Looking forward to the (free) OpenSocial Dev Garage this weekend at Cohabitat in Dallas. I’ve been fiddling with Facebook applications, and this should give me what I need to prep my apps for both platforms. Neat and well timed.
2008 Music Review
Inspired by my buddy Tim’s annual email, I’ve posted some of the musical highlights of my year. Unlike Tim, I am unable to summarize my musically year based on items released that year, so excuse the random assortment of new and old…but here’s what I’ve been listening to this year, in no particular order.
Deer Tick, War Elephant, Not at all what you would expect from the cover. Moody pop with catchy melodies and a few rockers.
Todd Snider, Near Truths and Hotel Rooms, My favorite songwriter at his laid back best live.
Frank Stokes, Creator of the Memphis Blues, In all my blues listening, I somehow passed over Frank until this year. Great, Great acoustic blues.
My Morning Jacket, Evil Urges, Great band’s best record, IMHO.
Avett Brothers, Mignonette, Avetts continue to provide great new take on string band music. “Pretty Girl from Cedar Lane” is my favorite track.
Justin Townes Earle, The Good Life, Spawn of Steve puts up a fine mix of honkytonk, swing and fine songwriting. This one was a bit of a surprise for me. Not spectacular or life-changing, but a very solid and enjoyable record that I keep coming back to.
Chatham County Line, IV, “The Carolina” is the best new bluegrass song I’ve heard in years. The whole record captures the innocent purity of the best bluegrass, without ever falling into the schmaltzy, corny stuff that losses me on so many contemporary bluesgrass albums.
Blitzen Trapper, Furr, “Furr” and “God & Suicide” are highlights of this fine poppy, rock record.
Laura Cantrell, Trains and Boats and Planes, She covers “The Wreck of the Edmunds Fitzgerald.” Is any additional endorsement necessary?
Servoy: mod_js_core v0.4
I’ve updated my Servoy module, mod_js_core, to version 0.4. This is the first version which includes not only the adapted extensions from the Prototype.js library, but also some Servoy specific convenience methods for working with forms and foundsets.
Servoy tip: fetch n:1 record via calculation
In a Servoy solution, often you have a record and you want to access a record that is related via an n:1 relation. Say, for example, you have a relationship from contacts to companies. You are working with a contact record, and you need to fetch the related company into a variable to work with.
The proper way to do this is first to test for the presence of a record, and then fetch it through the relation you have defined. If it's something you're going to do often, you can wrap that logic in a dataprovider calculation on the contacts table, however. Try defining a "MEDIA" type calculation something like this:
JavaScript:
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function get_company()
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{
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return databaseManager.hasRecords(contacts_to_companies) ? contacts_to_companies.getRecord(1) : null;
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}
Then, when you need to access the related record in code, use that calculation instead of reproducing the logic to fetch the related company....like:
JavaScript:
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var contact = foundset.getRecord(foundset.getSelectedIndex(); // fetch a contact from anywhere
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var company = contact.get_company;
I find this a very handy shortcut to have around and try to define a "get_xxx" method on all my child tables that allow me to fetch the related parent in the relation.
Servoy-Twitter example: mod_twitter
[Updated version of mod_twitter now on my developers page]
Well, Bob Cusick threw down the gauntlet, and it's not like I had work to do (AH!)...so I whipped up mod_twitter. It's a simple Servoy (v4 or greater) module that shows how to get the public timeline, user timeline, and post a tweet to Twitter from inside Servoy. Enjoy.
Converting GPT partition to MBR for Vista
When you arrive home from a conference (which you were, of course, smart enough to bring your Mac to), and find that your Windows laptop won't boot because in the process of doing absolutely nothing while you were away, the hard disk failed catastrophically (grr-click, grr-click, type fail), and the other disks you have laying around all are formatted with GPT partitions, which the windows installer fails to recognize...you need to:
- Enter the repair console in the Vista boot disk
- type "diskpart" to enter the partition utility
- type "Sel disk 0" to select the main drive in the laptop
- type "clean"
- type "exit" and try again with the installer and it will work.
I actually needed to do quite a few more things, mainly involving Google and writing run on sentences in my blog -- but you get the idea.
ServoyWorld Slides
I think today's presentation went pretty well. Here's the Slides for those interested.
ServoyCasts
In preparation for ServoyWorld next week, I've been experimenting with screencasting. The result is a new site, ServoyCasts, where I aspire to post new Servoy-related instructional screencasts from time to time.
I haven't reached the production values I'd hoped for the first couple of episodes, but you have to start somewhere, ya know? I think I'll be better able to practice and edit these once I get over the initial annoyance of hearing my own recorded voice.
I will probably try to address generally more advanced topics in this series, since Servoy already does a great job of covering the basics in a similar series of tutorial on their site.
“Build a bundle” of Mac software
Seth's gone live with his "build a bundle" extension to his charity Mac software auctions.
Pick what you need, make an offer...all the money goes to fight cancer. Everyone wins!
TAKScopes update
Just rolled out an update to TAKScopes, a Rails site I built for Rice University.
The site now allows for automatic guest login to view sample of the resources available, so you can browse a little more of the site without a paid account. You still can't see the admin interfaces, which is probably the neatest aspect from a development point of view, but it's still cool that you can see some of the content they are pushing out. The site is getting a lot of users now, especially via ISDs all through the Houston area.
mod_console on Google code
I'm moving my free Servoy modules to Google code. mod_console is the first to go.
10-ish years?
Anyone remember exactly when Userland released Manila? I was looking at the date, and realizing I think I've been blogging for about 10 years. I started briefly with an static site, using Frontier's web framework, then moved to Manila -- running on a 68k Quadra over my 128k DSL line, sometime around 1998. Wow, time flies.
I didn't migrate my Manila site to Conversant, when I moved to it, but the archives of this site go back to that change on March 26, 2000.
It was really, really fun to be involved in a community that was developing blogging in the early days. First in the Userland Frontier community, later as an extension of that community with the Macrobyte gang.
Just do it!
Bob Cusick put it in far more detailed an eloquent terms, but when it comes down to it the best way to do software development is to "Just do it!" and not spend so much time planning to do it.
Testing WordPress for iPhone
Seems to work. Probably won't make me blog anymore, however.