Lone Star Ruby Conference

I went to (and spoke at) my first Ruby conference this past weekend. Lone Star Ruby Conference was held in Austin and consisted of 1 training day & 2 days of conference sessions. There were 2 tracks, and even still I was often conflicted on which session to attend. The hallway conversations were...

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Load Testing our Heroku app

I've said many times before how much I love Heroku. Though they've had an unusually large amount of downtime this week (~1 hour), I'm still loving their service. One of the applications that we're building is expecting a large wave of traffic shortly following a blitz PR campaign. The golden question...

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Using CarrierWave with Mongoid

I'm moving a side project over to Rails 3, and I purposely chose a set of technologies that I hadn't used yet. Rails 3 Mongoid (hosted on MongoHQ) Haml CarrierWave (for file uploads) I'll post about the general experience of this project later, but suffice it to say I'm liking this stack a lot. But this...

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GiggleTouch Featured in the App Store

I never got around to blogging this, but a few weeks ago I created my first iPad app (it's a universal binary, so it works on iPhone as well). It's called GiggleTouch and it's $0.99, available on the Apple App Store. So, what is it? GiggleTouch is simply an app for young children. My 1-year-old twins...

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Dealing with Dates & Time Zones in Objective-C

Date formatting is always one of those areas (especially in a newer language) where you continually need to look it up to do it the right way. In an application that I'm building I have a need to deal with dates coming from an XML feed, so I need to parse them as a string. I also need to be able to display...

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Sorry Safari 5

I love browser innovation. I like seeing new features and I'm always eager to switch to the faster, better, more comfortable browser. After hearing good things on Twitter, I was actually ready to put all my eggs in the Safari basket. That is, until I tried using it for a week. First, the good things...

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ASP.NET MVC 2 in Action has Arrived

You can order it from Manning or Amazon affiliate link . My thoughts on this edition: In this edition we took a different approach. The first edition, while it reviewed well, had a barrier of entry. It was purposely for the intermediate to advanced developer. We wanted to make this 2nd edition approachable...

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Installing PostgreSQL for Rails on Mac OS X

If you're doing any serious Rails work with Heroku you'll eventually want to run the same database server they are, namely PostgreSQL. One such reason is if you plan on using Geokit , all of the geo math is done at the database level and thus not available on Sqlite. There are numerous ways of installing...

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Give Your Eyes a Break with Safari 5 Reader

Since Safari 5 was released I decided to set it as the default browser for a week and see how I liked it. Previously my default was Firefox, but mainly because the developer tools are so kick ass with it. Chrome is nice and fast (and I use it still), but doesn't feel like a Mac app and I was seriously...

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Speaking at iPhone Dev Con in San Diego

I'll be heading to San Diego in September at iPhone/iPad Dev Con 2010 . I'll be giving two talks: iPhone SQLite Techniques iPhone Dev for .NET Developers This is a great chance to get some top notch training for iPhone & iPad development. The conference is from September 27th - 29th. If you register...

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