AJ Morris

iPhone App test post

AJ — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 00:31:31 +0000

Just testing the wordpress app for the iPhone. I think this is a good idea for smaller posts but I’m not sure I’d want to use this all the time on the road.

Quite Funny!!

AJ — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 14:05:10 +0000

I found this to be pretty funny. Hope you guys like it as much as I did.

Video tutorial: unlock iphone

Ruby Vulnerabilities

AJ — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 16:51:43 +0000

An Apple Product Security technician has identified multiple vulnerabilities with Ruby, which if exploited could be used in denial of service attacks. It does not have to be just Mac OS X that this afects. It looks like it’s all versions based on the official post from the Ruby development team. To find out what version of Ruby you are using open up Terminal or your command-line prompt client and type

ruby –version

You should get something like this

ruby 1.8.6 (2008-06-20 patchlevel 230) [i686-darwin9.3.0]

Now you can see that’s I’ve already went ahead and updated my version, so yours might have patch 110 if there was a patch level. To update your Ruby version all you need to do is visit the link above and choose which patch you need to install. For us Ruby on Rails developers you’ll need to upgrade to Ruby 1.8.6 patch 230. You can download it here and type the following in your command-line prompt.

curl -O ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.6-p230.tar.gz
tar xzvf ruby-1.8.6-p230.tar.gz
cd ruby-1.8.6-p230
./configure –enable-shared –enable-pthread CFLAGS=-D_XOPEN_SOURCE=1
make
sudo make install
cd ..

You can then check your version by typing.

ruby –version

If you have any problems, feel free to comment below.

UPDATE: After posting this I was having a hard time keeping an instance of monrel running. I did some searching and found out that the option they have offered us does have a bug still in it. So what that means is that we either update and have issues or stay at what we’re currently at and deal with the possibility of denial of service attacks. Keep your eyes posted to the Ruby on Rails blog for an update. I’ll post another update here as well once things are figured out.

Firefox 3 is Released!!

AJ — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 18:34:36 +0000

The much anticipated release of browsers has been released! Of course, as of this post, I had to wait about 45 minutes to get the page to load, so there idea of getting a World Record of downloads in 24 hours might not be a good thing if they can stand the traffic. Regardless, I’m looking forward to getting off the RC version I’ve been playing with and will hope to see a few new changes in it.

On a separate note, I’ve been a little quiet lately here due to working on a major project at work. Well it’s wrapping up so I should have some posts about my experiences soon. Until then keep it real my friends!!

Friday’s Picture Day :P

AJ — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 15:24:59 +0000

So I don’t have any tech stuff to write about today, been a little busy at work but I should have some shortly, so I figured I’d give you all a picture to look at from the Cherry Blossom Festival here in DC.

You can also check out my flickr account for more pictures of the festival and some of the monuments along the way. Hopefully I’ll add captions and titles to them this weekend. Let me know what you think of them!

To busy to complete…

AJ — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 01:26:09 +0000

So I’ve been getting a little busy at work lately, and while I’d like to really take you guys through a ToDo list tutorial, I just don’t have the time right now to work on that, while learning Rails 2.0, and then working on getting a ToDo list app working as well. Rather than leave you guys high and dry without finishing this, I thought I’d show you this really cool open-source ToDo application that you can install for free! Check to FooToDo here!! I think you guys will like it. I’ve played around with this on my Development machine, but not in a Production setting. From what I’ve been able to tell it looks like it’s no longer being updated (it’s running under an older version of Rails as well).

On other news, I would like to invite anyone in the NOVA/DC area that’s interested in hearing Chad Fowler and Rich Kilmer at the DCRUG meeting this Wednesday, March 26th. Here’s the details:

Date & Time
Wednesday, March 26th, 2008, 7:00pm

Refreshments:
Pizza and soda will be provided by Intridea - please RSVP to chris@intridea.com so we can get a headcount.

Location:
The George Washington University
Media and Public Affairs Building
Room B02
805 21st Street NW
Washington, DC
http://www. gwu.edu/~map/hmap/index.cfm?bldg=103

You can also read more about it here. If you’ve got any questions, please feel free to comment and I’ll let you know if I can answer them.

Todo list application with Rails 2.0!

AJ — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 03:26:16 +0000

I’ve recently taken a new position doing Rails applications full time (which I’m definitely excited about) however, between myself and the other developer, we’ve decided to go right up to Rails 2.0.2. This of course did not fit with me very well because I haven’t done rails development full time yet, and what rails apps I have done were in 1.2.6 and lower. I haven’t been a good developer because I wasn’t paying attention to all the new features and how they work. Of course I posted awhile back about some of the new updates here, but that’s about all I’ve done with Rails 2.0 until last week when I started my new job.

