The last six months have been busy. Summer was crazy. Why? Besides working my regular consulting gigs I co-founded a new company with my good friend Justin Grammens. We named it Recursive Awesome, LLC.
Recursive Awesome is focused on developing mobile applications for the four main smart phone platforms; iPhone, Android, Blakcberry, and Palm. We do custom development for clients as well as build our own products.
Our first product, called Mobile VidHub, allows video producers to have a custom, branded app on each platform to distribute their content. More details here.
As for client applications you should check out TrickiWiki Trivia. Recursive has released iPhone, Android, and web based versions of the game. The Palm Pre and Balckberry versions are in development. All of the TrickiWiki games are native applications with the questions powered by a Ruby on Rails web service.
While Justin and I are using RA to focus on mobile development we will continue to build web applications using Ruby and Ruby on Rails.
Please check out our business and let us know if you are in need of our services.
- 5th February , 2008 by
Sam in
MySQL, Mac, Miscellany
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This past weekend I bought a new MacBook and, of course, it has Leopard for the OS. As I was installing all of the development tools I need I kept having issues when trying to run MySQL 5.0.51. I installed from the Mac OS X packages.
After consulting google I came across Ted Hogan’s site. He explained that is was a permissions issue between “/usr/local/mysql/data” and the current logged in user. His fix is listed below.
You can get to this through the finder by using the “Go to Folder” dropdown item from the Finder’s “Go” menu. Just type in /usr/local and go from there. Also, you can modify the permissions by command-I (info dialog) at the bottom (Sharing & Permissions.) Be sure to click the options button (gear box at bottom) and select “Apply to enclosed items” as well.
- 22nd January , 2008 by
Sam in
Miscellany, Ruby on Rails
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Yesterday I found that my team was selected for the Sierra Bravo F1 Overnight Website Challenge. I’m pretty excited about it. The teams get to stay up all night coding like fiends while powered by free Red Bull, Peace Coffee, Buffalo Wild Wings, and Chipotle with an occasional break for a Guitar Hero contest. My team is one representing the Ruby Users of Minnesota (RUM) and we have some top quality developers. I hope I measure up.
One part nerd Olympics, one part community service project and one part race-against-the-clock — Sierra Bravo’s F1 Overnight Website Challenge presented by VISI will partner deserving Minnesota non-profits with teams of talented web developers for 24 hours of fun collaboration culminating in a fully operational website for each participating non-profit. - Sierra Bravo website
Here is the link to team Ruby.mn. I’m the one with the party hat.
- 31st July , 2007 by
Sam in
Miscellany, Ruby on Rails
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I know this has been documented in other places so this is mostly for my own sanity. I want to use the attachment_fu plug-in by Rick Olson for my rails app to upload user avatars. I also want to resize the images and create a series of smaller thumbnails for use throughout the site.
Steps to install ImageMagick
- Download the Windows binary of ImageMagick. I used ImageMagick-6.3.5-4-Q16-windows-dll.exe
- Run the ImageMagick installer (The file you just downloaded) and accept the defaults.
- Open a command prompt to verify the install was successful
- Type >convert logo: logo.miff
- Type >imdisplay logo.miff
- If all went well with the install a little picture of blue wizard should appear.
Steps to install MiniMagick
- Install the gem from the command prompt with the command gem install mini_magick. You may be asked to install a few required dependencies. Say yes.
- Wait for the download and install to complete.
You should be good now to install attachment_fu, but that is beyond the scope of this article. Use the links below for more information
References:
- 19th June , 2007 by
Sam in
Miscellany
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I recently installed a new hard drive on my development PC and thought it would be a good time to refresh my environment since it was suffering from Windows rot. Man, was that experience an eye opener as to the tools I use. Here is my alphabetized list.
I had to install more things like mail clients, printers, etc. as well. I just found it amazing at the number of tools I have to use in my professional life
