CATA (Centre Area Transportation Authority) recently released a free iPhone app for tracking their buses in real time. Although I don’t own an iPhone, based off the few times I’ve seen my friends use the app, I’ll say that CATA did an excellent job with it.
The iPhone app wasn’t CATA’s first foray into real-time [...]
Eager loading in ActiveRecord is a great feature. It prevents what’s called the “n+1″ problem. From the docs (emphasis mine):
Eager loading is a way to find objects of a certain class and a number of named associations. This is one of the easiest ways of to prevent the dreaded 1+N problem in which fetching 100 [...]
Fellow Three Screen Games (the company that created FanGamb) co-founder, Robert Shedd, wrote a tutorial detailing how to safely update a database using the Facebook platform’s callback urls in a Rails app.
addthis_url = ‘http%3A%2F%2Fwww.alandelevie.com%2F2010%2F01%2F09%2Ffacebook-callback-urls-rails%2F’;
addthis_title = ‘Facebook+callback+urls+with+Rails’;
addthis_pub = ”;
ActiveRecord is awesome. Its dynamic finder methods, scopes, and effortless joins make working with a database a snap. But there are always those times when writing raw sql makes more sense. In my case, I was joining across several tables, and then sorting by a value from the joined table. The problem was that my [...]
As a side project, I’ve been working on a mobile site to track my local bus system. I’ll have a more detailed post about that once it is a fully polished site. Essentially, the site parses some xml with longitude/latitude data and uses a maps api to display the location. All fairly simple, and it’s [...]
A fun game has been sweeping the Internets. No, it doesn’t involve answering 25 questions on Facebook. It is speculation about Twitter’s future as a profitable business. Advertising Age recently published an article with (well-sourced) speculation of their own:
Certainly there’s an AdWords-like business there, but, as [Todd] Chaffee [an Institutional Venture Partners general partner and [...]