This is tutorial 1 of a new series I’m creating for making a simple CRM application that you can use for some of your daily tasks. Today we are going to create a simple todo list without writing any code (well to start off with). First create lets create a new app by typing,

rails -d mysql todo (I’m adding -d mysql, because sqlite3 is the default database and I’m using mysql)
cd rails

Next, we need to create our databases so we can type the following with rails 2.0.

rake db:create:all

Now that we’ve created our databases, it’s time to make our controller and model. For this, so that we don’t have to write any code, we’ll go ahead and scaffold this. We’ll type the following.

script/generate scaffold Todo title:string body:text done:boolean due:datetime

We can now migrate our database so we’ll type this.

rake db:migrate

Finally, all we have to do is start our server.

script/server

Then we can go to http://localhost:3000/todos and we’ll see our index page. You know have a working todo list, not very design oriented of course, but you are well on your way to making it yours. I’ve put up the application the way it should look here.

If you are looking for a version of this with pre-2.0 of Rails, you won’t be able to use the “rake db:create:all” command, so you’ll have to make your database another way. In the next tutorial we’ll add a customer database with a custom search so that we can search all your customers. Until next time folks!

New Ruby on Rails Host Makes Awesome Entrance!

AJ — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 03:17:34 +0000

Heroku is a new Y Combinator startup that joins the growing number of Ruby on Rails hosts, however this host adds a special step of using your browser to build your apps. You can now create Rails applications inside of your browser. Or if you prefer to use your development environment you can do that as well. Heroku is built using Amazon EC2 service. You have the option to upload your own apps via a tar file, or through their gem and git.

From their website they have an awesome list of features:

Instant Deployment
Create and Edit Online
Integrated Stack
Elastic Performance
Share and Collaborate
Import & Export
Full Ruby Environment
Gems & Plugins
Rails Console
Generate Code
Painless Migrations
Rake Console

But don’t take my word for it, check out their screencasts for more information on how to get things up and going.

Heroku, part of Y Combinator startups from this winter, has been in development since June 2006 and has attracted about 2500 users with around 2000 apps.

I do hope that we start to see some new features like support for subversion, mysql databases, and capistrano based deployment. I look forward to seeing what else comes from them. Please keep these guys in your rails radar.

I’ve got my account setup and played with it for a few hours today. If you would like to give it a try, they have a small waiting list, however if you send me an email I can work on sending you an invite faster. Feel free to send me an email at ajmorris2002[at]gmail.com for an invite.

Ruby on Rails Instructions Released for Leopard

AJ — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 03:21:22 +0000

Dan over at Hivelogic released an updated guide for installing Ruby, Rails Gems, Rails, and MySQL. Check out the article here. If there’s anything else that you need to install (like RSpec, Capistrano, SVN) you can do that with the following commands.

To install RSpec just type:

$ gem install rspec

To install Capistrano, type:

$ gem install capistrano

To install SVN it’s a little different, so you’ll have to install with the following command:

$ curl -O http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.4.3.tar.gz
curl -O http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-deps-1.4.3.tar.gz
tar xzvf subversion-1.4.3.tar.gz
tar xzvf subversion-deps-1.4.3.tar.gz
cd subversion-1.4.3
./configure –prefix=/usr/local –with-openssl –with-ssl with-zlib
make
sudo make install
Once you have everything is done you should be all set. If you want to check out any other gems, check out this site http://gems.rubyforge.org/gems/.

iPhone WordPress Plugin Anybody?

AJ — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 03:32:38 +0000

I had some free time today and started looking for some new sites that were iPhone friendly and saw this great plugin that can turn your WordPress blog into an iPhone friendly site. I found the instructions very simple to install and definitely worth adding to your site. Even if you have few readers, it’s always a good thing to reach out to the masses. I highly suggest checking it out. I hope I’ll have some free time to play around with the look of it so that I can customize it a little bit, but for a quick and simple option for making your blog iPhone friendly, it’s worth it. Perhaps I’ll even make a screencast of changing the layout/theme.

Speaking of iPhone web development I also came across this Mac only application called iPhoney that allows you to view what your site will look like in an iPhone without actually having one! The site says it’s NOT a simulator, but for all purposes of testing your web site/app inside of the 320 by 480 (or 480 by 320) screen area that the iPhone has.

The last thing I thought I would share with you is this tutorial of creating your Rails apps so that they have a different layout/theme for the iPhone, check it out here