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:

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 ...

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 ...

Shotgun: The Rubinius virtual machine and some musings on compiling Ruby

If you're interested in the future of Ruby, read Shotgun: The Rubinius virtual machine - it's a great overview of Rubinius, one of the promising alternative Ruby implementations.

Rubinius seems very clean - certainly a great step forward over Ruby 1.8. I haven't yet looked enough at YARV / ...

Sequel with Sqlite caveat: Sorting on dates

One slight hickup it's worth being aware of when storing timestamps in Sequel is that if you use the Sqlite adapter, the timestamp is stored as an ISO 8601 string with timezone, like this:

 2008-03-20T11:26:52Z 

The "Z" at the end signifies UTC.

This isn't a problem if you're ...

Sequel ORM: Right level of abstraction

The more I use Sequel, the more I am coming to believe the level of abstraction it picks is just right. You use operations that mirror SQL, but in a mostly Ruby-ish way. Most importantly SQL is so completely wrapped that I've yet to see any need to write "raw" ...

Syntax highlighting in Ruby

I love syntax highlighting - I have gotten so dependent on it I find it painful to use editors without it. So it's extremely annoying to post code snippets without it online too.

Thankfully it's trivially simple to do in Ruby. For this blog I really wanted a solution that ...

Sequel praise and Sqlite type translation problems

I ran into a very annoying problem with Sqlite yesterday, triggered by Sequel. But first some praise for how simple Sequel makes things most of the time:

One of the nice things about Sequel is that it allows me to write complex queries in pure ruby, without ever (so ...

My blog, version 2

I started and ended my first blog back in 2005. What caused the demise of my blog later that year was the workload I ended up with as we started preparing to launch Edgeio during evenings and weekends while I was still at Yahoo.

It's time to give it a go ...