scarcity in Design

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 10:31:35 -0700

Great interview of Fred Brooks in the August 2010 Wired magazine (sorry, no link at this time).

The critical thing about the design process is to identify your scarcest resource. Despite what you think that very often is not money. For example, in a NASA moon shot, money is abundant but lightness is scare; every ounce of weight requires tons of material below. On the design of a beach vacation home, the limitation may be your ocean-front footage. You have to make sure your whole team understands what the scarce resource you’re optimizing.

Ocean City Maryland

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 02:58:32 -0700

The red sun.

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DogFish Head Advertising

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 17:29:34 -0700

If you are hiring, I could sell a ton of this stuff.

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Smoking in Maryland

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 17:28:28 -0700

Way to stick it to the smokers Maryland.

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"Your #1 competitor starting out will always be the BACK button, nothing else."

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 10:34:55 -0700

“Your #1 competitor starting out will always be the BACK button, nothing else.”

- Gary Tan

Lost Time

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 06:38:14 -0700

Lost Time:

The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work.

Derek Sivers - My Loss

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 13:01:33 -0700

Derek Sivers - My Loss:

We all underestimate our ability to massively change our life when it’s gone off track.

Reading PDF eBooks on an iPad

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 06:45:00 -0700

The recent update to iBooks added PDF support. Unfortunately, the reading experience is no where near as good as the epub experience.

This was a bummer for me since I own quite a few eBooks in PDF format (and converting them to epub does not yield better results).

Thankfully, a tweet from John Grubber lead me to SimplyPDF which makes the PDF experience much more tolerable by allowing you to focus on a particular area of the page.

Here are too screen shots to compare:

The Default View in SimplyPDF

The Focused View in SimplyPDF

While it is no way near as good as a epub in iBooks or mobi in the Kindle app, it does get the job done for now.

A really interesting look at the design decisions in FireFox 4...

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 06:35:40 -0700

A really interesting look at the design decisions in FireFox 4 for moving tabs to the top of the main window.

You are as Dumb as You Ever Will Be

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 06:18:04 -0700

A great line from Design Patterns in Ruby by Russ Olsen in talking about You Ain’t Gonna Need It (YAGNI):

Barring a sharp blow to the head, as you stand here today you are as dumb as you ever will be.

You get smarter every day. Your users (generally) understand your app and their needs better every day. Unnecessarily trying to solve future problems is really just guessing, so why do it if you do not have to?

Steak at a dollar store. Could this happen anywhere but in the...

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 10:15:58 -0700

Steak at a dollar store. Could this happen anywhere but in the US?

Coder.io

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 05:50:49 -0700

Coder.io:

It’s my attempt at fixing the process of discovering and maintaining knowledge and references relating to development topics I’m/you’re interested in.

In short, you tell Coder.io what you are interested in and it filters through the content and presents you with a list of fresh content.

Great video by Gary Vaynerchuk at RailsConf about actually...

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 06:26:48 -0700

Great video by Gary Vaynerchuk at RailsConf about actually giving a damn.

Think for a second if you would have made that last tweet or posted a very negative blog rant if your grandchildren might someday read it?

People are increasingly understanding once something gets published online, it is impossible for it to be removed. However, I don’t think people are completely grasping the historical perspective of information in general.

Stack Exchange Making the Internet Better

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 06:13:00 -0700

Stack Exchange Making the Internet Better:

Everything contributed to the Stack Exchange network of websites is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution – Share Alike. This means it belongs to everyone, and can be freely reused (even commercially!), so long as it is follows our simple rules of attribution. That’s our contract with the community — it’s your generously contributed content that makes these websites worth visiting in the first place!

The way it should be. Kudos to the Stack Exchange folks for working to make their data as open as possible.

1% Better

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 07:00:00 -0700

In reading Tony Hsieh’s excellent Delivering Happiness there is a blog post by CFO, Alfred Lin, about what can be accomplished by getting 1% better everyday (personally, community, company, etc.).

Imagine yourself making 1% changes every day that compounds and will make you and Zappos 37x better by the end of the year. Imagine if every employee at Zappos was doing the same. Imagine how much better you, Zappos and the world will be next year.

A 1% improvement everyday will yield a 37x return. As an example, $100 with a 1% daily return would net you $3,700 at the end of the year ($100 * (1 + 1%) ^ 365 = $3,778.34).

While you cannot calculate mathematically a 1% life improvement it still a great daily goal. What can you do today to improve the world around you by 1%? Can you do it tomorrow as well?

