delynn

Wow, it’s been almost a year since I’ve updated my blog. I wish I could say that it was due to me not having anything to say, but that wouldn’t be true. Sometimes life decides to shake things up a bit, and that’s exactly what happened to me last May. As a result of this shake-up I was forced to alter my priorities quite a bit so that I could keep a proper life balance. During the next few months I learned an awful lot about previously unknown areas of life, as well as myself.

Every year during the first week of December I look back at my goals for the year and see how I did. I also start looking toward the year ahead and decide on what I’d like to accomplish. What I found this time around was that I hadn’t accomplished anything that I had set out to do during the year. This really bothered me, and at first I wrote it off to the rough year. After thinking about it a bit more though I realized something–I had incorrectly altered my priorities back in May. I had sacrificed a lot of little things that I really enjoyed (blogging, working on side-projects, personal time, etc.) in order to get my life back in balance, instead of just cutting the amount of time I was spending at work. But why?

For the longest time I’ve been a border-line workaholic. It was not uncommon for me to work eight to ten hours a day, seven days a week. In years past though, I did this because I really loved my job, and even though I worked a lot, I was still able to find time for all the other fun things in life. Unfortunately my work situation had changed to where I was no longer having fun, and I was also unable to scale back due to sheer number of responsibilities that I had accumulated over the years. I decided that a change was in order.

After being with this company for almost six years, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried about leaving. My fears were soon put to rest though, after my search began. For some reason things really fell perfectly in place and I just knew I had made the right decision. Within a day I had an interview scheduled, and within ten days I had completed two interviews and accepted a position with one of the best companies to work for in Denver. The really beautiful thing was that I was going to be working full-time with Ruby.

So, how has my life improved? Well, for starters I’ve only been working eight hours a day, and I’ve had six free weekends in a row to do whatever I wanted. I’ve taken the last six weeks to decompress and enjoy life more, and now I’m really looking forward to completing all of my goals from last year as well a couple new ones for this year. In the short-term expect a refresh of all of my existing projects as well as a transition of the code bases to GitHub. I’ll also probably move my blog off of my existing setup (which is still hosted on my personal server sitting in my old company’s rack) to something that is hardware independent and better fits my blogging style. I’ve been using Tumblr for the past couple months, and I’m quite liking it.

2008, here I come!

I’m starting to get excited about heading to Austin Texas this week for SXSW. I arrive late this Friday and will be hanging out all week. If you are going to be there, I’d love to meet up, so leave a comment or shoot an email to delynn at gmail dot com.

See you there!

Late last year my youngest brother Daniel decided to attend the prestigious Le Cordon Blue cooking school. My dad and I helped him move out to Las Vegas over New Years weekend, and he started classes the first week of January. After getting settled in and finishing his Cooking 101 and Wine and Beverage classes, he has decided that it would be nice to record the experiences and share some of the more interesting things he has learned.

So, if you are interested in cooking, I highly recommend you keep an eye on his new weblog.

A new release of the Rails framework means it’s time for a new version of the CHM Documentation file.

Download the latest version from here.

I’m about two weeks late getting this announcement out, but I wanted to point everyone to a new Rails plug-in that I have been working on with Fernand Galiana. It’s name is ZiYa (after the Turkish impressionist painter Nazmi Ziya Güran), and its purpose is to make using the XML/SWF Charts library a snap with your Rails project.

Here’s how to get a sample bar chart in your current Rails project:

Step 1.

Install the ZiYa plug-in:

  [ruby] script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/liquidrail/plugins/ziya/trunk

Step 2

Include the ZiYa module into a controller that will be responsible for generating the chart:

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class ChartsController < ApplicationController
  include Ziya
end

Step 3

Create the action that will be used to generate the XML document for the chart. Please note, this action will be used by a new or existing action, it will not be the same action that your users load in their browser.

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  def posts_chart
    chart = Ziya::Charts::Bar.new
    render :text => chart
  end

Step 4

In the view template for the client facing action, use ZiYa’s gen_chart helper method to embed your chart into the view:

<%= gen_chart("posts_chart", :url_for(:controller => "charts", :action => "posts_chart"), "#ffffff", 400, 300) %>

Step 5

Refresh your browser to see the default bar chart.

To make getting up to speed on all the capabilities of this plug-in and the XML/SWF Library we have put together a great support site. We have generated documentation, a bunch of sample charts, an introductory video and a really great training application that allows you to play with the YML chart styling capabilities. You can also checkout the project page over on RubyForge. There’s also a Google Group that we’ve created specifically for ZiYa discussion. Please post any questions or comments that you have regarding the plug-in there.

So, download the plug-in and get charting your data. This is a must have feature for an application that needs to impress their managers!

Since the first release candidate of Rails 1.2.0 was announced yesterday, I decided to update the CHM documentation to match this latest release. You can find the updated file via my CHM Documentation Project Page, or just download the file directly from here.

Please note that ActiveResource was pulled from 1.2.0 as of revision 5554, so its documentation is not included in the above file. If you are running off of trunk and want/need the ActiveResource documentation, then you should download my latest trunk CHM file from here.

Jamis Buck just posted about how he and Michael Koziarski have recently teamed up to start a new blog called The Rails Way. If you’re new to Rails, or are just interested in how these wily veterans might solve a coding problem, be sure to add their feed to your RSS reader.

As a side note, it’s nice to see them using the Scribbish theme for Mephisto.

Just a quick note to update everyone on the status of my project repositories. I’ve gotten them moved to my new server, and I have also updated the location urls on the individual project pages. Instead of installing Apache on this box just to proxy SVN requests, I decided use the built in SVNServer, so the urls have changed. Also, since I created new repositories, the version numbers have changed. So if you are using SVN externals in your applications, make sure to update the url (as well as the version number where applicable).

I have also installed Bounty Source’s neat Subversion Browser, to give people the ability to browse the repository source. You can find that by going to: http://code.delynnberry.com/.

I wanted to post a quick note to let people know that a port of the Scribbish theme for Mephisto has been posted. I’m currently using a personalized version of the theme on my site, and I may be a bit biased here, but I think it’s one of the better themes currently available.

The release of this port began a while ago when I first considered moving my site from Typo to Mephisto. I didn’t really want to lose the look that I had recently switched to, so I set out looking into what all would be involved in porting the theme. It took me a little time to learn the ins and outs of the Liquid syntax (that and a few updates to Mephisto’s Liquid API helped make the theme even better), but after re-launching my site a couple weeks ago I thought it would be nice if the theme was available for all Mephisto users. I contacted Jeff and asked him if he was interested in posting the port on his site. He was more that willing to oblige, and quickly setup a SVN branch for me to hack on. After a few uploads and some refinements by him, we had something we consider ready for release.

You can learn more about Scribbish from the product page, or download the zip file and upload it to your Mephisto install.

So, I was able to take the time last night to put together a CHM document that contains documentation for revision 5315 of Rails trunk. You can find the file here.

For more information related to what’s new in Rails, be sure to read Ryan Daigle’s category “what’s new in rails”–great stuff.