Midem Music Hackday 2013
January 29, 2013 § Leave a Comment
Carrying on from my post on the Mint site, I wanted to share a little more information on what I think was the coolest part of my MIDEM Music Hackday hack – the technology.
But first a quick recap of the idea for those in the dark:
To answer the question “what do you listen to?” I created an app that analyses your recent listening history and awards Artist, Genre, Guilty Pleasure and Hipster badges based on certain criteria.
With that out of the way…
Sneaking a peak at Rails 4
October 15, 2012 § Leave a Comment
This weekend I decided to have a go at making an app with edge Rails, aka Rails 4.0.0.beta. I hunted around for a summary of the cool new stuff and didn’t really find one. So, here is the interesting things I hit upon, more or less in the order I hit upon them:
iOS 6 injecting should_group_accessibility_children to POST requests
October 3, 2012 § 5 Comments
After iOS 6 dropped, we got reports that an iPhone app of ours had stopped working after upgrading. We quickly confirmed that this was indeed the case and started to investigate.
Rails, callbacks, workers, and the race you never expected to lose
August 21, 2012 § 31 Comments
Consider a fairly normal pattern in a user model in Rails, sending a welcome email when a user signs up. If you’re interested in keeping your controller actions quick whilst you do this, you would probably queue the email to be sent later, like this:
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
after_save :queue_welcome_email, :on => :create
private
def queue_welcome_email
Resque.enqueue(WelcomeEmailJob, self.id)
end
endclass WelcomeEmailJob
@queue = :normal
def self.perform(user_id)
user = User.find(user_id)
UserMailer.welcome_email(user).deliver
end
endStraightforward, right? You’d think so, but if you implemented this and ran it in a live system, you would find a small number of ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound errors cropping up in Resque.
Cross domain font woes – part 2
July 4, 2012 § 1 Comment
A few months back we looked at issues related to showing custom fonts in firefox (see Cross domain font woes in Firefox). Since then we have also started hosting more and more sites on heroku where you have no control over nginx. Obviously this makes the previously proposed solution hard to implement…plus who can remember all of that config?
Collabify – everyone curates the party playlist
May 10, 2012 § 1 Comment
Last night was the first Music/Tech meetup. It went really well and we had a blast. Lots of interesting folks came down, we had a few drinks, we had a good chat. It was fun. Why am I telling you about this on the Logical Friday technical blog? Because the way we decided to play music is quite interesting.
Because this was the Music/Tech meetup, we had to have music playing, and it had to be done in a needlessly complicated way. To that end, we decided to take a crack at making the playlist selection more egalitarian. Enter Collabify.
Finally, a legitimate use for 3D CSS
March 28, 2012 § 2 Comments
Production sites using 3D transforms are still quite rare these days. I think one of the reasons is that people can’t find a legitimate reason to use 3D Transforms in their sites. Fair enough. Another reason can be that people think the technique isn’t mature enough yet. Recently I have been working on a website that is making use of 3D CSS, and it’s working!
In this article I want to show you that you can actually use 3D transforms in a production site, and what to expect when you’re thinking of using it in your site.
