BOTS BootCamp | 4 Dec 2011

3 months ago | Rohan Kini: blog@BumsOnTheSaddle.com - Home

The much awaited BOTS Bootcamp is to happen this weekend.

Date: 4 Dec 2011
What time: 9:30am – 11:30am
Where: BumsOnTheSaddle

The Bootcamp is aimed at getting a biker comfortable owning his/her bike and understand how they can derive the max out of it.

What we intend to cover at the BOTS BootCamp

• Understand your bike – parts of your bike, gears, brakes, suspension, quick releases etc
• Maintain your bike – maintenance schedule, punctures, issues and solutions and dispel some common myths
• You and your bike – aches n pains, nutrition, riding techniques, pollution, safety
• Using your bike – communities, rides, races, cyclo tours
• Evangelism – how you can help us help others

If you have not yet received an invite and would like to attend this, please do send us an email at admin@bumsonthesaddle.com

BOTS BootCamp | 4 Dec 2011

3 months ago | Rohan Kini: blog@BumsOnTheSaddle.com - Home

The much awaited BOTS Bootcamp is to happen this weekend.

Date: 4 Dec 2011
What time: 9:30am – 11:30am
Where: BumsOnTheSaddle

The Bootcamp is aimed at getting a biker comfortable owning his/her bike and understand how they can derive the max out of it.

What we intend to cover at the BOTS BootCamp

• Understand your bike – parts of your bike, gears, brakes, suspension, quick releases etc
• Maintain your bike – maintenance schedule, punctures, issues and solutions and dispel some common myths
• You and your bike – aches n pains, nutrition, riding techniques, pollution, safety
• Using your bike – communities, rides, races, cyclo tours
• Evangelism – how you can help us help others

If you have not yet received an invite and would like to attend this, please do send us an email at admin@bumsonthesaddle.com

Now that's what I call breakfast.

3 months ago | Queenie Takes Manhattan: Queenie Takes Manhattan

Prune's butter-crumbed eggs with stewed chickpeas might just be the best breakfast I've had since my birthday migas in Austin. The crunchy coating on the runny egg adds a dash of textural contrast to the largely soft meal, and the preserved lemon on top of the Moroccan-spiced chickpeas is just...magic.

And if you're not veggie, you simply must have a side of the lamb sausage. No ifs, ands or buts allowed. No, sirree.

Two ways of using Redis to build a NoSQL autocomplete search index

3 months ago | Pat Shaughnessy: Pat Shaughnessy - Home

Consider a NoSQL solution such as Redis the next time you need to implement search...

Last week I demonstrated how to setup autocomplete in a new Rails 3.1 app using the Soulmate gem, from SeatGeek. Soulmate uses Redis to cache all of the autocomplete phrases in memory, providing lightning fast query results. While autocomplete is a very useful feature and a common web site design element, what really interests me about Soulmate are the ideas and detailed techniques behind how it uses a NoSQL Redis database to implement autocomplete search…

Price refresh

3 months ago | Rohan Kini: blog@BumsOnTheSaddle.com - Home

Awesome cycling just got a bit more expensive.

$ thumping the Rupee

Price refresh

3 months ago | Rohan Kini: blog@BumsOnTheSaddle.com - Home

Awesome cycling just got a bit more expensive.

$ thumping the Rupee

It's tradition.

3 months ago | Queenie Takes Manhattan: Queenie Takes Manhattan

Last year, on the lookout for a way to bring brussels sprouts into the Thanksgiving meal (we've always been more of a green bean family), I stumbled across Zak Pelaccio's (he of Fatty Crab and Fatty 'Cue) recipe for the most obscene sprouts ever conceived. Bascially, you render the fat out of half a pound of bacon, then cook two pounds of sprouts in it - oh, and then you add heavy cream and good maple syrup, just in case you were worried that the recipe wasn't quite festive enough.

I know.

I tested the recipe first on a few willing victims at Thanksgiving, then pulled it out again for Christmas dinner at Nick & Louisa's in Austin. When this year's feast rolled around, I petitioned my Aunt Cathi, the hostess, for a spot on the menu for these little balls of goodness. Permission was granted, and the sprouts rode again.

I've tweaked the original a bit; Pelaccio added chestnuts to his, but since chestnuts aren't my most favorite nut - and are, in fact, a pain in the ass to roast and peel - I've left them out. As you all know, I like a bit of acid and heat with my rich flavors, so I've added a bit of red pepper for kick.

Need I say that they've been requested for the upcoming Christmas feast? I'll say it any case: these will be appearing on my table at least one more time in 2011, and I think you should give them a try as well.

Queenie's Holiday Sprouts
Adapted from Zak Pelaccio

1/2 pound applewood bacon, cut into 1/4 inch batons
2 pounds brussels sprouts, trimmed and sliced in half lengthwise
Sea salt
3 cloves garlic, minced
3 sprigs thyme
1 tsp. dried red pepper
3/4 cup cream
Scant 1/4 cup good maple syrup
Juice of half a lemon

In a large skillet set over medium-high heat, render the fat out of the bacon until it is nearly crispy. Remove bacon to a plate lined with paper towels, but leave the fat in the pan.

Add the sprouts to the pan, season with a generous amount of sea salt, and saute until they begin to get brown, about 4 minutes or so. Add the garlic, thyme and red pepper and saute until the garlic turns golden, another 2 to 3 minutes.

Reduce the heat to medium and add the cream. Cook gently until the cream has reduced by half; it will also turn a golden brown, thanks to the goodness on the bottom of the pan. Add the maple syrup and the reserved bacon to the pan, and cook for a few minutes. Squeeze the lemon over the sprouts. Taste for seasoning (add more salt and red pepper as needed) and serve.

Serves 8 as a side dish.

every Monday Bicycling Movie Nite - Mountain Bike Chronicles Season 1

3 months ago | Rohan Kini: blog@BumsOnTheSaddle.com - Home

Red Bull – Mountain Bike Chronicles Season 1

Q: What is a Monday Bicycling Movie nite?
Well, there is a lot of awesome bicycling happening all around the world. We intend to share some of these with you every monday.
We start around 7:30pm and wrap up in an hour.

Today, 28 November
Time – 7:30pm
Where – BumsOnTheSaddle

Yup. We are watching 45 mins of Red Bull Mountain Bike Chronicles

1. Why – Monday’s are boring. We want to spice up your life.
2. BYOB event – so BYOB please.
3. Everyone is welcome.

every Monday Bicycling Movie Nite - Mountain Bike Chronicles Season 1

3 months ago | Rohan Kini: blog@BumsOnTheSaddle.com - Home

Red Bull – Mountain Bike Chronicles Season 1

Q: What is a Monday Bicycling Movie nite?
Well, there is a lot of awesome bicycling happening all around the world. We intend to share some of these with you every monday.
We start around 7:30pm and wrap up in an hour.

