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2008-03-23
Why Rails is total overkill and why I love Rack

Rails is total overkill. It tries to do "everything" in a massive framework where major components are tightly intervowen. Smaller frameworks like Merb and Camping have already shown you don't NEED this. I argue you don't need a framework at all - you need highly cohesive, loosely coupled components. That is ...

2008-03-23
Waking up to snow in late March....

was something I thought I was done with when I moved from Norway to London... At least it's not actually settling down. I will however stay indoors all day in protest.

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2008-03-22
Rack middleware: Adding cache headers

I'm playing with a small web based RSS reader, and one of the things it does is cache a lot of data to reduce the impact on the sites I follow feeds from. However I realized this a couple of days ago I'd completely forgotten to set cache headers, and I ...

2008-03-22
Rewriting content types with Rack

UPDATE: I have just added another Rack entry: Rack Middleware: Adding cache headers

Rack is a common API between webservers and frameworks for Ruby. It allows all kinds of nice stuff, like chaining filters that each do one small and self-contained part of the processing and are easy ...

2008-03-21
Draw a logo with gradients with Ruby and Cairo

UPDATE: I have posted yet another Cairo tutorial: Web2.0 style logo reflection with Ruby and Cairo

After this entry about drawing with Cairo I decided to play around some more. The following example uses the functions I included my previous entry (you'll need to include the require's and ...

2008-03-21
Web2.0 style logo reflection with Ruby and Cairo

I keep trying to learn more about Cairo, and cheesy logo effects seems to be as good a way as any. This evening I was playing around with clip paths, and decided to use it to create some reflections. Here are the results:

2008-03-21
Simple drawing in Ruby with Cairo

UPDATE: I've just added another howto for Cairo about how to draw a logo with gradients

I've been playing around with Cairo for some time, and have recently been starting to rely on it more and more to avoid having to deal with drawing programs. I'm a command ...

2008-03-21
Being a recovering startup employee tired of gambling

I finally feel I am over the post-Edgeio "daze". A startup is always exhausting, particularly when things aren't going your way, and after every startup I've worked in there's been this period where my mood swings between elation and euphoria it's over and that I can go back to a semi-normal ...

2008-03-21
Using Sequel and Ruby to import the Geonames database

GeoNames is a project to gather geographical information under the creative commons attribution license, which means it's ideal for commercial use and hobbyists alike.

The version I have contains a whopping 6.7 million. names of populated places, locations and all kinds of other things that have a name and ...