Results of the Edmonton Ruby Meetup Survey

February 2nd, 2010

To start, thank-you to everyone that has taken part in our survey.  We’ve had a great response, and appreciate you taking the time to answer our questions.  Your responses are key in figuring out the details and audience of our meetups.   And now the results…

When we look at the responses it’s clear that  most people are interested in meeting once a month for lighting talks and informal hacking sessions, starting sometime in the next month.  There is also some interest in longer more formal talks and tutorials, so they’ll probably have a place in our meetups at some point too.

Based on these results we’re shooting to start meetings by the end of February and will have more details once a date and time are confirmed.  If you haven’t had a chance to answer the survey polling is still open.   Have your say at http://edmontonrb.org.

For the statistically inclined keep reading for all the results.  (These charts will update in real time.)

What format would you like to see the gatherings take on?

This chart shows users answers to the question, "What format would you like the meetings to take".  Lightning talks, and hacking and informal session are most popular, followed by formal hour-long presentations.

How often would you like to meet?

By far the majority of those surveyed would like to meet once a month.

When would you like the meetings to start?

Seems like people would like them to start soon!

Mark Uncategorized

HELP ME: I’m running 14km to support the RSPCA

July 14th, 2009
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As you may know, I’m going to be doing a race called the City to Surf this August. It’s 14km and I’ve convinced myself doing it won’t kill me (though it may shave a few years off!) The race is setup so you can choose a charity to support, and I’ve selected the RSPCA.

As long-distance doggy daddies we’ve both been thinking a lot about the welfare of our pet, and know that he’s been well taken care of. We also know that not all pets are as lucky as Bruno. The RSPCA helps thousands of animals in need every year, and we thought supporting it would be a great way to honour Bruno while we’re away.

If you’re interested in sponsoring me I’ve got a page setup at:

http://city2surf.everydayhero.com.au/mark_bennett

Mark Uncategorized

Discovering services using Bonjour, DNSSD, and Ruby

June 3rd, 2009
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This is the third part in a series of articles I’ve been writing on using Zeroconf (aka Bonjour) in Ruby.  The first post covered Zeroconf and how to install DNSSD, the most popular Ruby Zeroconf libary. The second post went through creating and registering a web service using Zeroconf so other machines on your network can find it.

In this post we’ll digress a bit and write a command-line tool to monitor and explore the information Zeroconf broadcasts on your network.  This will give us some background for the next post when we modify our web server to list other servers of a similar kind running on your network.  If you’re already familiar with how to browse and retrieve information about Zeroconf services using DNSSD then you may want to skip ahead. Read more…

Mark Uncategorized , , , , , , , ,

Registering a service using DNSSD and Zeroconf

May 24th, 2009
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In this series of posts I’m using the power of Zeroconf and DNSSD to share my strawberry ice cream advocacy web site with the rest of the network. In the last post we learned all about Zeroconf and how to install DNSSD so you can use Zeroconf from Ruby.

In this post I’ll put DNSSD to work and we’ll use it to register our web site on the network.

Read more…

Mark Uncategorized , , , , , , , ,

Strawberry advocacy with Zeroconf and DNSSD

May 24th, 2009
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Strawberry Ice Cream

Strawberry ice cream has a bad rep.

It’s not as sexy as chocolate and not as safe as plain vanilla. Instead it’s immediately relegated to third place in most ice cream debates.

Not satisfied with this situation I did what any coder would do and created a web site to evangalize strawberry ice cream using Sinatra.

Read more…

Mark Uncategorized , , , , , , , ,

UPDATE: Bringing test driven development to Drupal 5

April 2nd, 2009
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Test Driven Development BadgeA few days ago I made a post about modifying phpunit_setup.inc to enable test driven development on Drupal 5.  Since then a few things have happened.

Drupal TDD

The first big news is that phpunit_setup.inc is now part of a new project called Drupal_TDD.  To quote our README file the project is,

“…designed to make Test Driven Development with Drupal easy and enjoyable.”