Today, 28 November
Time – 7:30pm
Where – BumsOnTheSaddle

Yup. We are watching 45 mins of Red Bull Mountain Bike Chronicles

1. Why – Monday’s are boring. We want to spice up your life.
2. BYOB event – so BYOB please.
3. Everyone is welcome.

Analytics using R: Most active in my Twitter list

3 months ago | Lalatendu Das: Interpretations of Technorealism

I follow some 80 odd people/ news sources on my twitter account. For a while I wondered which of these sources are most active on twitter. I picked a simple metric '# of status messages posted to twitter' as the measure of activity. Using R I quickly wrote a program to generate my top 10 most active twitter sources.

Here is the bar plot of the result

 

## Prerequisite: Install twitteR package 'install.packages(twitteR)
## load twitteR package
library(twitteR)

##get handle to a twitteR user object (in this case for user d_lalit
tuser <- getUser('d_lalit')

##get list of friends of d_lalit
tfriends <- userFriends(tuser)

##create an array to store the name and number of status messages for each friend
friendsCount <- length(tfriends)
friendsName <- character(friendsCount)
friendsMsgCount <- numeric(friendsCount)

for (i in 1:friendsCount) {
  friendsName[i] <- tfriends[[i]]$screenName
  friendsMsgCount[i] <- as.numeric(tfriends[[i]]$statusesCount)
}

## prepare a sortedlist and extract top 10 values from the list
sortedlist <- sort(friendsMsgCount, index.return = TRUE, decreasing=TRUE)
top10friendsName <- character(10)
top10friendsMsgCount <- numeric(10)

for (i in 1:10) {
  top10friendsName[i] <- friendsName[sortedlist$ix[[i]]] ## index is stored under ix
  top10friendsMsgCount[i] <- as.numeric(sortedlist$x[[i]])
}

## plot the chart
barplot(top10friendsMsgCount, width = 0.25, names.arg = top10friendsName, horiz=FALSE, main="Twitter friends by activity count", ylab="Number of status messages", xlab="twitter friends", space=0.2, density=50, angle=45, cex.names=0.7) 

BumsOnTheSaddle

3 months ago | Rohan Kini: blog@BumsOnTheSaddle.com - Home

BumsOnTheSaddle

Check out the other pics of our bicycling space

BumsOnTheSaddle

3 months ago | Rohan Kini: blog@BumsOnTheSaddle.com - Home

BumsOnTheSaddle

Check out the other pics of our bicycling space

! No such app as radiant-cloud-8241. (Heruko)

3 months ago | Amit Kumar: RubyizednRailified

Inverted Waterfall chart with Highcharts

3 months ago | Niranjan Sarade: InLoveWithNature

Pushed inverted waterfall chart implementation with Highcharts to Github @inverted-waterfall-chart

e.g. Zero Gap, i.e. Planned Savings = Actual Savings


Positive Gap, i.e. Actual Savings > Planned Savings


Negative Gap, i.e. Actual Savings < Planned Savings

Finding your soulmate: autocomplete with Redis in Rails 3.1

3 months ago | Pat Shaughnessy: Pat Shaughnessy - Home

Fast autocomplete with Soulmate can help users fall in love with your Rails app

Back in February the SeatGeek team open sourced a gem they call Soulmate that implements autocomplete using a Redis back end. “Soulmate finishes your sentences” as they say on their Github readme page. You can see it in action on SeatGeek.com. Soulmate is very useful: many of us need type ahead search behavior and using Redis is a great way to make it fast and snappy. But more importantly, Soulmate is a great example of how to create an index in Redis ahead of time, allowing for very fast lookups later. Take a few minutes to learn how Soulmate works; chances are you’ll be able to use the same approach in your own app with a completely different data set…

The Bangalore Brevets are starting again!

3 months ago | Rohan Kini: blog@BumsOnTheSaddle.com - Home

They Bangalore Brevets are all ready to kickoff again. Time to dust off your touring bike and enjoy some kickass long rides!

Ride Details

Date: Nov 26, 2011
Time: 6AM start. Registration formalities begin 5.30AM
Start: Indian Institute of Science Gymkhana Gate, Yeshwantpur
End: Indian Institute of Science, A-Mess Gate/Kendriya Vidyalaya Gate, Mathikere Road
Distance: 200 km
Time limit: 13.5 hours

More Details – www.BangaloreBrevets.in

The Bangalore Brevets are starting again!

3 months ago | Rohan Kini: blog@BumsOnTheSaddle.com - Home

They Bangalore Brevets are all ready to kickoff again. Time to dust off your touring bike and enjoy some kickass long rides!

Ride Details

Date: Nov 26, 2011
Time: 6AM start. Registration formalities begin 5.30AM
Start: Indian Institute of Science Gymkhana Gate, Yeshwantpur
End: Indian Institute of Science, A-Mess Gate/Kendriya Vidyalaya Gate, Mathikere Road
Distance: 200 km
Time limit: 13.5 hours

More Details – www.BangaloreBrevets.in

Testing IP Whitelisting in your Specs and Features

3 months ago | Alex Rothenberg: Common Sense Software

Rails has so much support for testing built into itself that its rare I come up with something that’s hard to test but HTTP headers is not easy. Normally you don’t have to worry about HTTP headers as they’re set by the browser and you don’t do much with them. Recently I was working on an application where each user has an IP whitelist and they are only allowed to come from their whitelisted IP addresses. This isn’t as crazy as it sounds since the app is in a corporate environment and the users will all be coming from their corporate networks.

Basically this means our authentication method needs 3 pieces of information

1. username
2. password
3. remote ip address

What makes this interesting is that the first two are input by the user but the ip address comes from the browser and network. Writing an RSpec unit test or Cucumber scenario to test user parameters (username and password) is something we’ve all done before but today I’m going to talk about how you can also test the IP address in a header.

Implementation

Before we look at how to test this let’s take a look at the implementation of our SessionController.

class SessionsController < ApplicationController
  def new
    @session = Session.new
  end

  def create
    remote_ip_address = request.headers['X-Forwarded-For'] || request.headers['REMOTE_ADDR']
    @session = Session.create(params[:username], params[:password], remote_ip_address)

    if @session.valid?
      session[:current_user] = @session.user
      redirect_to root_url
    else
      flash.now[:error] = 'Unable to authenticate. Please try again'
      render :new
    end
  end

  def destroy
    session[:current_user] = nil
    redirect_to session
  end
end

These three actions provide login and logout.

• new displays the login form with username & password fields
• create uses the username and password from the form as well as the ip address to create a session (i.e. authenticate). In case the request hops through some proxy servers we use the X-Forwarded-For header to get the source IP and not the proxy’s IP.
• destroy users need to log out (but we wont talk about that anymore here)

This works, but you shouldn’t trust me. We need tests around the create action!

