by tjs on January 15, 2009
We’re evaluating using Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud) to fire off full instances of our system for both dev and QA. That involves multiple servers and databases, it’s a non trivial task. I think RightScale is a great service which we’ll probably use if we move forward but at this point during testing and discovery I decided to muck around at a lower level. RightScale provides a very nice Ruby library to access AWS services.
So I wrote a simple ruby script that tracks changes in aws assets. Stuck it in a cron job and it notifies me by e-mail whenever there’s a change on our account. [click to continue…]
by tjs on October 31, 2008
UITableView is probably the most used view on the iPhone. It’s flexible and the UI is ideally suited to use on the iPhone. There are lots of examples on how to add multiple items to a UITableViewCell. However, I needed to present some data in a more traditional spreadsheet style grid. The results worked well and enabled me to pack a lot of information on the screen that was very hard to follow without the vertical grid. I’ll show a very simplified version here you can use to add vertical lines to your UITableView.
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by tjs on October 21, 2008
We’ve been planning on moving to a new messaging protocol for a while. We’ve looked at a lot of different solutions but had enough issues with every proposed solution to date that we haven’t made a decision. JR Boyens pointed us to Google’s announcement Protocol Buffers: Google’s Data Interchange Format in July. Glanced at it but then it got lost in the everyday noise. Recent work on a project caused it to get more attention. I like what I see.
As part of a new offering we decided to add in our new messaging direction. We’re processing realtime voice conversations. Some of our major considerations are:
[click to continue…]
