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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.

Since when does Gmail prohibit sending email with a .bat file attached? It won’t even send a Zip file that includes a .bat file.

Of course, executable shell scripts for other platforms can still be attached and sent. Apparently, even legitimate users require protection from the scourge of Windows batch files.

If you’re in Tulsa or the surrounding area and want to learn more about Ruby (or just meet other Tulsa Rubyists) please attend the Tulsa Ruby Workshop Saturday April 26th from 10am to 4pm.

Hope to see you there.

In the case where your application is deployed on the same server as your Subversion repository, it can be helpful to access the repository via the file system rather than over the network.

set :repository, "file:///path/to/repository" 

However your workstation (from which you’ll run Capistrano) will need to access the repository over the network. This is accomplished by setting that local_respository parameter. “local”, in this case, meaning your local workstation.

set :local_repository, "http://host/svn/repository" 

Thanks to an article on my host, Slicehost, for pointing this out.