Plasticx Blog

One of the coolest small Rails apps is Ozimodo
http://ozimodo.rubyforge.org/ , a Rails based tumblelog

Micro blogging and non-traditional forms of communication are helping to evolve how we’ll be communicating in the future. Its list of contributors is a veritable who’s who in the Rails community.

Here’s an enumeration of aspects that make Ozimodo great in the current context

I am happy to announce yet another very small URL generator called

hurl it => http://hurl.it/

In fact its first entry is this very blog post.

There are obvious predecessors and the recent (and very cool) Rails based urlTea which itself I think is inspired by rubyurl

But hurl it is not those things, hurl it is a Camping application. Camping is a Microframework written by why the lucky stiff, a MVC based framework that is a total size of 4K and written in Ruby. Camping applications are small, light weight, and are intended to do one thing really well. hurl it does one thing very well – RESTfully create and serve very small URLs.

hurl it has these attributes

• is a Camping application
• RESTful (index, show, and create verbs) and responds to application/xml
• tunes its use of ActiveRecord for use with the performanced minded MyISAM engine
• developed with Agile practices including full unit and functional tests using Mosquito
• is open source under the MIT License
• has a neat-o base 62 number algorithm using the alphabet of 0-9,A-Z,a-z that would be good to know on an interview

hurl it is meant to be the honey layer in your peanut butter sandwich on wheat bread. hurl it is not the sandwich nor tries to be anything more than really super awesome at representing long URLs as really short URLs.

Things I’ve found helpful during hurl it development

• Evan Weaver Camping Master
• top-secret tuned mysql configurations for rails (EV)
• rv-a-tool-for-luxurious-camping a SysV init.d reference implementation for daemonizing Camping apps (EV)
• Camping, a Microframework (by _why)
• Mosquito Camping test framework (by TF GG)

I wrote a SysV init.d setup for Gentoo based on Evan’s work call RV2

Source

http://github.com/monde/hurl hurl hurl

I’m now a company!!!

Sasquatch, Inc.

Yet another programmer becomes a consultant.

Linux, Ruby, and a little Java to make some latte money.

Cellphone Multimedia Message Service (MMS) messages that your cellphone sends are really just email formatted text. You can send MMS to other cellphones or to a real email address. I wrote a post about using the Rails receive method in ActionMailer::Base to process email decoding email attachments with ActionMailer::Base receive If you just want to process the mail but don’t need the hook into Rails then just use the TMail class’s parse method directly

mail = TMail::Mail.parse(raw_email)

I’ve been processing MMS emails via TMail recently and have found the cellphone carriers often modify user generated content (text, videos, images) to include advertising for their services.

After reading Slashdot’s review of “CSS: The Missing Manual” by David Sawyer McFarland, I was interested in learning more about CSS so I picked up a copy.

I recommend the book for your collection and here are my notes from reading the book …

There are lots of references that say you can decode images and other media attachements in email using the receive method of ActionMailer::Base

Ruby On Rails Wiki is one: HowToReceiveEmailsWithActionMailer.

Rails Recipes Recipe #68 “Testing Incoming Mail” is another.

But those references and many others on the internet don’t show you how to really do it.

Here’s how its done …