Unit Testing the IP Whitelist with RSpec

Our Controller Spec needs to pass all 3 pieces of information (username, password & ip address) to the controller. Passing the username and password is pretty standard and something I’m sure you’ve done before. They come from a form so we pass them as a hash in the second argument to post.

post :create, {:username => 'alex', :password => 'secret'}

Unfortunately we can’t pass the IP the same way because the post method in ActionController::TestCase doesn’t support passing headers in (but it does take the session or flash - that’s interesting to remember for some other time).

def post(action, parameters = nil, session = nil, flash = nil)
  process(action, parameters, session, flash, "POST")
end

If we keep looking around it turns out the ActionDispatch::TestRequest object has a nice convenience method that lets us specify the remote_addr directly.

def remote_addr=(addr)
  @env['REMOTE_ADDR'] = addr
end

If we add a line to our spec we can handle the case where the IP comes in the REMOTE_ADDR HTTP header.

request.remote_addr = '192.168.1.100'
post :create, {:username => 'alex', :password => 'secret'}

We still need to deal with the X-Forwarded-For case. While Rails doesn’t give us a convenience method, by looking at the implementation of the remote_addr= method we can see how to set this header ourselves.

request.env['X-Forwarded-For'] = '192.168.1.100'
post :create, {:username => 'alex', :password => 'secret'}

Putting it all together we end up with a controller spec that looks like this.

require 'spec_helper'

describe SessionsController do
  describe '#create' do
    describe 'successfully' do
      let(:alex) { mock }
      let(:valid_session) { mock(:valid? => true, :user => alex )}
      before do
        Session.should_receive(:create).with('alex', 'secret', '192.168.1.100').and_return(valid_session)
      end
      describe 'using REMOTE_ADDR' do
        before do
          request.remote_addr = '192.168.1.100'
          post :create, {:username => 'alex', :password => 'secret'}
        end
        it { should redirect_to root_path }
        it { should set_session(:current_user).to(alex)}
      end
      describe 'using X-Forwarded-For' do
        before do
          request.remote_addr = '172.16.254.1'
          request.env['X-Forwarded-For'] = '192.168.1.100'
          post :create, {:username => 'alex', :password => 'secret'}
        end
        it { should redirect_to root_path }
        it { should set_session(:current_user).to(alex)}
      end
    end

    describe 'unsuccessfully' do
      let(:invalid_session) { mock(:valid? => false) }
      before do
        Session.should_receive(:create).with('alex', 'secret', '192.168.1.100').and_return(invalid_session)
      end
      describe 'using REMOTE_ADDR' do
        before do
          request.remote_addr = '192.168.1.100'
          post :create, {:username => 'alex', :password => 'secret'}
        end
        it { should render_template :new }
      end
      describe 'using X-Forwarded-For' do
        before do
          request.remote_addr = '172.16.254.1'
          request.env['X-Forwarded-For'] = '192.168.1.100'
          post :create, {:username => 'alex', :password => 'secret'}
        end
        it { should render_template :new }
      end
    end
  end
end

To sum up we can

• pass parameters as a hash in the post method

  post :create, {:username => 'alex', :password => 'secret'}

• set the remote_addr on the request with a convenience method

  request.remote_addr = '192.168.1.100'

• et the X-Forwarded-For directly on the requests’s environment hash

  request.env['X-Forwarded-For'] = '192.168.1.100'

Integration Testing the IP Whitelist in a Cucumber Feature

We face a similar issue when writing our cucumber scenarios - its easy to pass the username and password but harder to pass the IP address. The solution turns out to be similar but not quite exactly the because our Cucumber steps will use Capybara instead of ActionController::TestCase directly. Before we look into how to implement the steps, let’s write the feature we want which will help us define the steps we need.

Feature: Authentication of a user
  In order to ensure a really secure application
  As a user
  I want my IP address to be validated during login

  Background:
    Given the following user exists:
      | username | password | company                   |
      | alex     | secret   | ip_address: 192.168.1.100 |

  Scenario: Successful log in
    Given I am connecting from ip "192.168.1.100"
     When I log in as "alex" with password "secret"
     Then I should be on the home page

  Scenario: Successful log in with X-Forwarded-For header
    Given I am connecting from ip "192.168.1.100" behind a proxy
     When I log in as "alex" with password "secret"
     Then I should be on the home page

  Scenario: Failed log in from wrong IP
    Given I am connecting from ip "172.16.254.1"
     When I log in as "alex" with password "secret"
     Then authentication should have failed

  Scenario: Failed log in from wrong IP behind a proxy
    Given I am connecting from ip "172.16.254.1" behind a proxy
     When I log in as "alex" with password "secret"
     Then authentication should have failed

We immediately realize we don’t know how to write the first step

Given /^I am connecting from ip "([^"]*)"$/ do |ip_address|
  pending # How do we set the IP Address???
end

To figure this out we need to dig into how capybara works.

We don’t call post in ActionController::TestCase directly instead letting capybara do it for us. To see what capybara is doing we can skip that step and implement the login step

Given /^I am connecting from ip "([^"]*)"$/ do |ip_address|
  # do nothing for now
end

When /^I log in as "([^"]*)" with password "([^"]*)"$/ do |name, password|
  visit(new_session_path)
  fill_in('User name', :with => name)
  fill_in('Password', :with => password)
  click_button('Log In')
end

and edit the SessionsController to show us the stack trace.

class SessionsController < ApplicationController
  def create
    raise caller.inspect
  end
end

The stack trace is very big but if we look closely, somewhere in the middle of it we see lines below that show how capybara uses the rack-test gem to submit our form.

~/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p334/gems/rack-test-0.6.1/lib/rack/test.rb:66:in `post'
~/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p334/gems/capybara-1.1.2/lib/capybara/rack_test/browser.rb:62:in `send'
~/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p334/gems/capybara-1.1.2/lib/capybara/rack_test/browser.rb:62:in `process'
~/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p334/gems/capybara-1.1.2/lib/capybara/rack_test/browser.rb:27:in `submit'
~/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p334/gems/capybara-1.1.2/lib/capybara/rack_test/form.rb:64:in `submit'
... more lines omitted...
~/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p334/gems/capybara-1.1.2/lib/capybara/node/actions.rb:38:in `click_button'

Looking at the Rack::Test#post method we see something similar to what we saw before in ActionController::TestCase but its not quite identical. It takes the env as a parameter so we need to figure out how to inject our header in there.

def post(uri, params = {}, env = {}, &block)
  env = env_for(uri, env.merge(:method => "POST", :params => params))
  process_request(uri, env, &block)
end

Following the stack trace up we see the env passed into Rack::Test::Session.post comes from Capybara::RackTest::Browser and it turns out that env is computed in the Capybara::RackTest::Browser#env method.

def options
  driver.options
end

def env
  env = {}
  begin
    env["HTTP_REFERER"] = last_request.url
  rescue Rack::Test::Error
    # no request yet
  end
  env.merge!(options[:headers]) if options[:headers]
  env
end

The key is in the line env.merge!(options[:headers]) if options[:headers] and those options are delegated to the driver. Now we know how to inject our IP address onto the driver’s options.

