For those of you viewing this, this is a demonstration of YouTube’s video encoding and HD Embed options. This is only a test… nothing else to see here.

Journey in HD

This video is 660 PX

This video is 853px and is the max width.

As an early adopter I get to try all the cool new stuff first. Which is great, but this time it bit me. I eagerly installed Snow Leopard, the latest OSX Update, and in the process my entire dev machine broke.

The problem is that Snow Leopard runs everything in 64bit mode by default, and with all of your gems likely compiled in 32 bit mode, you will need to rebuild your gem list in order to run them optimally (or at all).

In some cases, your gems will simply fail to run, giving you notice that you should rebuild them. But in many cases you will find a serious slowdown in your gems. Webrick for example took 45 seconds to start for me.

So, After I installed Snow Leopard, here’s how I fixed this problem.

Update your gems in bulk

Issue the IRB command to open an IRB session and issue the following command to update all of your gems.

`gem list`.each_line {|line| p "Installing: #{line.split.first}"; system "env ARCHFLAGS='-arch x86_64' sudo gem install #{line.split.first}"}

If you prefer a quieter install, the command below will exclude the RDOCs

`gem list`.each_line {|line| p "Installing: #{line.split.first}"; system "env ARCHFLAGS='-arch x86_64' sudo gem install #{line.split.first} --no-ri --no-rdoc"}

Remove MySQL

Remove the 32bit MySQL Gem from your system with

sudo gem uninstall mysql

Update MySQL

First, you will need to download and install the 64bit version of MySQL, but you also need to make sure you build the native parts of the MySQL Gem as the 64bit version as well.

Download the 64bit MySQL here (64Bit Intel MySQL 5.1.37)

Then, issue the command below to update your MySQL Gem:

sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64" gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config

You should set the ARCHFLAGS as shown above whenever you do a gem install with native components on Snow Leopard.

Update Ports

p. If you are running macports then you will need to update that as well. Download the Snow Leopard Macports , install, and run sudo port -v selfupdate

You will need to ensure that when you install objects from ports that you set the ARCHFLAGS as we did with the gems.

All good!

With that you should (should) be back up and runing with 64 bit versions of your gems.

I recently gave a presentation at the local Austin on Rails meeting on HTML5 and CSS3. Some of the people there expressed interest in seeing the slides so I put it up on Scribd.

You can download the HTML5 & CSS3 Overview here

Ruby on Rails gives us a ton of helper methods to make our life easier. But these method are pretty tightly tied into the Prototype / Scriptaclious librarys. To use the lighter jQuery library, you were forced to ignore the helpers and code your JS by hand. Now it’s easy to add jQuery functionality to your Rails projects.

Enter jRails .

jRails is a drop-in jQuery replacement for Prototype/script.aculo.us on Rails. Using jRails, you can get all of the same default Rails helpers for javascript functionality using the lighter jQuery library.

- Install instructions below -

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If you’re like us then you probably code your HTML in Firefox or Safari and then switch to IE to iron out the kinks. It would be fantastic if all the browsers just worked… but that’s not going to happen any time soon.

Enter Dean Edwards and his wonderful JS includes for IE 5, 6 & 7.

IE7 is a JavaScript library to make Microsoft Internet Explorer behave like a standards-compliant browser. It fixes many HTML and CSS issues and makes transparent PNG work correctly under IE5 and IE6.

These two JS includes fix many Internet Explorer CSS Bugs and implement a ton of IE8 CSS Selectors and Properties

These go a long way in getting IE 6 & 7 to play nicely with the newer versions of Firefox and Safari.

Download the JS Files here

Chris Hanscom over at Veign.com has been busy this week bringing his CSS3 Quick Reference Guide up to date in line with the latest CSS3 specifications.

The CSS 3 reference guide features one of the most complete and up-to-date cheat sheets on the new CSS 3 specification. See the new properties, selectors and allowed values that are being introduced in the CSS3 standard.

Features:

• Complete listing of the current CSS3 specification
• Organized by type / module
• Complete listing of the properties accepted values
• Selector Type reference
• Unit reference and information
• Common selector pattern reference

You can download the CSS3 Quick Reference Guide here.

Recently our firm was asked to bid on a project for a potential client. The client wanted a highly custom E-Commerce engine with heavy social networking components such that the project demanded a custom solution.

We presented our solution to the client, but unfortunately we were not able to meet their budget and were told by the client that while our proposal offered everything they were looking for in their project, they were going to move forward with a different firm. It was a peaceful parting as we fully understood their position. We wished them luck and success with their project and moved on.

Unfortunately, the client has returned to us. The selected firm was not able to complete the project due to the project’s complexity. It was simply over their heads.

The client invited MWD to preform a review of the code base in order to determine if we are willing to take over the project. The following is the story of our findings. It is a story of a developers responsibility to the client. It is also a story of tragedy.

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Your team’s velocity is most easily defined as the number of Story Points they are able to complete fully within a single iteration.

Once you understand your team’s velocity, you can more confidently commit your team to complete a specific number of story points for the next iteration. But how do you factor velocity when the project has just begun?

Here we take a look a the Velocity Guess based on Historic Progress. It’s a method that has served us well in the past.

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Planning any large project, and by large I’m speaking of projects that last 3-8 Months, is often viewed by many as a shot in the dark. Nearly two-thirds of projects significantly overrun their cost estimates and the average project exceeds it’s schedule by 100%.

Any project with one hundred plus features, or one which dives into unknown territory, is going to produce obstacles which will threaten the plan. Clashing features, unknown API’s, growing database complexity, or a lack of understanding of the complexity of a feature will all push out the project’s time line and jeopardize the schedule.

However, with a story based planning and development strategy it is possible to see these risks coming and plan accordingly with very little overhead.

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Many business needs require custom designed solutions. Inventory management, complex business models, and specialized content management all require a customized solution to meet your needs.

Our team works with you to ensure that we understand your business needs. We then design a custom solution which fulfills your requirements while maintaining flexibility for future expansion.

We view ourselves as partners in your business’s success. It’s our job to make your company as streamlined as possible.

We do this by first creating a detailed feature roadmap which is used to understand your applications needs and the needs of your users. Our roadmap is used to plan project phases and iterations, and organize and prioritize features.

From there we work with our clients during the development phases to ensure the application is delivering the expected results. We monitor our velocity during development which often allows us to slip in additional features which provide value for the application. Weekly meetings ensure that the project stays on track, and the client stays informed.

Ruby is a language, just like PHP, or ASP. It allows us to define business logic, calculate prices, and interact with a database. Rails is the framework. It tells us where files should go, how HTML views interact with Database Objects, and allows us to plug in modules.

PHP and ASP have these things too. But in the world of programming, Ruby is the 20 something with the sun glasses and the sports car!

Ruby on Rails allows us to do all the things that PHP and ASP can do with 10% of the code-base and 1/3rd the time. Less code means less to build (and less that could break). It’s faster to build, more stable, easier to deploy, and a JOY to program. We can test it programatically. We can automate deployment. We can scale from one server to a hundred, just by changing a variable.

Furthermore, with the standards that are enforced, any Rails Developer can pick up another Rails project and be up and running in a fraction of the time as he could with other languages.

We have never seen another language which provides us as much promise and potential as Ruby on rails. We strongly recommend it to all our clients.