Now that we are fully using Git at work one of my tasks has been to move some of our old projects over to using Git. There are some different ways you can go about doing this, you can simply do a SVN export of the project and make a new git repository from it. I don’t prefer this method because you lose the commit history. The way below is a way to maintain all the history from the SVN repository.

For a upcoming Ruby project that I plan on working on I want to be able to send small messages to myself with information from a form that gets filled out. Amazon has just updated Simple Notification Service to be able to send SMS messages along with emails. This fits in perfectly with what I’m looking for. Looking on Amazon’s Github page for the aws-sdk gem I didn’t see any sample code for using SNS and googling I couldn’t find any right away.

Been a bit from my last posting, good reason for this though as I was away on a trip with my wife to London and Edinburgh. The trip was to celebrate one year of marriage with my wife. This was my 3rd time going to London, it’s a great place and where I asked my wife to marry me. Right outside the The National Gallery over looking Trafalgar Square in December with everything done up for winter!

I haven’t been playing World of Warcraft for a bit, but I guess they did some big updates to the armory which stopped the code I had written before from running correctly. (Link to the old code, Ruby and Groovy) After looking in to what has changed, I found out they added a new REST API for Battle.net which lets you pull data easily without the need of tricking the server to pass you XML.

So for my posting for Project Euler 001, the Javascript code kind of upset me. It’s not nice to look at and doesn’t really solve the problem in a functional way. With Javascript being a functional programming language it didn’t sit well with me. Comparing the Javascript code to the Groovy and Ruby code there is one thing missing and it is the ‘Range’ type call. If I could have a call like that I could use some other calls like filter and reduce to get the same outcome.

Made this posting sometime ago but I’ve been forgetting to actually post it. When I was looking up some information on Scala I found a great video tutorial on youtube made by MadocDoyu, which can be found here. In part of the video he introduces the Project Euler, this project seems really interesting. I plan on solving problems time to time using many of the languages I have looked at. I’m hoping this will keep my skills in these languages up to date.

Yesterday I was looking around for some new Ruby gems to help with web scraping (also sometimes called screen scraping), I found Nokogiri which is a great gem for dealing with HTML/XML data. One of the great things about Nokogiri is that it lets you use CSS3 selectors to find the data your looking for. This kind of makes it like using jQuery but in Ruby. For working with one page and not interacting with a site Nokogiri is fine, but if you need something more, Mechanize most likely will do the trick.

This has been a posting that I been putting off for some time now. noSQL is a great topic but the more you look in to it the more there is. noSQL covers a lot of technologies and ideas, some very new, and some that been around for a bit. I’m hoping this posting wets your appetite for knowing more about noSQL. One thing I will say to start off with, noSQL is a buzzword, plain and simple.

One of the other things I’m trying to learn on my free time is Scala, like Groovy it’s a language that runs on top of the JVM and is both a object-oriented and functional programming language. One of the biggest places I know where its being used is Foursquare Same idea as the other postings I did for installing Groovy, Grails and jRuby. Head to the Scala home page at http://www.

I really don’t like writing about games because I don’t play that many of them. When a game comes along that is good AND free, it makes it very easy to get into. Recently Team Fortress 2 has become free to play through Steam. This is a first person shooter (FPS) in the play style of Unreal Tournament and Wolfenstein Enemy Territory but with a very cartoony feeling to it. For me, this feature makes the game more enjoyable than just playing UT or W:ET.