Great Git Reference

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 06:15:00 -0700

Great Git Reference:

This is the Git reference site. This is meant to be a quick reference for learning and remembering the most important and commonly used Git commands. The commands are organized into sections of the type of operation you may be trying to do, and will preset the common options and commands needed to accomplish these common tasks

The doc and ProGit book integration throughout is great.

Mongoid - Hottest OSS Project Site Ever

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 12:53:19 -0700

Mongoid - Hottest OSS Project Site Ever:

Definitely something to aspire to.

RVM

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 06:08:35 -0700

I have been using a tool called Ruby Version Manager (RVM) for the last couple of weeks and it has been pure gold.

RVM is a command line tool which allows us to easily install, manage and work with multiple ruby environments from interpreters to sets of gems. RVM itself is easy to install!

When I first set it up, I was still using Ruby 1.8.7 at the system (non-RVM) level and set up a quick instance of 1.9.1 in RVM. My initial demo tests worked great, but once I started to actually go beyond the basics with it I started to run into some weird gem issues in regards to executables.

The fix for me was to remove all of my gems (and executables) from the system version of Ruby and instead set up a new instance of 1.8.7 under RVM. Once completed, I just set this instance of 1.8.7 as my system wide default (rvm 1.8.7 —default).

RVM & Textmate

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 11:30:09 -0700

RVM & Textmate:

Looks like this has been out for a while, but it was new for me.

if you get an error executing “rvm wrapper” you will need to update rvm.

Cache Hit Ratio

Sun, 06 Jun 2010 10:30:49 -0700

Cache Hit Ratio:

The great memcached hit ratio is great however even more than that you should target eliminating requests all together. Hit rate is very bad indicator to begin with. Imagine you have application which gets 90 memcache gets (hits) to retrieve some data plus there are 10 more requests which resulted in misses and caused MySQL queries. The hit ratio is 90%. Imagine now you have found a way to store the data which required 90 requests as the single object. You have 1 request (hit) now and 10 misses which drops your hit rate down to less than 10% but performance will likely be a lot better.

For those in the Microsoft space, this logic applies equally well to Velocity/AppFabric. The act of caching is just the first step. You need to think about what you cache, why you are caching it, and then ensure you can re-use it effectively.

Readability

Sun, 06 Jun 2010 06:22:48 -0700

Some nice updates to the excellent Readability bookmark tool.

Purpose Vs. Profit

Sat, 05 Jun 2010 11:52:48 -0700

This really gels with a great book I am reading, Start With Why.

Once you loose site of the purpose (WHY), nothing else really matters.

.Text Lives (sort of)

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 17:00:00 -0700

If you are seeing this post, it means you are visiting my new home on the Intertubes – ScottW.com.

I have owned ScottW.com for a while, so I figured it was time to actually put it to use. Since I was going to make a change, I figured I would take the time to clean some things up and simplify the site.

I removed a bunch of posts which are no longer relevant (example: open positions). I am going to try to push content that is date sensitive over to my tumblr blog.
The site is now generated by Jekyll, powered by Rack-Jekyll, and hosted on Heroku. This means I can write it in a simple text editor and then publish it easily via git.
I am going without comments for now. If you have questions or comments you can email me at scottwater@gmail.com or use the ask feature on Tumblr.
Blog posts about blogs are lame, so I am going to stop here. I really just wanted to callout the new url and apologize for unread posts you may be seeing in your aggregator. Sorry. :(

If you want to see how it is all put together and works, you can grab a copy of it from my git repository.

Setting A Tab Title in Terminal

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 16:00:00 -0800

I have been spending a lot more time in terminal recently. I routinely find myself having more tabs open than I can keep track of.

I then end up forgetting what’s open and end up opening even more tabs which just make the problem worse.

I finally got tired of this and posted a quick question on Twitter. While waiting for a twitter response, I figured I would finally checkout SuperUser which of course had the answer.

You just need to execute the following command:

echo -n -e "\033]0;YOUR TAB TITLE HERE\007"

Since there is no way I will remember that command (and who should) I wrapped it in a function that I can put in my .bash_profile.

function title(){ echo -n -e "\033]0;$1\007"
}

Now, in any tab, I just need to execute:

title 'My Tab Title'

Singing With Sinatra

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 16:00:00 -0800

I attended a couple Ruby sessions at CodeMash this year which really piqued my interest level in Ruby.

