Entries by Scott Wheeler
So, over at Directed Edge we were having problems with some new goodies we’re working on that are trying to pull data out of a MySQL database and do some analysis on them in Ruby. There seemed to be a few options: Do the data analysis directly in SQL. SQL would have been sufficient for our [...]
A couple days ago I released a Wikipedia Beautifier for Chrome inspired by Readability. It was my first exploration into the world of Chrome extensions (which turned out to be surprisingly straightforward). There’s still a rough corner or three to round out, but it makes Wikipedia much easier on the eyes. The internet loves it, [...]
Or, “Why using send doesn’t work as exptected” So, I’ve been banging away at a Rails plugin the last few days. Â One of the things that I initially did was to add an initializer that extended the models from the app to avoid needing to muck-up the model, e.g.: [project root]/config/initializers/acts_as_foo.rb SomeModel.send(:acts_as_foo, :bar) It seemed [...]
I’d been looking for an excuse to create a Cocoa app for a while. Even though I still switch hit between Ubuntu and OS X, I spend most of my time on OS X these days. I’d gotten Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X a while back, but had been missing that real-but-simple app idea [...]
I’ve finally succumbed to the Github bug and have been slowly offloading small projects that I’ve created mostly for work stuff. The latest of these is a relatively small hack to produce an RSS fit from a Git repository, which I’d wanted to have posted in our intranet. Usage is simple and includes a command [...]
There’s one funny bit in the history of starting up Directed Edge: I have no idea when I decided to do it. I don’t really know when the idea first crept into my head seriously to start a company. I did a little reconnaissance on my e-mail and file archives and put together some of the [...]
I’ve traveled a good bit in my day; I’ve been to some 20-odd countries, 4 continents, you know, the works. Â And if there’s one thing that I hate more than airports, it’s booking travel online. The problem is this: Â my goal is not to book flights at specific airlines, at specific airports, with specific ticket [...]
So after Fred’s post caused a little bit of a stir in the blogosphere by downplaying some of the advantages for startups being in Silicon Valley, and being from a Berlin-based startup that’s out exploring the Silicon Valley vibe this month it set me to wondering — just where have most of the “great” software companies been started? [...]
I’m not one of the sort of folks that gets irritated when people unfollow me on Twitter, but I do like to keep track of it. Â Qwitter used to provide that service, but it’s been absent without leave for a good long while. So I hacked together a little Ruby script that when run shows [...]
I’m an avid reader of news.yc, but it’s annoyed me for some time that the RSS feed is rather broken. Â So, I decided to dust off my Lisp skills and give it a go. Â The biggest chunk was adding code to do conversion from UNIX timestamps to UTC in Arc. Â Significant stuff that works now: [...]
I got started with web programming in the early days. ’97, specifically. Â CGI.pm was the soup of the day for 4 years straight. Â But starting in early 2001, I went off to do server and desktop programming and didn’t return to the web until 2008. I’m not a designer; I’ve never intended to be. Â But [...]
After a handful of Tweets on the topic a while back I ended up having a brief email exchange with John Musser from Programmable Web (great site, by the way, basically an index of web service APIs).  I’d mentioned that I’d really like to find a tool for handling both quick and systematic tests of REST APIs. [...]
We’ve had more snow in Berlin this year than since I moved to Germany in 2002.  I’ve been a wanna-be-amateur photographer for a few years now, so this morning after the heaviest snow of the year — the good sticky kind of snow — I set out to Görlitzer Park with my Olympus E-500.  The [...]
 Really looking forward to the Berlinale this year.  So much, in fact, that I’m going to see 5 of the competition films: The Messenger Alle Anderen Chéri Forever Enthralled London River I’m an armchair enthusiast in film and have quite a few friends involved in film production.  In the past I’ve always been too slow [...]
Yesterday, in a rare display of lack-of-guilt-for-not-working, I pulled out the bass for a bit and started improvising into the sequencer. Pretty soon it needed a second line. Then I ripped the G-string in half on my bass and decided to round out the ending on guitar, which I never did, hence the track still [...]
Interview from a couple months back at the web 2.0 expo. Thanks to Jof for doing the interview! Update: Flash link has been broken for a while, download available here.
Recent Comments