RailsConf will be the place to be. As of right now, I'm going to find a way there. I looked at the tentative Cubs schedule and they are home the next week so hopefully I can stretch out the weekend to catch a game at the Friendly Confines.
The good news about this mini-project is that the idea isn't that complicated. Users will choose a winner for each college football bowl game. For the four BCS games, they will also give a final score. This will be used as a means of breaking a tie and possibly some bonus points.
The bad news is there isn't a ton of time to put something together and much of the data isn't accessible via RSS or some other sort of formatted text. That's ok though since there aren't that many bowl games though some college football fans might not agree with that.
The first order of business is to create a MySQL database and some tables. At the beginning, I see four tables to hold data.
One for users which will have fields for username, password, last_login and current_score. Username and password will be VARCHAR's, last_login a datetime and the current_score a number.
There will also be a teams table which will just have the school name and the nick name. A locations table will be for the city and state information. Some cities have multiple games so we'll create a has_many relationship for that. We will also store the longitude and latitude in the locations table in case we want to do any mapping of the games.
For now, the final table will be games. We'll be storing the name of the bowl game, foreign keys to the teams table for both the home team and the away team, the time and date of the game and finally a foreign key to the locations table for the location of the game.
Undoubtedly, there will be additional tables to create but for now, these four will get us moving. The next post will look at loading the database with some initial data and using ActiveRecord outside of Rails.
Technorati Tags:
bowledover
The Pragmatic Programmers have released their second title in the Friday series which are short and concise, focusing on only one thing. This one is on the Google Maps API.
It looks like it covers exactly what you need in order to put together an application using the API. I'll probably purchase it and maybe work on something over the weekend. We'll see.
Technorati Tags:
googlemaps, pragmaticprogrammer
Before I begin, let me first state the standard boilerplate of not speaking for my employer in any way and things discussed here are in no way an example of a future application or service. For that matter, nothing in here even happened. Ok, that's out of the way.
You are sitting in your office today, doing your usual work when your boss comes in and asks you when the college football bowls start. You check the usual suspects of sports sites and find out they start on the 20th of December, roughly 4 weeks away from today. Your boss leaves without explaining why and you don't think more about it until he comes back with that gleam in his eye that managers get when more work is coming your way.
His idea is to have a little contest for anyone who wants to sign up, to pick the winners of all the bowl games. Also, for the four BCS games, users choose the score of the games. There should be a way for the user to track their score as well as see the top scorers.
You start counting backwards from December 20th and your blood pressure raises. You don't have much time from design to implementation to testing to production so you make some quick decisions to get you started. The code will be written using Rails and the database will be MySQL.
The next step will be a quick design overview to make sure the initial pieces are there. That will be the next post.
Technorati Tags:
bowledover, rails
Titus Brown gives some very good advice to anyone with open source projects. Though they seem like common sense to me, I bet many projects could move towards this direction and see better code and community.
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opensource
Brian Smith has a good overview of the new Yahoo! Shopping beta, the Shoposphere.
The idea of social shopping is something which has been explored before with things like Epinions but with the addition of more user-generated content, you could pull more data into it.
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socialshopping
Paul Kedrosky wants a geography-based todo system. Something which will indicate the things he needs to do or people he needs to see when he arrives in a new location.
I think you could put together something very close to this together combining Backpack with one of the map API's. Any of your lists in Backpack could have a prefix indicating which city you wanted the event or reminder to show up in, then when grabbing the list via their API or RSS, you could mark it on a map.
This could be a fun little weekend project.
Edd announces the Call for Participation for the XTech 2006 conference. The proposals are due January 9th so there isn't a ton of time to put something together.
Technorati Tags:
xtech2006, cfp
The Robots reminded me that there are 43 days left in the year. I know it is cliche but it has truly flown by. On Tuesday, it will be a year since I interviewed at EarthLink. Crazy!
At any rate, I have plans for the next 43 days. Plans that will change the world. Ok, that's a bit much but it always feels good to type. I'm hopefully finishing up the first part of a project at work that I've been working on seemingly forever. I know I'm not the only one who feels that way but I still want it done. I've learned a ton while working on it which is what you always want but there are other things to do.
As far as personal projects go, I have two main ideas I want to explore before the end of the year. The first is actually something which needs to be done by the 20th of December. I'll start writing about it probably tomorrow. The other still hasn't fully clicked in my brain but hopefully it will soon.
Matt McAlister takes a look at the two main phrases when talking about users and RSS, adding a feed vs. subscribing to a feed. I definitely agree that Subscribe is a loaded word, one with plenty of monetary thoughts. Do you have to pay for this subscription? Will it run out like magazines? If so, how do you renew? Sure, these questions seem a bit simplistic but I can hear my mom asking them.