For many people (especially web developers) when you hear about Ruby they think Ruby on Rails. While Rails is an impressive framework, there are some other interesting options available. One of them that recently caught my attention (and admiration) is called Sinatra.

Sinatra is a DSL for quickly creating web applications in Ruby with minimal effort.

Sinatra is a drop dead simple way to create a small site, blog, service, or even a prototype. Here is all it takes to serve a web request with Sinatra:

require 'rubygems' require 'sinatra' get '/hi' do "Hello World!" end

While the code above returns the UI inline, there is full support for templates, layouts, and much more.

If you are new to Ruby and want to see what you can do with the language with almost no effort, Sinatra is a great place to start.

I have been hacking around on it for a couple of days and decided to write a simple plugin. While I am sure I will cringe at this code a couple of months from now, I figured I would post it see if it is useful to others.

Goal:
Ensure urls served by the application are consistent by requiring no trailing slash and requiring all urls to be lower cased. If either one of these conditions are not met, the plugin will do a 301 redirect to the proper url.

Here is the actual plugin:

require 'sinatra/base' module Sinatra module ConsistentUrls def validate_url_requests() before { path = request.path.downcase path_to_redirect = nil #if the path ends in '/' remove it path_to_redirect = path[0..-2] if /.+\/$/.match(path) #if the original path was not lower case. NOTE: we lowercase this above to minimize steps path_to_redirect = path if !path_to_redirect && path != request.path #if we need to redirect, build a query_string if(path_to_redirect) query_string = hash_to_querystring(request.params) path_to_redirect << ("?" + query_string) if query_string end redirect path_to_redirect, 301 if path_to_redirect } end #borrowed from http://justanothercoder.wordpress.com/2009/04/24/converting-a-hash-to-a-query-string-in-ruby/ def hash_to_querystring(hash) hash.keys.inject('') do |query_string, key| query_string << '&' unless key == hash.keys.first query_string << "#{URI.encode(key.to_s)}=#{URI.encode(hash[key])}" end end end register ConsistentUrls
end

A minimal application skeleton. The key line is the validate_url_requests which is what invokes the plugin.

require 'rubygems'
require 'sinatra'
require 'consistenturls' #plugin 
validate_url_requests get '/' do "Hello World"
end get %r{(.+)} do |catch_all| "I am the catch all #{catch_all}#{request.url}"
end not_found do "The path #{request.url} does not exist"
end

A set of tests.

require 'demo_app'
require 'test/unit'
require 'rack/test' set :environment, :test class ConsistentUrlsTests < Test::Unit::TestCase include Rack::Test::Methods def app @app || Sinatra::Application end def test_urls_with_trailing_slashes_will_be_redirected execute_url_test('/some-random-url/', '/some-random-url') execute_url_test('/some-random-url/second-path/', '/some-random-url/second-path') end def test_urls_with_trailing_slashes_and_querystrings_will_be_redirected execute_url_test('/some-random-url/?abc=123', '/some-random-url?abc=123') execute_url_test('/some-random-URL/?abc=123&z=abc', '/some-random-url?abc=123&z=abc') end def test_case_sensitive_url_will_be_redirected execute_url_test('/CAPS-LOCK-ROCKS', '/caps-lock-rocks') end def test_case_sensitive_url_with_trailing_slash_will_be_redirected execute_url_test('/CAPS-LOCK-ROCKS/', '/caps-lock-rocks') end def test_case_sensitive_url_with_query_string_will_be_redirected execute_url_test('/CAPS-LOCK-ROCKS?abc=123&def=HIJ', '/caps-lock-rocks?abc=123&def=HIJ') execute_url_test('/CAPS-LOCK-ROCKS/ROCKS/It/ROCKs/?abc=123&def=HIJ', '/caps-lock-rocks/rocks/it/rocks?abc=123&def=HIJ') end def execute_url_test(url_to_test, expected_redirect) get url_to_test follow_redirect! assert_equal last_request.url, 'http://example.org' + expected_redirect end end

Getting started:

Setup steps for Sinatra can be found here.

Two things to note.

1. To run the tests, you will need to get rack-test. I mistakenly assumed this part of Rack which tripped me up a bit.

2. You need to grab Shotgun if you want to have the site reloaded anytime you make a change. This requirement was apparently something that changed recently. It is documented nicely on the Sinatra site, but seems to catch people off guard.

One Less Step

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 16:00:00 -0800

Every step a user must take provides a chance for failure and frustration.