Given /^I am connecting from ip "([^"]*)"$/ do |ip_address|
  page.driver.options[:headers] = {'REMOTE_ADDR' => ip_address}
end

Putting it all together we can write all our steps

Given /^I am connecting from ip "([^"]*)"$/ do |ip_address|
  page.driver.options[:headers] = {'REMOTE_ADDR' => ip_address}
end

Given /^I am connecting from ip "([^"]*)" behind a proxy$/ do |ip_address|
  page.driver.options[:headers] = {'X-Forwarded-For' => ip_address}
end

When /^I log in as "([^"]*)" with password "([^"]*)"$/ do |name, password|
  visit(new_session_path)
  fill_in('User name', :with => name)
  fill_in('Password', :with => password)
  click_button('Log In')
end

Then /^I should be on the home page$/ do
  URI.parse(current_url).path.should == root_path
end

Then /^authentication should have failed$/ do
  page.text.should include 'Unable to authenticate. Please try again'
end

Now the scenarios we wrote before all pass.

To sum up

• capybara handles form submission superbly with

  fill_in('User name', :with => name)

  click_button('Log In')

• we can set any HTTP header in capybara with

  page.driver.options[:headers] = {'REMOTE_ADDR' => ip_address}

Testing is good

Since we’re testing the IP logic at both the unit level with RSpec and integration level with Cucumber and Capybara we can be pretty sure it’s all going to work correctly.

Gift Guide Number One: Brights.

3 months ago | Queenie Takes Manhattan: Queenie Takes Manhattan

I'm kicking off this season's gift guide series with a bang: a collection of the most brightly colored bits and bobs on offer. See, in the dreary doldrums of winter in the Northeast (which follow hot on the heels of the holiday season), everyone needs a little cheering up. For some, this comes in the form of one of those vitamin D sun lamps; for me, it comes in a jazzy iPhone case and bright pink lamps.

People tend to think of bright colors as a girlie thing, but I happen to think that men could use a little neon in their life as well. Maybe help him start small, with a neon pen or two, or introduce a bright yellow Baggu into the grocery shopping rotation.

Up next, books galore!

The gifts, clockwise from top left: Neon enamel pens ($20 each), chevron iPhone case ($39.99), Baggu bag ($8), Dents suede gloves ($31.45), table lamp ($150.70), Swarovski beaded friendship bracelets ($65 each).

every Monday Bicycling Movie Nite - BEING FREE

3 months ago | Rohan Kini: blog@BumsOnTheSaddle.com - Home

image credit – Szymon Nieborak

Q: What is a Monday Bicycling Movie nite?
Well, there is a lot of awesome bicycling happening all around the world. We intend to share some of these with you every monday.
We start around 7:30pm and wrap up in an hour.

Today, 21st November
Time – 7:30pm
Where – BumsOnTheSaddle

Excerpt
The long awaited full film – Being Free – is here!

This summer Nico Turner has been working hard travelling across the UK and Europe to produce this master piece. Anyone with any experience of film making knows just how hard it is to create something of this standard purely off your own back. Nico rises to the challenge every time and reminds us what dedication is all about. He is behind the camera for every single shot and has spent hours in front of a monitor editing for your viewing pleasure!

Yup. We are watching 45 mins of Being Free

1. Why – Monday’s are boring. We want to spice up your life.
2. BYOB event – so BYOB please.
3. Everyone is welcome. Really.

every Monday Bicycling Movie Nite - BEING FREE

3 months ago | Rohan Kini: blog@BumsOnTheSaddle.com - Home

image credit – Szymon Nieborak

Q: What is a Monday Bicycling Movie nite?
Well, there is a lot of awesome bicycling happening all around the world. We intend to share some of these with you every monday.
We start around 7:30pm and wrap up in an hour.

Today, 21st November
Time – 7:30pm
Where – BumsOnTheSaddle

Excerpt
The long awaited full film – Being Free – is here!

This summer Nico Turner has been working hard travelling across the UK and Europe to produce this master piece. Anyone with any experience of film making knows just how hard it is to create something of this standard purely off your own back. Nico rises to the challenge every time and reminds us what dedication is all about. He is behind the camera for every single shot and has spent hours in front of a monitor editing for your viewing pleasure!

Yup. We are watching 45 mins of Being Free

1. Why – Monday’s are boring. We want to spice up your life.
2. BYOB event – so BYOB please.
3. Everyone is welcome. Really.

Queenie's Treasury, sort of.

3 months ago | Queenie Takes Manhattan: Queenie Takes Manhattan

Hey, cats and kittens! Just wanted to let you know that my gift guides for the 2011 holiday season will be coming your way this week. I've got three installments this time around - brights for those of you craving summer, books for those of you who want nothing more than to curl up with a good one, and the makings of the best boozy, cold-weather picnic ever.

Get ready, because here comes fun! (If, by fun, you mean holiday shopping ideas. Because that's what I mean.)

And, if you simply must have it, Oscar's blinky nose can be found here.

BBCh 10 | 20th Nov | 0830 IST | Off Road Race | Hesarghatta

3 months ago | Rohan Kini: blog@BumsOnTheSaddle.com - Home

Our last off road race of this season!

Race stats, click for more details

Race details

Location – Hesarghatta
Driving directions – http://goo.gl/ND7By a Dummies Guide to reach Hesarghatta
Race route – http://goo.gl/SLNhT
Start time – 0830 IST
Distance – ~4 km x 4 laps

Do register immediately

Points to Ponder

• This is an off road race – do expect thorns on the track. It pays to be prepared for punctures and not get a surprise.
• Find your helmet and gloves
• A Hybrid bicycle should mostly be ok. Road bikes and rigid frames are a strict no-no
• Watch Jessi talk about how to get your bike race ready here

Since this is the last off road race of the season we thought it would be a good idea to have a lot more than just a kickass race

• Kiddies race – request to all mums and dads, pls ensure that your tough guys are wearing a helmet too
• Quiz – Flavour of Bangalore (we would like this to be a verbal treasure hunt of sorts and if you think you can help out please let us know)
• Breakfast for Bikers – a big breakfast for bikers at BBCh (costing is underway)
• BBCh recruitment drive – we need enthusiastic people at BBCh to ensure every single race runs better in 2012.
• Basic workshop on Bikes

We will have the usual ambulance and first aid kit.

Please contribute to the Vit M box. This is very essential to keep running the races. We think 200 INR per biker makes our Vit M kitty feel like it has something inside.

BBCh 10 | 20th Nov | 0830 IST | Off Road Race | Hesarghatta

3 months ago | Rohan Kini: blog@BumsOnTheSaddle.com - Home

Our last off road race of this season!

