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Derek
At the Bovine Bakery in Point Reyes Station, CA, there’s a custom shelf on the wall that holds a collection of coffee cups. I thought it was a nice decoration, but then I read the posted notes – people can leave a coffee cup and use it instead of a throw-away paper cup. It’s a win for the Bovine Bakery, the environment, and the Point Reyes community.
Why I love this idea:
- Less paper cups in the trash
- The coffee is $0.25 cheaper when you use your own cup
- I’d be more likely to get my coffee from a cafe where I leave my coffee cup
- It’s a great decoration – the coffee cup is like an online avatar. My favorite is the metal coffee cup in the bottom right.
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Derek
Bill Siggelkow and James Mitchell of the Atlanta Ruby Users Group have put together Ruby Roundup, a solid podcast highlighting the news around the Ruby community.
It’s difficult keeping up with Ruby news. Listening to the podcast is a productive way to do it.
Posted in What We Wrote, Ruby on Rails | no comments
James
If all you Rails programmers love TextMate as much as I do, you will want to know that my TextMate book is now shipping. Amazon has it in stock already.
If you been a casual TextMate user until now, I promise this is the best excuse you’ve ever had to put an end to that. Allan Odgaard, the creator of TextMate, actually read through the book as I worked fixing my errors and adding a terrific collection of helpful tips. You just can’t beat having that kind of knowledge. That’s why I’ve already been using the book as my personal TextMate reference for months now.
Pick up a copy. You won’t regret it.
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Derek
Recently I moved from San Mateo to San Francisco. Like any move, it involved a couple phone calls to utility companies.
I was really impressed with Pacific Gas & Electric. When a company has a dominating position in their industry, it’s pretty easy to see why customer service can drop down the priority list.
When I called PG&E to setup service at my new address, the call started like any other – the typical “we are experiencing an abnormally large call volume” message. But after that announcement, PG&E offered to call me back when an opening occurred.
It worked perfectly – I received a call a bit later and was instantly connected to an operator.
I’d argue that 99% percent of the time, it’s people and not technology that result in better customer service (here’s a great story about Best Buy and cookies). It’s great to see it work the other way.
Call centers are a particularly interesting area. They won’t overstaff to just handle the peak times, but the service still needs to be adequate when things get busy. PG&E’s callbacks work great, but I’m also excited to see if companies like liveops can make an impact as well.
Posted in Hosting, Slingshot | 2 comments
CBQ
It’s not often that we here at Highgroove Studios make mistakes (joke), but the Slingshot Hosting Application was broken for a few hours recently.
I added several new plans (based on our customer feedback), wrote tests to ensure that they worked, and then checked the code back into our repository so I could deploy:
cap deploy
All was great until one of our customers notified me of an error when trying to order one of these new plans! What I should have run was:
cap deploy_with_migrations
Easy to fix, and even easier to push out changes! Problem solved.
Not using Capistrano yet? Sign up with Slingshot and get a customized capistrano deployment recipe file and our very own slingshot.rb library that makes setting up your application a breeze.
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Derek
If you’re like me and have been putting off RESTful routing in Rails (in other words – the future), checkout Andre Lewis and his presentation on RESTful routes at Thursday’s Silicon Valley Ruby on Rails Meetup.
Andre is a great presenter and the author of Beginning Google Maps Applications with Rails and Ajax .
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CBQ
OK, so it’s not as entertaining as the Top 10 YouTube Videos of 2006 or as heart-wretching as the Top Ten Breakups of 2006, but Highgroove Studios had a lot of great moments this past year.
For those of you who speak Ruby-on-Rails, here is how we came up with this list:
HighgrooveTopTen.find(:all, :order => 'RANDOM()')
10. We helped Blurb.com launch a NY Times-featured web application in time for the Christmas Season.
9. James Edward Gray II’s 2nd book, TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac got published (as well as several recipes in the must-have Ruby Cookbook ). He was, however, turned down for his next book entitled: “Ruby Ninja Tricks: 17 Deadly Ways to Kill a Man Using Only Ruby.”
8. Derek Haynes, who led the development of the Magma Design Automation customer service portal, proved Murphy’s Law, when his salesforce.com login expired 45 seconds into his one-minute Rails presentation at the salesforce.com conference. At least, that’s the story he claims.
7. We all attended RubyConf 2006 in Denver, Colorado, but forgot to bring our clever “Highgroove-Powered” t-shirts, and a few other important things like toothpaste. Ahem, CBQ.
6. Our #highgroove IRC Ruby bot became self-aware, stopped reporting all our Basecamp messages, code pastes, and check-ins, and became deeply interested in collectible Bratz doll figurines.
5. Confirming what we’ve known for years, CBQ was officially declared a Big Nerd. No, really, he’s teaching the Ruby on Rails BootCamp at Big Nerd Ranch in Atlanta, Georgia and up and coming in Frankfurt, Germany.
4. We sponsored the Rails Day 2006 contest, competed, and won “Most Useful Web Application,” for our entry Heartbeat.
If you’re not using it to monitor and maintain your production Rails applications, well, you should be!
3. Slingshot Hosting, our Business-Class Rails Hosting company, released several deployment guides, deployment tools, added better Partner-managed support, and shall henceforth be known as Slingshot “So-Incredibly-Easy-To-Launch-A-Rails-App-You-Have-No-Excuses-Now” Hosting.
2. We learned Hebrew, Japanese, Spanish, German, Finnish, Norwegian, and Danish. Well, not really, but we built an AJAX-powered application with a translated interface to all these languages.
1. We decided to change our slogan, from “Keeping it Simple.” to “Keeping it Simple” (see, without the period, now it’s perfect).
Here’s to 2007!
Posted in Presentations, Atlanta, Ruby on Rails, Slingshot | no comments
CBQ
A Presentation on with Screech Powers, Cesar Milan (The Dog Whisper), Sean Penn, and guest Ruby celebrity (and Atlanta native) Obie Fernandez. Despite the antics, Capistrano is a powerful, yet simple, bona-fide, big-boy tool. It sure does make our life easier. We like it so much, we’ve made it our goal with Slingshot Hosting to get your Ruby on Rails application up and running with our customized Capistrano Recipes, so you can focus on development.
Capistrano – Atlanta Ruby Users Group PDF
Posted in HowTo, Ruby on Rails | no comments
James
I just finshed fixing file uploads in a HighGroove application to work with any size file. I uploaded a 14 byte file to make sure I had things right. This has a few gotchas in Rails, so I thought I would share the recipe for success.
Read more... 
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Derek
John Adams. George Selkirk. Steve Ballmer. Charles Brian Quinn.
The people above have something in common – they followed in the footsteps of an icon. For Highgroove Studios’ Charles Brian Quinn, it’s taking over Ruby on Rails training at Big Nerd Ranch from David Black, author of Ruby for Rails and leader of RubyCentral, and Marcel Molina Jr., member of Rails core and part of the team at 37Signals.
If you’re looking at diving head-first into Ruby on Rails, this is the way to do it. The class, which is being held February 12-16, gives you a chance to be totally immersed in Ruby on Rails for a solid week (plus stay at a great hotel and receive some gourmet meals – don’t worry, Charles doesn’t do the cooking).
Besides his great teaching ability and fun personality, one of the special things Charles will bring to the training class is real-world experience. He’s not dabbling in Rails – Charles has been building, deploying, and maintaining Rails applications for over a year at Highgroove Studios. If you’re looking for the complete Rails picture, Charles will give it to you.
Ruby on Rails Bootcamp
