Blogs

Over at Nitobi these days we’re hiring new developers, so if you’re a wicked Ajax, or Flex developer and want to work in Vancouver BC, we want to hear from you. Wander on over to Dave Johnson’s blog for details, or jump straight over to our careers page. Tip: if you want to rise above, show us what you’re capable of!

On a similar note, I’m working on a really exciting project right now called Jiibe. The goal of this project is to develop a web application that helps people distill this idea of “company culture” down to something we can compare, discuss, and track. Why would we want to do that? Well, for one thing, we want to help people make their workplaces the best places they can be.

This is a collaborative effort between Nitobi and a really talented team of people including Greg Scott of Vision2Hire fame, and Stephen Race, an occupational psychologist whose web-based job candidate solution won HR Executive Magazine’s Top 10 HR products award.

I can’t show you anything more just yet, but I can point you in the direction the the Jiibe Blog (http://blog.jiibe.com/), which is turning out to be a pretty interesting read about company culture and communications. Go check it out!

Earlier I posted our sample database with tonnes of free datasets for developing web applications: Country/State information, Dictionaries, Fake sales data, Fake customer lists, and so-on. There is an update available for this database with several new tables, and also a corrected Regions database.

Go git er’ (big download btw) here: http://blogs.nitobi.com/alexei/?p=92

Was stuggling with ActionMailer today (a little). Went to several online and offline resources. Found this tutorial to be among the better ones:

http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/HowToSendEmailsWithActionMailer

Apparently it’s official. Ajaxian.com has been acquired? According to these guys it has: http://www.rttnews.com/sp/breakingnews.asp?date=06/18/2007&item=95&vid=0

Techtarget has purchased them to reach developers and get a foothold in Ajax related web development media – of which Ajaxian appears to hold the lions share. Its an interesting development and although I congratulate the guys over at Ajaxian, I hope it doesn’t degrade the quality of news and information coming from them.

Note: Blue is Ajaxian. The other lines are other development and ajax-related blogs.

UPDATE (June 28, 2007): New release of this dataset is available below with corrections and new datasets.

Over the years I’ve needed data for various purposes when developing web applications. Examples: Regional data for sign-up forms (”Choose your location:”), Dictionaries for spell checkers, relational enterprise data for mockups and samples, etc. So I’ve compiled a fairly large resource that I imagine would be useful – given how hard some of it was to come by.

I know there are data generators out there and other sources for some of this – but when I was looking it was a chore (especially for the regional data) to get it all together the way I needed it. So here it is (download link is at the bottom of the page). Warning: its around 100MB compressed and 550 MB uncompressed so watch out!

Included is full schema information for each database.

For each database there are 4 formats available:

1. CSV
2. MS Access 2000
3. SQL Syntax file
4. XML

The following databases are included:

1. ComputerLanguages – A random list of computer languages in a table. Don’t know why I needed this
2. ContactsFlatfile1k – A table of 1000 realistic but fake people with full contact information, email, phone, address, etc.
3. ContactsFlatfile10k – Same but with 10,000 entries.
4. ContactsFlatfile100k – Same but with 100,000 entries for testing big lookups.
5. CountryRegion – A fairly extensive list of Country and region (be it state/province, etc) flatfile information. Great for signup forms. UPDATED
6. EnglishDictionary – 110,554 words and definitions from the English language. Don’t know where this came from, but you might want to check copyright before using it in anything serious.
7. EnglishWordsLarge – A slightly larger (127,238) database of English words without definitions.
8. EnglishWordsMostPopular – The most popular 1,000 words in the English Language. Great for live spell checkers.
9. GeneralProducts – A table of product information.
10. NorthWindUltra – A much larger and more detailed version of the famous NorthWind database from Microsoft. Note: it contains none of it’s data. This is all new stuff and would be great for app mockups.
11. USCityStates – A detailed list of all major US cities and their states. This version is in a heirarchical parent-child relationship database structure. Over 13,000 entries.
12. USCityStatesFlatfile – A detailed list of all major US cities and their states. This version is in a flat-file single table structure for easy reference. The same 13,000 entries.
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13. Industries – A list of common industries. Useful for signup forms.
14. CompanyTypesSizes – A list of common company types and sizes. Also useful for signup forms.
15. UKPostalCodes – A list of UK Postal Codes with full longitude, latitude, and district name. Thanks to Tony Hine for this!

Download it here (100 MB): http://blogs.nitobi.com/alexei/dbtestdata_entset2007.zip

Having trouble with RMagic in Ruby on Rails? You can always do what I ended up doing today, and using the command line interface to ImageMagick instead of dealing with all the headaches I was having.

First, download ImageMagick. Compile it or get the binaries if on Win32.

Figure out your command line for convert to create an image, set the correct blurring and warbling filters. Eg:

convert -size 142x42 xc:white -font arial -pointsize 30 -tile pattern:checkerboard -annotate +10+30 MYSTRING -blur 0x1 -wave 1x3 -draw "line 20,50 90,10" captcha.jpg

Then, create a helper method to come up with a string and use system method to execute the command line and dump the file in the correct spot.

system(’convert -size 142×42 xc:white -font arial -pointsize 30 -tile pattern:checkerboard -annotate +10+30 ‘ + mystring + ‘ -blur 0×1 -wave 1×4 -draw “line ‘ + String((rand*142).round) + ‘,50 ‘ + String((rand*142).round) + ‘,0″ -draw “line ‘ + String((rand*142).round) + ‘,50 ‘ + String((rand*142).round) + ‘,0″ public/images/captcha/’ + filename + ‘.gif’)

resultstring = filename + “.gif”

Well its a great day for web development (or is it?). Apple has released Safari 3.0 for Windows Beta. You can download it from http://www.apple.com/

This is sortof how I view this release:

It will in theory be an advantage to developers if the browsing engine matches closely enough the version the most MacOS users have. Right now, it doesn’t. I immediately noticed inconsistencies in the display engine, meaning I’ll now have an additional platform to test on. I sincerely hope this is a safari 3.0 thing, not a safari Windows thing. ANYWAY.. thats not necessarily a criticism – just an initial observation.

A criticism (if there is any to be had) would be with the inconsistencies between versions of the Safari display engine.

Still. Its pretty awesome to have a PC native version of Safari! Go get a copy!

We’ve updated our knowledgebase so that you can now add comments and ask questions.

Go check it out: http://www.nitobi.com/kb/?artid=345Â Â (look at the bottom!)

Joe has posted a great little plugin for Drupal to easily add RobotReplay functionality to your site! Go check it out:

http://drupal.org/project/robotreplay