Race stats, click for more details

Race details

Location – Hesarghatta
Driving directions – http://goo.gl/ND7By a Dummies Guide to reach Hesarghatta
Race route – http://goo.gl/SLNhT
Start time – 0830 IST
Distance – ~4 km x 4 laps

Do register immediately

Points to Ponder

• This is an off road race – do expect thorns on the track. It pays to be prepared for punctures and not get a surprise.
• Find your helmet and gloves
• A Hybrid bicycle should mostly be ok. Road bikes and rigid frames are a strict no-no
• Watch Jessi talk about how to get your bike race ready here

Since this is the last off road race of the season we thought it would be a good idea to have a lot more than just a kickass race

• Kiddies race – request to all mums and dads, pls ensure that your tough guys are wearing a helmet too
• Quiz – Flavour of Bangalore (we would like this to be a verbal treasure hunt of sorts and if you think you can help out please let us know)
• Breakfast for Bikers – a big breakfast for bikers at BBCh (costing is underway)
• BBCh recruitment drive – we need enthusiastic people at BBCh to ensure every single race runs better in 2012.
• Basic workshop on Bikes

We will have the usual ambulance and first aid kit.

Please contribute to the Vit M box. This is very essential to keep running the races. We think 200 INR per biker makes our Vit M kitty feel like it has something inside.

33 Powerful Ways of Overcoming Fear . Right Now

3 months ago | Riju Kansal: Riju's Thoughts Captured...

click here

Twitter Bootstrap, Less, and Sass: Understanding Your Options for Rails 3.1

3 months ago | Pat Shaughnessy: Pat Shaughnessy - Home

You can find my article this week over on rubysource.com.

Programming With Kids

3 months ago | Alex Rothenberg: Common Sense Software

I’ve started to teach my kids to program. I figured I build websites professionally and it’d be a fun way for me to share what I do and help supplement their learning. And it was something they expressed interest in not something I was pushing. I suggested we build our own small version of facebook or twitter. Very quickly I learned two truths

1. websites are boring
2. games are fun

Okay. I’ve never built a game before after a little digging there are plenty of tools in the open source world and many built on Ruby. We’re currently experimenting with three different tools/technologies.

Shoes

I first came across Shoes several years ago and was blown away. It was originally written by why and is now maintained by Team Shoes on github. “Shoes is the best little DSL for cross-platform GUI programming there is. It feels like real Ruby, rather than just another C++ library wrapper”

Writing a Shoes app feels just like writing a Ruby app (it is Ruby!). The best analogy I can use is that what Rails does for websites, Shoes does for GUI apps.

If you want to create a blue rectangle on a page, here’s your app

Shoes.app do
  fill blue
  rect :top => 25, :left => 50, :height => 75, :width => 150
end

We can make it a bit more interactive and allow the user to move our rectangle around with the arrow keys and display the current coordinates

Shoes.app do
  fill blue
  @player = rect :top => 25, :left => 50, :height => 75, :width => 150
  @current_coordinates = para "(#{@player.left}, #{@player.top})"

  keypress do |key|
    @player.left += 10 if key == :right
    @player.left -= 10 if key == :left
    @player.top  += 10 if key == :down
    @player.top  -= 10 if key == :up
    @current_coordinates.replace "(#{@player.left}, #{@player.top})"
  end
end

We’re not limited to blue rectangles. We can replace it with an image

Shoes.app do
  @player = image 'images/Starfighter.png', :top => 25, :left => 50
  @current_coordinates = para "(#{@player.left}, #{@player.top})"

  keypress do |key|
    @player.left += 10 if key == :right
    @player.left -= 10 if key == :left
    @player.top  += 10 if key == :down
    @player.top  -= 10 if key == :up
    @current_coordinates.replace "(#{@player.left}, #{@player.top})"
  end
end

We’re writing Ruby in a fairly natural way. Shoes just gives us GUI methods like rect to create a rectangle or para to create a paragraph. Because this is Ruby, as your Shoes app gets more complex you can create classes and methods to organize and keep it manageable just as you would in any other app.

There are all sorts of great resources out there including

• The Shoes Manual which includes a reference for all the elements you may use (like rect or para)
• why’s tutorial - the original introduction to Shoes
• sample apps - there are some really good ones here!
• Teaching Ruby to High School Girls (using Shoes) article by Sarah Mei

Gosu

Gosu is a gaming library so while Shoes lets us build any sort of GUI apps this is seemed like it might be a better fit since we’re interested in gaming. Luckily there’s a gem that wraps up the Ruby interface (Gosu can be used from C++ or Ruby).

gem install gosu

If we want to build a similar game to what we did in Shoes with a play we move around via the arrow keys we need to subclass the Gosu::Window class.

require 'rubygems'
require 'gosu'

class Player
  def initialize(window)
    @image = Gosu::Image.new(window, "media/Starfighter.png", false)
    @x, @y = 125, 50
    @angle = 0.0
  end

  def draw
    @image.draw_rot(@x, @y, 0, @angle)
  end
end

class GameWindow < Gosu::Window
  def initialize
    super(640, 480, false)
    self.caption = "Gosu Tutorial Game"
    @player = Player.new(self)
  end

  def draw
    @player.draw
  end
end

window = GameWindow.new
window.show

And we see a window with a player that looks like a starship

Its not too hard to make it move by overriding the update method in our window class

require 'rubygems'
require 'gosu'

class Player
  attr_accessor :x, :y

  def initialize(window)
    @image = Gosu::Image.new(window, "media/Starfighter.bmp", false)
    @x, @y = 75, 50
    @angle = 0.0
  end

  def draw
    @image.draw_rot(@x, @y, 0, @angle)
  end
end

class GameWindow < Gosu::Window
  def initialize
    super(400, 300, false)
    self.caption = "Our Game"
    @player = Player.new(self)
    @current_coordinates = Gosu::Font.new(self, Gosu::default_font_name, 20)
  end

  def update
    @player.x -= 10 if button_down? Gosu::KbLeft
    @player.x += 10 if button_down? Gosu::KbRight
    @player.y += 10 if button_down? Gosu::KbDown
    @player.y -= 10 if button_down? Gosu::KbUp
  end

  def draw
    @player.draw
    @current_coordinates.draw("(#{@player.x}, #{@player.y})", 10, 10, 0, 1.0, 1.0, 0xffffff00)
  end
end

window = GameWindow.new
window.show

This example can be extended into a full Asteroids like like game where your ship has inertia. You should look at the source or an explanation on the gosu site.

There are all sorts of great resources out there including

• Samples from the Gosu Showcase or

  Falling Blocks	or	CptnRuby

• Chingu an extension that seems to let us avoid re-writing common tasks
• Chipmunk a physics library that makes it easy to do things like collision detection, gravity, etc

Even though we’re still writing Ruby, Gosu feels more like C++ Windows development I used to do long long time ago. I’m not sure if that’s inevitable and need to keep using Gosu to find out.

gamesalad

The last framework we’ve been working with is pretty different. GameSalad advertises it lets you “Create games for iPhone, iPad, Android, Mac, and HTML5. No coding required.”