Compare these two shipping confirmation emails from 1-800-Flowers and Zappos.

1-800-Flowers

Zappos

1-800-Flowers actually says, “2 easy steps”.

However, what they are not counting on:

The tracking code is 18 characters. While more savvy computer users will simply copy and paste, many will try to manually enter the 18 characters. Those that do copy and paste will usually need to highlight the text, go to the edit menu select copy… in short, they are usually not going to use control+C and then control+V.
The UPS website is stuck in the mid-90’s and requires you to first pick your country. Don’t every make the wrong choice here (and of course this adds another step).
Users will need to switch back and forth between their email app/screen/tab and the USP screen.

The funny thing about this is 1-800-Flowers actually has other links in the confirmation email, including one to UPS. They just don’t link to the one that really matters.

Branding Gone Wild

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 15:38:04 -0800

I am not a marketing/branding expert, but I am pretty sure this is not a very good idea.

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Only Thing Worse Than A Spammer

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 06:24:07 -0800

...is a really lazy spammer.

Click here to download:

ATT00001..c (0 KB)

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The difference between hiring and recruiting

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 09:57:29 -0800

Recruiting is the act of finding the very best person for a job and persuading them to stop doing what they're doing and come join you

via sethgodin.typepad.com

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Pork

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 08:30:15 -0800

When three types of pork is not enough.

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Twitter Mag

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 05:46:36 -0800

Does the world really this?

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Popular items and Personalized ranking

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:53:15 -0700

The goal of personalization at Google remains the same as ever: to help you find the best content on the web. We hope these new features help you do just that — go Explore for yourself.

via Official Google Reader Blog: Reading gets personal with Popular items and Personalized ranking

All I can say is it is about time. If Google does this right, it could be a serious threat to Digg, Reddit and others.

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How to be lucky

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 04:58:44 -0700

Unlucky people often fail to follow their intuition when making a choice, whereas lucky people tend to respect hunches. Lucky people are interested in how they both think and feel about the various options, rather than simply looking at the rational side of the situation. I think this helps them because gut feelings act as an alarm bell - a reason to consider a decision carefully.

Unlucky people tend to be creatures of routine. They tend to take the same route to and from work and talk to the same types of people at parties. In contrast, many lucky people try to introduce variety into their lives. For example, one person described how he thought of a colour before arriving at a party and then introduced himself to people wearing that colour. This kind of behaviour boosts the likelihood of chance opportunities by introducing variety.

Lucky people tend to see the positive side of their ill fortune. They imagine how things could have been worse. In one interview, a lucky volunteer arrived with his leg in a plaster cast and described how he had fallen down a flight of stairs. I asked him whether he still felt lucky and he cheerfully explained that he felt luckier than before. As he pointed out, he could have broken his neck.

via Be lucky - it's an easy skill to learn

I think it just comes down to attitude. If you wake up everyday thinking it is going to be a crappy unlucky day, it probably will be a crappy day. However, if you wake up and look for some good (luck), you will likely find it as well.

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Ben Huh and the value of keeping it very simple

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 06:04:30 -0700

via How The Owner Of “Fail Blog” And “I Can Has Cheezburger” Keeps Racking Up Wins – With Ben Huh

A really interesting interview with Ben Huh of “I Can Has Cheezburger” on the value of keeping things very simple.

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Google AI

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 09:31:24 -0700

I couldn't remember who Rutgers played next. To save me a couple key strokes I simply Googled "Rutgers Football".

Poof. Before the first search result is the answer to my question. This probably scares content creators, but I like it.

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Better GReader & Helvetireader

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 17:39:31 -0700

The Helvetireader theme in the Better GReader (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6424) FireFox add-on dramatically improves the browser experience of Google Reader.

If you use Google Reader and FireFox I highly recommend checking it out.

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US Airways

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 18:44:11 -0700

Just wanted to give a big shout out to US Airways.

Over the last couple of months they have consistently been cheaper and easier to fly than Continental.

Today I arrived at the terminal a couple hours early. While using the kiosk I was informed there was an early flight and asked if I wanted to switch. I clicked yes, selected a seat and was on my way home about 2.5 hours earlier than expected. There were no extra feels, screens, etc. Just good old fashion do the right thing and get you on the road. Thanks!

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Twitterville

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 14:21:37 -0700

Does the world really need 300 pages on 140 characters?

Sent from my iPhone

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Fire Alarm Fail

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 18:44:30 -0700

I just might have to see if this is true.

