Experiences Developing My First iOS / iPhone App – OnCall for Nagios

16 May

by: Matt in Development, Infrastructure, iOS

tags: ios, ios sdk, ipad, ipad sdk, iphone, iphone sdk, nagios, oncall

I’ve long since wanted to participate in the explosion of popularity that is the iOS App Store. I toyed with demonstration-purpose applications, learning the foundational aspects of developing on this new platform and the intricacies of Objective-C, but never really had a compelling idea to follow through to completion. Due to the nature of my [...]

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Async DNS Resolution in Tornado’s AsyncHttpClient (curl multi, c-ares)

01 Nov

by: Matt in Development, Infrastructure

tags: async, asynchronous, asynchttpclient, c-ares, curl, dns, libcurl, Python, tornado

I learned some rather important facts about cURL’s multi interface (which makes it possible to perform asynchronous HTTP requests and what Python’s Tornado framework uses under the hood in it’s AsyncHttpClient helper). I was investigating some intermittent issues in an application at work – transient DNS issues were causing the application to become unresponsive. This [...]

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Migrating from a legacy authentication scheme to Authlogic

22 Oct

by: Eric in Ruby, Ruby on Rails

tags: ActiveRecord, authlogic, model, passwords

I’ve been working on a project where I inherited a database with over 9,000 users.  The passwords are stored as an MD5 hash, with no salt.  For obvious reasons, I wanted to transition the old authentication scheme and architecture over to authlogic.  This post by Ben Johnson pointed me in the right direction. The problem [...]

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Convert HTML to PDF in PHP (libwkhtmltox extension)

15 Sep

by: Matt in Development, PHP

tags: convert, extension, html to pdf, libwkhtmltox, pdf, php, wkhtmltopdf

A common problem when developing a web application is having producing a high-quality PDF out of an existing layout/view/template. Perhaps for a reporting engine, an invoice, a receipt, or any number of other situations. Often this involves using somewhat cryptic output primitives and creating the PDF by hand. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were [...]

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Python libwkhtmltox module – wrapping a C library using Cython – convert HTML to PDF

09 Sep

by: Matt in Development, Django, Python, Random

tags: binding, c++, cython, libwkhtmltox, module, Python, wkhtmltoimage, wkhtmltopdf, wrapper

First of all, big shout out to antialize for creating wkhtmltopdf (github repo). Also, this project is being hosted on GitHub @ github.com/mreiferson/py-wkhtmltox. wkhtmltox What is wkhtmltox you ask? It’s a utility built on Nokia’s Qt framework for converting HTML (including images, CSS, and Javascript) to a PDF or image. When Qt introduced it’s webkit [...]

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Improved deploy:cleanup for capistrano

08 Sep

by: Matt in Development, Infrastructure, Ruby, Ruby on Rails

tags: capistrano, rails, ruby, Ruby on Rails

We ran into a problem today where capistrano wasn’t correctly cleaning up old releases on a 15-minute multi-host deploy. It seems like the default deploy:cleanup task wasn’t written with multiple hosts in mind. Essentially what it does is list the contents of your releases_path for the first host in the list of hosts and assumes [...]

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Python’s Tornado has swept me off my feet

01 Jul

by: Matt in Development, Infrastructure, Python

tags: API, asynchronous, non-blocking, Python, REST, tornado, web.py

I’ve been working with Python’s Tornado for about 2 months now and I love it. Tornado is a non-blocking web server written in Python. It’s structure is similar to web.py so users of that popular Python web framework will feel right at home. This is a structure that lends itself really well to developing RESTful [...]

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google-define and last-fm plugins released

06 May

by: Eric in Ruby on Rails

tags: plugins, Ruby on Rails

Over the last few days I released my first open-source plugins on GitHub. google-define – Extracted from a side project I worked on, it’s basically a wrapper class for parsing definitions from Google (define:perplexed). last-fm – This plugin was inspired by a previous gist, which itself was taken from an app I wrote to aggregate [...]

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FormStack API Call Over SSL With Ruby

28 Apr

by: Eric in Random, Ruby on Rails

tags: FormStack, JSON, Ruby on Rails, XML

I recently had to use the FormStack API in the context of a Rails app. You need to make these calls over SSL, and API returns either XML or JSON. I chose JSON because it’s much easier to work with in my opinion and I hate XML. Below is a simple example. Check out the [...]

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Learning vs. Solving

15 Mar

by: Matt in Development, Random

tags: Random, thoughts

Often times you’re tasked with solving a problem you haven’t faced before, requiring the use of technologies you haven’t previously been exposed to. This is a great thing! These experiences are the stuff of legend – continuing deep into the night as your curiosity peaks. When delivery of the solution makes a difference to somebody’s [...]

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