It follows a model similar to what Adobe Flash uses where you have Scenes containing Actors. You write your programs in a visual editor by dragging and dropping Actors onto Scenes, Rules onto Actors and Behavior onto Rules. For instance if we have a starship actor and we drop these rules onto it

We will get our familiar spaceship that can move left and right

GameSalad is the least familiar to me but seems to be easiest for my kids to start working on. Not having to write any “code” or “do programming” makes it much easier to get started. It also can create iPhone or iPad games and I would never dream of exposing my kids to Objective-C.

What’s next?

We’ve started experimenting with all three of these tools and so far are having fun with all three. Hopefully we’ll figure out what works for us and perhaps try to write about it again in a few months.

After writing this I came across a recent NY Times article Programming for Children, Minus Cryptic Syntax and Scratch also sounds interesting so I may have to look into that sometime too.

every Monday Bicycling Movie Nite's - BEYOND THE PELOTON

3 months ago | Rohan Kini: blog@BumsOnTheSaddle.com - Home

Every Monday Bicycling Movie nite – we intend to watch a biking movie every monday evening.
Start around 7:30pm and wrap up in an hour.

Today, 14th November
Time – 7:30pm
Where – BumsOnTheSaddle

After two seasons of following the Cervelo TestTeam, Joseph Finkleman and Booker Sim now follow Team Garmin-Cervélo and capture the human passion and beauty of cycling. With their all-access passes, they show you what conventional race footage fails to capture: everything “beyond” the peloton.

Yup. We are watching 45 mins of Beyond the Peloton

1. Why – Monday’s are boring. We want to spice up your life. 2. BYOB event – so BYOB please. 3. Everyone is welcome. Really.

every Monday Bicycling Movie Nite's - BEYOND THE PELOTON

3 months ago | Rohan Kini: blog@BumsOnTheSaddle.com - Home

Every Monday Bicycling Movie nite – we intend to watch a biking movie every monday evening.
Start around 7:30pm and wrap up in an hour.

Today, 14th November
Time – 7:30pm
Where – BumsOnTheSaddle

After two seasons of following the Cervelo TestTeam, Joseph Finkleman and Booker Sim now follow Team Garmin-Cervélo and capture the human passion and beauty of cycling. With their all-access passes, they show you what conventional race footage fails to capture: everything “beyond” the peloton.

Yup. We are watching 45 mins of Beyond the Peloton

1. Why – Monday’s are boring. We want to spice up your life. 2. BYOB event – so BYOB please. 3. Everyone is welcome. Really.

A bicycle commute in Bangalore

3 months ago | Rohan Kini: blog@BumsOnTheSaddle.com - Home

Go by Bike!

Sri Harsha has a good writeup about his bicycle commute (and his earlier post). Thank you for the kind words about BumsOnTheSaddle Harsha! We love you too!

A bicycle commute is always awesome – fast, fun and cheap-er

Here’s how you can ensure a fun commute

• Get a good bike
• Read the Commute FAQ section on the awesome bicycling notebook
• Get inspired by others who cycle to work
  • Akshay
  • Dasarathi
  • Muralidhar Chavan
  • Sriram
  • Ravi Ranjan Kumar
  • Dheeraj Reddy
• Ride Safe
  • Use a Helmet
  • maybe a Pollution Mask
  • Secure your bike with a good lock
  • Be nice to everyone on the road – smile n wave. While you might feel like superman, remember you are traffic!

A bicycle commute in Bangalore

3 months ago | Rohan Kini: blog@BumsOnTheSaddle.com - Home

Go by Bike!

Sri Harsha has a good writeup about his bicycle commute (and his earlier post). Thank you for the kind words about BumsOnTheSaddle Harsha! We love you too!

A bicycle commute is always awesome – fast, fun and cheap-er

Here’s how you can ensure a fun commute

• Get a good bike
• Read the Commute FAQ section on the awesome bicycling notebook
• Get inspired by others who cycle to work
  • Akshay
  • Dasarathi
  • Muralidhar Chavan
  • Sriram
  • Ravi Ranjan Kumar
  • Dheeraj Reddy
• Ride Safe
  • Use a Helmet
  • maybe a Pollution Mask
  • Secure your bike with a good lock
  • Be nice to everyone on the road – smile n wave. While you might feel like superman, remember you are traffic!

On hand.

3 months ago | Queenie Takes Manhattan: Queenie Takes Manhattan

Sometimes I think there's nothing in the house for breakfast, and then I remember that I have eggs, scallions, a tomato and half an avocado. What's better than that?

Answer: the Sriracha I squirted all over it after I snapped this photo.

[populaire] Arkavathi 150

3 months ago | Rohan Kini: blog@BumsOnTheSaddle.com - Home

Randonneuring is a non-competitive, self-supported, long-distance cycling activity.

Populaires allow people to sample randonneuring over shorter distances, typically less than 200km.

IISC Randonneurs proudly present the Arkavathi 150

Date: November 12, 2011, 06:00 AM
Start: Indian Institute of Science Gymkhana Gate, Yeshwantpur
End: Indian Institute of Science, A-Mess Gate/Kendriya Vidyalaya Gate, Mathikere Road
Distance: 147 km
Time limit: 10 hours

A lot more info on the IISC Randonneurs page. Way to go guys.

Important Links

• IISC Randonneurs
• The Arkavathi Populaire
• Bangalore Brevets

Spicing it up.

4 months ago | Queenie Takes Manhattan: Queenie Takes Manhattan

I've always really wanted to love pumpkin bread. In theory, it should be an easy thing for me to do. I'm a big fan of the pound cake/quick bread genre, and I really love pumpkin-spiked baked goods, particularly scones and pie. It should be an easy sell. But, in my experience, most recipes for pumpkin bread result in overly-sweet, overly-oily, cloying messes of a loaf.

This year, I decided to take charge of the pumpkin loaf. No longer would I be a slave to such sub-par use of one of nature's most delicious ingredients. It was time for a revolution.

As a starting point, I used this recipe from Bon Appétit. I'd tried it before, and been pleased with the texture, but disappointed in the flavor. It was too sweet and not nearly spicy enough. After all, what is the point of baking with pumpkin if you're not going to exercise a moderately heavy hand with the ginger, cloves and cinnamon? What is autumn if not an excuse to clear out the spice cabinet?

And so I got to work. Out went one of the three cups of sugar, and, for good measure, I swapped one of the remaining two for half a cup each of dark and light brown sugar. After all, pumpkin and molasses (the "brown" in brown sugar) play pretty well together. In went extra cinnamon and cloves, freshly grated nutmeg stood in for the powdered stuff, and ginger was added to the mix.