I have stayed in quite a few hotels. None of them have had this warning. Instead of buy 300 signs and subjecting your visitors to fire drills, why not just fix the problem?

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If Only 1%

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 20:50:53 -0700

Great write up on the fallacy of the "If only 1% of people purchase my ...." by Derek Sivers.- http://sivers.org/1pct

Money quote: "He forgot there was a number lower than one percent"

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Mono not Chasing Tail Lights

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 20:43:40 -0700

Unsurprisingly someone attacked Miguel and Mono for "always chasing tail lights" which is a common logical fallacy that the anti-Mono folks love to argue...

via A Moment of Zen: Mono not Chasing Tail Lights

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ESPN 360

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 12:45:09 -0700

It works, but it us super flaky.

Anyone else have a better experience with ESPN 360?

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Doodle Jump

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 07:00:40 -0700

The 99 cent iPhone game, Doodle Jump (http://DoodleJump.LimaSky.com) is a great bargain and a ton of fun.

In addition, it has the best social integration of any game I have played up to this point:

1. It as one click access to post scores to Twitter

2. It has one click access to post scores to Facebook and will then compare scores with your friends

3. It will quickly and easily generate an email you can send to your friends to further change

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Is Tekpub (or PeepCode) Worth the Money?

My answer to this question has consistently been, “Only if you value your time”.

As an example, I just started watching Tekpub’s iPhone Development series. There is currently about 2 hours worth of content (and I believe more is on the way). The cost for the series is listed as $25 on the site.

My guess is the videos will save me about 10 to 20 hours of reading, tinkering, and just generally getting things going. Now assuming I put a value of more than $2.50/hr for my time (and i do :), the purchase¹ would be a no brainer.

I also have a subscription to Peepcode which I have been loving as well.

¹ Disclosure: Rob Conery did comp me a full season pass. However, this came when I was about to personally buy a license so I have no qualms writing this review.

SEO with Rack-Rewrite

I am still very much in the camp of write good (and consistent) content first and let SEO handle itself. However, that does not mean you should not keep an eye out for fundamental problems which can cause bad search engine results.

One of these problems I believe every developer of public web sites needs to be mindful of is duplicate content. Duplicate content causes quite a few problems:

You may appear to be a spammer in the “eyes” of a search engine
Links may appear to be directed at two or more urls
Your content may have to compete with itself

I have long been a fan of ISAPI_Rewrite for IIS to help manage and control some of these problems (which is in turn heavily influenced by mod_rewrite). However, since I have moved this site to Heroku, I needed to find another solution.

Thankfully, due to the awesomeness of Rack and middleware, I found a component called Rack-Rewrite and I was able to leverage it with just a couple of minutes effort.

A web server agnostic rack middleware for defining and applying rewrite rules. In many cases you can get away with Rack::Rewrite instead of writing Apache mod_rewrite rules.

I am already using a customized Rack application, Rack-Jekyll, to power this site, so plugging in Rack-Rewrite was just as simple as adding a couple of lines to my rackup file.

Here are the full contents of my config.ru

require "rack/jekyll"
require "rack-rewrite" ENV['RACK_ENV'] ||= 'development'
ENV['SITE_URL'] ||= 'scottw.com' use Rack::Rewrite do r301 %r{.*}, "http://#{ENV['SITE_URL']}$&", :if => Proc.new {|rack_env| ENV['RACK_ENV'] == 'production' && rack_env['SERVER_NAME'] != ENV['SITE_URL'] } r301 %r{^(.+)/$}, '$1' end run Rack::Jekyll.new

The two rules I am running on this site ensure that only scottw.com (no www.) is used and that no links end in a “/”. The first is particularly important since Heroku issues you a custom url as well.

What is really interesting about Rack-Rewrite is the ability to execute code as part of your rewrites. This enables a lot of flexibility (such as ignoring some rewrites when running in development mode).

Dynamics and MongoDB Revisited

A couple of months ago I wrote about wiring up C# 4.0 dynamics with MongoDB. At the time, I opened up the MongoDB-CSharp library and modified a bit of the code.

For obvious reasons this was not a good long term solution. In what appeared to be moment of clarity a couple of days ago, I decided to try to use extension methods and add dynamics on top of MongoDB-CSharp.

