Enterprise Cloud Summit

Posted by Matt Smith Sun, 31 May 2009 08:33:00 GMT

I attended the Enterprise Cloud Summit in Las Vegas during Interop. It was a good experience, met some very good people, and learned a lot more about cloud computing.

Amazon announced their CloudWatch, Auto Scaling, and elastic load balancing for Amazon EC2. Which all look very interesting.

The running demo application was nice to see as it is able to run on multiple cloud platforms provided by different providers, you can try the demo here. The demo app used the open source project Panda, which was great as I had started investigating Panda shortly before the summit.

I look forward to deploying more applications in the "cloud".

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Congrats to EngineYard on Releasing Vertebra

Posted by Matt Smith Sun, 21 Dec 2008 12:45:00 GMT

Engine Yard has release Vertebra. I am looking forward to doing some digging with this. You can get the code at github. Links to the source and documentation can be found on Engine Yard's site.

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iPhone - Custom System Settings / Preferences

Posted by Matt Smith Sun, 21 Dec 2008 09:45:00 GMT

Follow these steps to create custom system settings for your iPhone application.

  1. Within your application right click on the project and choose "Add -> New File" from the menu.
  2. Next you are asked to choose a template for your new file. Choose the "Settings -> Settings Bundle" from the iPhone templates.
  3. Now that there is a Settings.bundle in your application choose it and edit the Root.plist file within the bundle. The template sets up four items within the Root -> PreferenceSpecifiers array. These four items are a PSGroupSpecifier, a PSTextFieldSpecifier, a PSToggleSwitchSpecifier, and a PSSliderSpecifier. Running the application now looks like the following: Each of these items have multiple properties that can be set that affect the behavior of the setting/preference. The "Key" property is used to access the value of the setting.
  4. To access the settings in your application you retrieve the value by the key: 
    NSUserDefaults *defaults = [NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults]; 
	  name_preference = [defaults stringForKey:NAMEPrefKey]; 
	  slider_preference = [defaults stringForKey:SLIDERPrefKey];
	  enabled_preference = [defaults stringForKey:ENABLEDPrefKey];
    There are various options for pulling the preference: stringForKey, arrayForKey, objectForKey.... see NSUserDefaults class documentation.

I hope this helps you with your system settings for your iPhone application.

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RubyConf 2008 videos

Posted by Matt Smith Sat, 29 Nov 2008 08:05:00 GMT

The confreaks have released the RubyConf 2008 videos. Looking forward to watching as I was not able to attend.

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Ruleby at the Ruby Hoedown

Posted by Matt Smith Fri, 22 Aug 2008 04:27:00 GMT

Confreaks have posted the talks from this year's Ruby Hoedown. Of special interest to me was Joe Kutner's talk on Ruleby, the Rule Engine for Ruby.

A question from the crowd asked about if there were plans for an external DSL and the answer is "yes". We are building an external DSL based on the internal String based DSL in Ruleby with parsing handled by Treetop. It has been a while in the making or not making, but work has begun again...

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MattSmith.me is launched!

Posted by Matt Smith Mon, 21 Jul 2008 13:50:00 GMT

Welcome to MattSmith.me. Here you will learn about all things related to, well, me. Most will be technical in nature as I am a computer programmer. Among other things I will review books I am reading and projects I am working on. Currently that would be on topics such as ruby, erlang, and REST.

Ruleby, ActiveRule, and Resterly are three projects I am working on. I cofounded the Ruleby project and will soon release ActiveRule and Resterly. ActiveRule will be a plugin aimed at making Ruleby easier to use with Rails and Merb. Resterly is an erlang based project to help with the building of REST based services in erlang. Hopefully these projects will be useful for others...

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