The result is a pumpkin loaf that - I think - successfully bridges the gap between pumpkin bread and gingerbread. It's spicy and just a bit sweet, moist and fragrant. It made my apartment smell heavenly for days, and if you make it in these adorable little mini loaf pans, it just might be the best host or hostess gift the holiday season ever saw. Except for a bottle of bourbon.

Spiced Pumpkin Bread
Adapted from Bon Appétit

Butter for greasing the pans
3 cups all purpose flour, plus a bit for flouring the pans
2 tsp. ground cloves
3 tsp. ground cinnamon
1 tsp. freshly grated nutmeg
1 tsp. ginger
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. kosher salt
1 cup canola oil
1 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup light brown sugar
1/2 cup dark brown sugar
3 large eggs
1 16-ounce can of pure, pureed pumpkin
1 tsp. vanilla

Pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Butter and flour two standard, 9x5x3 inch size (or four mini) loaf pans. If using mini loaf pans, place them on a cookie sheet.

In a large bowl, sift together the flour, spices, baking soda and baking powder. Stir the salt in with a fork. In another large bowl, mix together the sugars and oils, then add the eggs, pumpkin and vanilla. If you have any lumps from the brown sugars, use a large whisk to help dissolve them into the mixture.

Add the flour mixture to the wet ingredients in two additions, mixing well with a spatula or wooden spoon after each. Divide the batter evenly between the pans, then place in the oven and bake until a tester inserted into the cakes comes out clean - about an hour for mini loaves, and 70 minutes for the larger loaves. I'd also recommend rotating the loaves about halfway through baking - spinning them front to back and switching baking racks, if you're using two.

Cool in the pans for about 30 minutes, then run a butter knife around the edges of the loaves. Invert onto a cooling rack to cool completely. Eat immediately or wrap tightly in plastic wrap and store at room temperature for up to four days.

Makes two standard loaves or four mini loaves.

VMware+ubuntu with Ruby on Rails

4 months ago | Doel Sengupta: Doel

Lately I have started using VMware with ubuntu on my Windows machine for faster and hassle free Ruby on Rails development. But nothing comes easy, there are pretty many things you need to take care of for this setup. You can follow the steps here, preferably sequentially for the installation.

And I would love to add the things which I have faced while installation, setup and while running my RoR app here :)

1. wired connection error, unable to connect to INTERNET from the Virtual Machine. Mainly this is caused not only due to your internet connection/ speed but by a corrupted Virtual machine. refer here for detail.
2. ERROR: Error running '/usr/bin/make install', please read /usr/share/ruby-rvm/log/zlib/make.install.log. This is mainly caused as you are not executing the commands from the administrator mode. In order to do that, instead of doing $ rvm pkg install zlib do $sudo rvm package install zlib.
3. Nokogiri / ruby gems with native C extension failure. Refer nokogiri site for details or follow the below commands for Ubuntu.
   Ubuntu doesn’t come with the Ruby development packages that are required for building gems with C extensions.Following are the commands for that.

4. # ruby developer packages
   sudo apt-get install ruby1.8-dev ruby1.8 ri1.8 rdoc1.8 irb1.8
   sudo apt-get install libreadline-ruby1.8 libruby1.8 libopenssl-ruby
   
   # nokogiri requirements
   sudo apt-get install libxslt-dev libxml2-dev
   sudo gem install nokogiri

5. Invalid gemspec:: invalid date format in specification: error. For any of kind of such error you need to manually edit all the gemspec files which have this error. Look here for details. Otherwise simple change the date format to this s.date = %q{2011-08-31} . For changing the file you may need the root permission, i.e $ sudo vi /path/filename.gemspec will open the file in read-write mode.
6. Mysql: sudo apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client

   sudo apt-get install libmysql-ruby libmysqlclient-dev
   sudo gem install mysql

7. How to add mysql database related stuff : [[ -s "/usr/share/ruby-rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && source "/usr/share/ruby-rvm/scripts/rvm"
Remember to add the above lines in the .bashrc file. You can get the file from the root dir (in the terminal type cd..to go to your root dir), just type sudo vi ~/.bashrc [for editing the file as a root user]
8. How can I share folders/files in VMware: It is as simple as the screenshots below. But remember to have the VMware tools installed, which comes as default in the latest version though :)

wired connection error in Vmware

4 months ago | Doel Sengupta: Doel

Twitter is the new RSS Reader

4 months ago | Alex Rothenberg: Common Sense Software

In 2008 I thought RSS was an awesome way to stay abreast of what’s going on, but now its 2011 and I find myself using Twitter more often than Google Reader to find new and interesting articles people have written. Readers tweet and retweet articles they find interesting which seems a lower barrier than leaving an “I like this” comment. As an author Twitter also gives you some idea of who is reading your posts and a way to connect with them.

Back in 2008 I created a blog aggregator site http://waywework.it to group the all the people I work with and promote others to share their thoughts. I was so excited I even wrote an article about it.

Now that its 2011, I’ve been asking myself how could I update http://waywework.it for the twitter world of today?

I decide that if we’re going to follow people on twitter that’s what my site should facilitate. When new posts come in it should tweet them letting you see them if you follow @WayWeWorkIT.

Enabling API access to twitter

Once I had this I added the twitter gem to my application. I have to give a shout out John Nunemaker for writing this fantastic gem which made my task so simple.

In the Gemfile

gem 'twitter'

I created a new twitter account @WayWeWorkIT and registered an application at https://dev.twitter.com/apps so I had my OAuth and access tokens.

The only trick was I had to go Application Settings tab and configure it for Read and Write access then regenerate the tokens.

Now that I had the keys and tokens from twitter I had to tell my application to use them without hardcoding them in my code. This took two steps. First, configuring the app to read the tokens from the environment in config/initializers/twitter.rb. Yes I am somewhat paranoid about accidentally tweeting from development but that if Rails.env.production? should save me.

if Rails.env.production?
  Twitter.configure do |config|
    config.consumer_key       = ENV['TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY']
    config.consumer_secret    = ENV['TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET']
    config.oauth_token        = ENV['TWITTER_OAUTH_TOKEN']
    config.oauth_token_secret = ENV['TWITTER_OAUTH_TOKEN_SECRET']
  end
end

Secondly, setting the tokens on the heroku environment (I typed the real tokens instead of the XXXXXXXX’s).

$ heroku config:add TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY=XXXXXXXX
$ heroku config:add TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET=XXXXXXXX
$ heroku config:add TWITTER_OAUTH_TOKEN=XXXXXXXX
$ heroku config:add TWITTER_OAUTH_TOKEN_SECRET=XXXXXXXX

We can test it out (after deploying with git push heroku)

$ heroku console
>> Twitter.tweet('http://waywework.it aggregates blog articles')
=> # some big object returned
>> Twitter.user_timeline('wayweworkit').first.text
=> "http://t.co/FCmUQdc3 aggregates blog articles"

Great we just tweeted our first tweet for the world to see.