Adding doesn't fare much better. I like Matt's questions of where the feeds go when you add them. If you have a subscriblet of some kind, you hope the feed makes it back to your reader but you really don't know for sure until the next time you check it.
Of the two, I would also go with Subscribe. It seems to state the proper relationship between user and feed. You aren't adding the feed and then ignoring it like you can do with adding events on your calendar. Instead, you are taking the action of subscribing and the subsequent action of reading the feed for as long as you are interested.
This is yet another indication that the mainstream use of RSS is still not a given, at least in its current form.
Technorati Tags:
rss,
aggregators
The ability of a customer to access your Web application is seemingly the most important challenge a company can have, beyond even a sound business model. If your business model works, no one will care if they can't access their data or the data you want to show them.
Ethan Stock points this out quite well. New ideas are being launched daily from new companies and existing ones. These ideas need to be rolled out in ways that guarantee their access.
We are asking our customers to bet their businesses on our ability to deliver. "Flaky but free" simply does not cut it any more. How many of you out there rely on Yahoo or Google email for business-critical communications? What if it went down tomorrow, for 48 hours? What if Salesforce.com stopped working for 48 hours? What if Ebay or Adwords stopped working? Marketing campaigns, communications, and commerce grind to a halt, and real damage is done to real people and real businesses
I know I don't talk a lot here about the work I do other than vague mentions of technology but this post is different. We launched some new stuff yesterday to myEarthLink and I think it is pretty cool. Lest you think I'm just tooting my own horn, I had nothing to do with either of these new pieces.
The first is the ability to drag-and-drop various widgets on the screen. During the drag process, you will see the widget ghosted out, hovering over the spot it will land. I think this is a very nice way of presenting what the new look will be before the actual dropping. Most of the heavy lifting was done by Phrenchee.
The other new thing is an updated sports widget. The previous widget was just pathetic. It didn't look good nor did it give much data. The new one though just rocks. You can see previous, current and future games. If you hover over the final score, you'll see a quick summary. It just is so much nicer than what was there.
If you haven't signed up for myEarthLink, you can do so at this registration page. Don't worry, you aren't signing up for EarthLink access, just for access to things like our portal. There are going to be plenty of new things coming down the pipe so why not sign up early.
Next week in Cambridge, the Symposium on Social Architecture will take place. Looks like the usual suspects will be there but should be an interesting event. I tried to drop hints to my boss' boss that it would be a great idea for me to go but smart guy that he is, he refused to take the bait.
Oh well, I'm sure there will be others to attend. It would definitely be nice if they would end up here in SoCal but I don't see that happening anytime soon.
The 37 Signals crew posted an excerpt from the upcoming Blackberry Hacks book which shows how to use Basecamp with the mobile device. The advice can be used with any mobile device that supports email and browsing. I'm going to try and use my Treo in the same way.
Kathy Sierra lists qualities software products should have if they want to be successful. You could of course make sure you have these same qualities in your daily life and perhaps you'll get more dates.
Karl Baum updates an earlier post with a simpler way to use system properties in Spring configuration files.
I know that I could easily make changes to use this and it would help our deployment immensely. Great.. Just what I need to find out about on Friday night.
Greg Wilson has a theory on why there is so much bad software... because people are bad at meetings. Having been to a meeting or two, I think he's on to something.
In fact, his rules for good meetings should be printed and put to memory. I'd love to see them followed here. I'm more than willing to be a guinea pig.
Kevin Burton looks at the same crowd being at any Bay area event. I'm wondering where the LA version of this is. With all the folks here in SoCal, you'd think we could have things like TagTuesday and the TechCrunch BBQ. The last Mobile Monday was supposed to be in September yet it didn't happen and its blog hasn't been updated since August.
Hmmmm, I wonder if I could set up some things with the facilities at work.
I was reading thru my feeds and found this post from Obie Fernandez, responding to either a blog posting or a mailing list message from someone here at work. I'm really not sure who wrote the original message but they are wrong on the main argument in the post, that the engineers have decided Rails can't scale.
Being one of those engineers, I figured I should respond on some level. Yes, we are definitely using Rails to prototype new ideas and more than likely we'll rebuild them in Java but that isn't set in stone. I think the majority of folks on the team would be very interested in launching their Rails code into production. The problem is that I haven't seen any Rails apps which face the level of traffic we would be sending it. Are there any in production having greater than 5 million page views a day? If so, I would love to know about them.
I'm just going to gloss over the last thrust of Obie's message, the part about just firing the Java guys. That's just silly and short-sighted. Doesn't it make sense that if these Java guys are prototyping in Rails that maybe there is more to them than just following whatever Java framework is hot.