To the credit of the MongoDB-CSharp team, getting the basic functionality up and running was very simple. However, in the end it turns out that two compiler hacks (extension methods and dynamics) do not make a right. :)

Once in place, the code to use it looks something like this:

using (var m = new Mongo())
{ var db = m["mongocsharp"]; //ext method to get our "special" collection var col = db.GetDynoCollection("sample"); m.Connect(); //dynamic object to store our data dynamic newDoc = new DynoDocument(); newDoc.title = "Dyno Collections"; newDoc.slug = "dyno"; col.Insert(newDoc); dynamic query = new DynoDocument(); query.slug = "dyno" dynamic result = col.FindOne(query); Console.WriteLine(result.title); m.Disconnect();
}

While it works, it still feels too awkward to be useful IMO. Normally, this I would just delete something like this, but I am trying to let less code die on my machine, so I published it all as a GitHub gist: DynoMongo.

After working on this, I have come to the following conclusions:

MongoDB-CSharp provides adequate flexibility on a schema if I need it in .NET. Mix in Automapper and a helper or two you are all set.
Norm provides more structure if that is a requirementl
Dynamics are really just a parlor trick. If I want the flexibility of a dynamic language, using C# is a mistake.
I should probably try to do something similar in IronRuby, but with all the excellent MongoDB Ruby libraries out there, I am not sure it is even worth the thought.

Anyway, if someone feels this is interesting or useful, feel free to grab the gist, DynoMongo, and run with it.

OData

Yesterday, I made the trip into NYC to added the OData Roadshow.

For those who have not looked into OData:

The Open Data Protocol (OData) is a Web protocol for querying and updating data that provides a way to unlock your data and free it from silos that exist in applications today. OData does this by applying and building upon Web technologies such as HTTP, Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) and JSON to provide access to information from a variety of applications, services, and stores.

I personally do not feel it is truly RESTful, but I am willing to give up some of the tenants of REST in order to gain consistency.
While the protocol specification states it is read and write, I would be 99% of implementations will be read only. In fact, in the 5 hours of content covered by Microsoft, there were zero examples of updates.
If you are using a Linq to “Your Data Access” technology adding OData at a high level will be simple. If you are not using one, I expect this as quite a bit of work.

Overall, I really like the concept. Simple conventions for querying and representing data. IMO, this is the kind of stuff Microsoft should be doing more of (instead of silverlight/windows phone/etc). Couple with their data market (Dallas). I would expect to see much more data becoming available via OData.

On a side note, if the OData Roadshow is coming through your town, I would highly recommend checking it out.

Finally, for a walk through on setting up your own OData service, check out Hanselman’s OData For StackOverflow post.

Accessing a Restful Service with Ruby via NTLM

I have been looking for an easy to use library for accessing a restful service which sits behind NTLM via Ruby for sometime now and had been largely unsuccessful until now!

Last night after a bit more googling, I went back to twitter for help. Grant Carpenter put me on the right path with this:

I had the ntlm part working by patching rubyntlm (and then modifying savon). next stop: wsdl impedance http://bit.ly/982btc

The bitly link above points to a defunct project ruby-httpclient. However, it appears to have been reborn as httpclient with its source now hosted on gitub.

Getting a sample up and running could not be easier.

gem install httpclient
gem install rubyntlm

Note: If you are still doing sudo gem install and not using RVM you are really missing out.

require 'httpclient' domain = 'http://mydomain.com'
user = 'username'
password = 'password'
client = HTTPClient.new
client.set_auth(domain,user,password)
puts client.get("#{domain}/my-path/service/something.json").content

I have only been using the httpclient library for an hour or so, but so far the it appears to be very robust with built in support for just about everything Http.

Calibrating a MBP Battery

I recently noticed the battery on my 12+ month old MBP was only lasting about 2 hours.

A single charge on this model is supposed to last about 7 hours. I expected some decline after a year, but a drop off to 2 hours seemed off. In addition, unlike previous battery declines/issues the time seemed accurate. In other words, it was not reporting more time and then quickly draining.

A quick look around Google led me to the following Apple support document Calibrating your computer’s battery for best performance

Quick Steps:

Completely charge your battery (and keep it charged for 2 hours).
Unplug the power adapter and allow the battery to completely drain. You can use your computer during this time.
Allow it to sit powerless for at least 5 hours.
Recharge the battery.

I was skeptical, but after completing these steps, my full charge estimate went from about 2 hours to almost 5 hours.

Tip: Here is a great tool for MacBook users to monitor their battery’s health – Battery Health Monitor.

Update: It is now appears to be estimating the battery time at about 4 hours instead of 5. Not horrible, but not as good as I originally was seeing. I will report back of the decline continues.