Updating WayWeWork.IT to tweet new posts

The app periodically scans the rss feeds it tracks and when it sees a new post it creates it in the app’s database.

First we add a twitter_username to each feed we’re tracking

class AddTwitterUsernameToFeeds < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def change
    add_column :feeds, :twitter_username, :string
  end
end

Then, add an after_create callback to tweet each time we create a new post.

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
  after_create :tweet

  delegate :twitter_username, :to => :feed

  def twitter_username_with_at_sign
    "@#{feed_twitter_username || 'WayWeWorkIT'}
  end

  # See https://dev.twitter.com/docs/tco-link-wrapper/faq#Will_t.co-wrapped_links_always_be_the_same_length
  # We should query instead of hardcoding 20
  def short_url_length
    20
  end

  def tweet
    if Rails.env.production?
      non_title_part_of_tweet = " #{'x'*short_url_length} via #{twitter_username_with_at_sign}"
      max_title_length = 140 - non_title_part_of_tweet.length

      tweet = "#{title.truncate(max_title_length)} #{url} via #{twitter_username_with_at_sign}"
      Twitter.update(tweet)
    end
  end
end

Again with the “if Rails.env.production?” paranoia? You do know that you can never be too paranoid :)

With the twitter gem its one line to tweet Twitter.update(tweet). The rest of it is to shorten the title so twitter’s 140 character limit wont cut off the url or the author’s name.

Once this is in we’ll start seeing tweets like

Go ahead and follow @WayWeWorkIT on twitter and you’ll start seeing these blog posts.

Making it work.

4 months ago | Queenie Takes Manhattan: Queenie Takes Manhattan

As a half-Jewish girl growing up in the greater New York City area, I ate a lot of Chinese food. Correction: still eat a lot of Chinese food. Some of this is the more authentic dishes to be found mostly in Flushing and Chinatown; most of it is the gleefully Americanized stuff available all over the city, able to summoned with the briefest of phone calls.

Among my lifelong favorites from the latter category are cold sesame noodles. The peanut-y sauce, the chewy noodles, the thinly sliced cucumber and scallions - I love it all. They make an especially great canvas for hot sauce, which only makes them better in my eyes.

But since even I can't justify ordering in Chinese every night, I needed to find a way to satisfy my sesame noodle cravings at a moment's notice. The result? An actually somewhat nutritious version that substitutes julienned squash for the noodles and has a bit of yogurt in the sauce to add heft (and, incidentally, protein). The classic hooks are still there, though - peanut butter, sesame oil, scallions and cucumber all make an appearance. And though it's not often found in Chinese food, I added some fish sauce for funk and awesomeness.

Authentic? No. Tasty? I sure think so. Easy? Empirically so.

Queenie's Sesame "Noodles"

1 large yellow squash or two medium zucchini
2 tbs. Greek yogurt
1 tbs. creamy peanut butter
1 tsp. rice wine vinegar
1 tsp. soy sauce
1/2 tsp. fish sauce
1/4 tsp. Sriracha, plus extra for garnish
1/4 tsp. sesame oil
2 scallions, thinly sliced
1/2 English cucumber, cut in half lengthwise, seeded and cut into 1/4 inch pieces
1 tsp. toasted sesame seeds

Using a mandoline or a julienne peeler, peel the squash (except for the seeds at the core) into long strips. Place in a mesh sieve and sprinkle with a bit of kosher salt. Toss to distribute the salt evenly, then set aside while you prep the sauce.

Combine all remaining ingredients except the scallions, cucumber and sesame seeds in a small bowl. Whisk together with a fork until you have an even, light brown, creamy sauce with no lumps.

Meanwhile, bring a small pot of water to the boil. Add the squash to the pot and cook for 2 minutes. Remove with tongs and place back in the sieve to drain a bit.

Place the drained squash into a large bowl. Add the cucumber and 2/3 of the scallions, followed by a couple spoonfuls of the sauce. Using tongs, toss the "noodles" with the sauce and vegetables until well-combined, adding more sauce until it's as saucy as you want it. Using the tongs, transfer to a small bowl for eating. (You'll want to use tongs, because you'll have a bit of watery sauce left over at the bottom of the mixing bowl.)

Garnish with the remaining scallions, sesame seeds and a bit of Sriracha. Eat immediately.

Serves one, generously.

OAuth with OmniAuth and Twitter

4 months ago | Arun Agrawal: Ruby Rockers

Hi Folks, If you want to have OAuth in your Rails Application with twitter. OmniAuth is the best gem to use. OmniAuth provides list of  Strategies to use many OAuth for your application. Here is the List of Strategies. Showing here a Twitter Strategy for OmniAuth. Twitter uses the OAuth 1.0a flow, you can read about [...]

Besides being faster, what else is new in Bundler 1.1?

4 months ago | Pat Shaughnessy: Pat Shaughnessy - Home

Bundler 1.1 can help you sort through your gems

Three weeks ago I explained why Bundler 1.1 will be much faster than Bundler 1.0, which is clearly its most important new feature. However, there are a few new commands and options the Bundler team implemented in version 1.1 that can help you better manage and sort through the gems you have installed on your development computer and servers. Bundler 1.1’s new commands will tell you which gems you can upgrade, and also help keep things clean by deleting gems you no longer need…

Austin, Texas. Saturday, October 1st.

4 months ago | Queenie Takes Manhattan: Queenie Takes Manhattan

Birthday champagne, naturellement.

138 years of popular science by Jer Thorp

4 months ago | James Torio: Designing the experience

Jer Thorp walks through his process of how he created a recent visualization for popular science magazine. Part of his process that I find interesting is he says, “This is a really common approach for me to take – building small tools … Continue reading →

Social Training for Social Tools

4 months ago | Michael Idinopulos: Transparent Office

Socialtext product adoption is way, way up--over 300% YTD. There are many reasons for the phenomenal growth, but in this post I'll focus on one specific factor: our training approach. Some time ago, I had one of those forehead-smacking Ah-Hah...

rbx-require-relative (0.0.5) failure issue

4 months ago | Doel Sengupta: Doel

Installing rbx-require-relative (0.0.5) Unfortunately, a fatal error has occurred.
Please report this error to the Bundler issue tracker at https://github.com/carlhuda/
bundler/issues so that we can fix it. Thanks!/Users/sjain/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.2-p290/
lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/ installer.rb:364:in `ensure_required_ruby_version_met':
rbx-require-relative requires Ruby version ~> 1.8.7. (Gem::InstallError)

  gem 'ruby-debug'

  gem 'ruby-debug19'

Austin, Texas. Monday, October 3.

4 months ago | Queenie Takes Manhattan: Queenie Takes Manhattan

Go to Justine's. Order the salade de crevettes and the ratatouille. Thank me later.