As part of this change the source code for phpunit_setup.inc has moved to GitHub.  This will allow us to collaborate more easily on phpunit_setup.inc in the future, and should make it easier for any readers hoping to give test driven development with Drupal a try.

Check out the project page for news and updates, or to download the latest version of phpunit_setup.inc.  You can also visit the Drupal TDD wiki for documentation and examples.

Good-bye Backports, Hello Automated Version Detection

In other news, I’ve also been busy refactoring code to integrate some thoughts and feedback I’ve received.  The main changes are:

  1. Using phpunit_setup.inc in Drupal 5 now works just like using it on Drupal 6. You no longer need to include drupal6_backports.inc in your unit test files.  The same steps Pat outlines on his blog to use phpunit_setup.inc in Drupal 6 will now work with Drupal 5.  This also means you won’t need to change your tests when migrating between versions.
  2. When running under Drupal 5 phpunit_setup.inc now creates the same database schema as running a fresh Drupal 5 install. Rather than backporting the Drupal 6 installation process to Drupal 5 which created tables you wouldn’t normally use in a Drupal 5 installation, phpunit_setup.inc now automatically detects the version of Drupal you’re using and runs the appropriate database installation procedure.

There are still more announcements on the way, but that’s all we can reveal right now.  Stay tuned for further developments!

Mark Uncategorized , , , , , ,

PHOTO FRIDAY: Extreme Closeup

March 27th, 2009
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_DSC0179.jpg

The theme for this weeks PhotoFriday is, ‘Extreme Close-up‘.  This is as close as I would like to get to this fellow.

Mark Uncategorized ,

Bringing test driven development to Drupal 5

March 27th, 2009

UPDATE: Since this post was written phpunit_setup.inc has been moved into the Drupal TDD project. phpunit_setup.inc has also been updated to not require the drupal6_backports.inc file.  Read my post on the changes for the details.

Inspired by the work of Pat Shaughnessy in a series of great articles he wrote on Test Driven Development (TDD) using Drupal (1234567, and 8) I was motivated to take his code and use it on my current Drupal project.

Read more…

Mark Uncategorized , ,

Common vim settings

March 25th, 2009
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I’m frequently moving between computers (or vm images) and find I need to quickly enter some of my favourite vim settings at a new computer.

I’m posting this mostly as a reference for myself but please use it for your own purposes.  Just paste the text below into the .vimrc file in your home directory.

set cindent
set smartindent
set autoindent
set tabstop=2
set softtabstop=2
set expandtab
set shiftwidth=2

Mark Uncategorized

Rogers WAP/MMS/Emai on Motorola V3

April 18th, 2008

I recently got a new Motorola phone unlocked and carrier independant.  Inserting a SIM card is enough to send and receive phone calls, however to use advanced services like picture messaging and the internet some setup needs to be done.

During my searching I had trouble finding these settings on my carrier’s website.  It turns out there are actually two connections you need to setup.  The first allows you to connect to the internet, and the second allows to you send and receive MMS messages.  After scouring some very long forum posts to find these I thought I should make it easier on others to find these settings for themselves.

Rogers Motorola Internet Settings

Name: Rogers
Homepage: http://www.mymobilehomepage.rogers.com
Service type1: HTTP
Gateway IP: 010.128.001.069
Port1: 80
Domain1: blank
Service Type 2: Wap Secure
Gateway IP 2: 010.128.001.069
Port 2: 9203
Domain 2: blank
DNS1: 000.000.000.000
DNS 2: 000.000.000.000
Timeout: 15 mins
CSD no. 1:
User name 1:
Password 1:
Speed (BPS) 1: 9600
Line type 1: ISDN
CSD no. 2:
User Name 2:
Password 2:
Speed (BPS) 2: 9600
Line type 2: ISDN
GPRS APN: goam.com
User name: wapuser1
Password: wap

Rogers Motorola Media/MMS Settings

Name: Rogers MMS
Homepage: mms.gprs.rogers.com
{all the other settings are identical to the previous ones except for the last 3}
GPRS APN: Media.com
User Name: Media
Password: mda01

Hope this saves others some of the grieve I had tracking these down!

Mark Uncategorized ,