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Ready for Firefox 3.5:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7824

Submitted to MDC, awaiting approval.

Next Image

I’m reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest this summer as part of Infinite Summer.

Since I love Google App Engine so much, I figured it would be fun to write a little app for tracking my progress in reading all 981 pages of IJ. Since Infinite Summer is a group effort, I’d also like to know who is ahead and who is behind.

So, check out the Infinite Summer Reading Progress Tracker. Because it runs on Google App Engine, you can login with any valid Google account.

Inspired by Simon Willison’s JSON micro-apps: json-time, json-head, and json-tinyurl, I created another Google App Engine powered site that produces Weather Alert information as JSON and JSON-P.

http://json-alerts.appspot.com/

Given a common place name (e.g. city, state or county name) or ZIP code, the current weather alerts for that zone will be returned along with location and timezone information. Place names are mapped to a county and timezone using the Yahoo! GeoPlanet web service. Weather alerts are provided by the NOAA’s state-by-state CAP feed.

Next Image has been updated to a new version with configurable key bindings. It is now available via the official Firefox add-on site.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7824

In order to correctly override #destroy in an ActiveRecord model, you actually need to implement #destroy_without_callbacks like so:

def destroy_without_callbacks
  unless new_record?
    # do your custom stuff here, then save
  end
  freeze
end

Simply implementing #destroy will short-circuit the callback chain and skip the destroy method on any associations marked :dependent => :destroy.

To help my daughter practice multiplication and to experiment with Google App Engine, I created a small app for doing your times tables.

http://times-tables.appspot.com/

I’m pretty impressed with GAE. It’s very easy to use, the Mac App Launcher is helpful and the online Dashboard is well done. I especially like the ability to upload and stage multiple versions.

I’ve started the process of having Next Image hosted on the official Mozilla Add-ons site. Once it receives enough ratings, it can be nominated for the public site.

Please rate or review Next Image via it’s sandbox page:

Next Image :: Firefox Add-ons

I’m in the process of updating my extensions to support Firefox 3. Unfortunately, there were some significant changes in how extensions can be served. So, at this point, only my Next Image plugin is working. Also, it might not show up via the Add-ons manager “Find Update”, so please install it directly.

Project Page: http://www.mrchucho.net/pages/projects#nextimage

Direct Link: http://www.mrchucho.net/downloads/nextimage-0.9.xpi

Updated – My second extension, This Window, is now up-to-date and available, too.

Project Page: http://www.mrchucho.net/pages/projects#thiswindow

Direct Link: http://www.mrchucho.net/downloads/thiswindow-0.8.xpi

This blog is powered by a custom blog engine I wrote in Rails. I call it bbot as an homage to my favorite Ruby irc bot, rbot.

I built bbot for two reasons: I wanted to build a completely RESTful application from scratch and I was tired of wrangling with Wordpress. bbot is simple; it does exactly want I need and nothing more. It supports all the basic blogging features: posts, comments, moderating, drafts, permalinks, etc. plus non-post static page (e.g. my about).

I’ve decided to make bbot available on github: http://github.com/mrchucho/bbot/tree/master. This way I hope to learn more about git and share bbot with anyone who might be interested.