Noulakaz

The blog of Avinash, Christina, Anya and Kyan Meetoo.

Archives for 2007

RESTful Application talking to Dumb-Ass Recipients (RADAR)

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A nice blog entry by Dave Thomas, the author of Agile Web Development with Rails:

“Put the main application logic into a RESTful server. This is where all the CRUD-style access to resources takes place.

Then, write a second proxy server. This is an HTTP filter, sitting between dumb browsers and your core resources. When browser-based users need to interact with your resources, they actually connect to this proxy. It then talks REST to your main server, and interprets the RESTful responses back into a form that’s useful on the browser. And this filter doesn’t have to be a dumb presentation layer—there’s nothing to say that it can’t handle additional functionality as well. Things like menus, user preferences, and so on could all sit here.

[…]

Let’s call it RADAR. We have a RESTful Application talking to Dumb-Ass Recipients.”

Personally, I understand his logic. But do we really need to have two distinct applications to do that?

I’ll have to think about it.

Agile Web Development with Ruby on Rails

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At last!

Amazon has just sent me the book Agile Web Development with Rails that I ordered one month ago.

This book focuses on Ruby on Rails, the open source framework to write web applications in the Ruby programming language (which is making a lot of buzz on the Internet right now).

Previously, I had purchased Programming Ruby.

I guess I can start experimenting with Rails a lot more now as I finally have the two books pictured on the right :-)

By the way, both Ruby on Rails and Ruby Gems, the Ruby package manager, have just been updated. I did this on my Linux box:

sudo gem update --system
sudo rm /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/source_cache
sudo gem install rails

By the way, here is a tip I got from the Agile Web Development with Rails book on how to generate the Ruby on Rails API documentation automatically:

rails dummy
cd dummy
rake rails:freeze:gems
echo >vendor/rails/activesupport/README
rake doc:rails

A directory called api will be created into the doc directory. Move it to the desktop and, voilà, you have the complete API documentation.

Have fun!

(Image courtesy of Spuggy, source_cache tip from ImaPenguin and Ruby Gems tip from Gregory Brown)

I’ve moved all my emails to Gmail

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I have moved all my emails (from 1997!) to Gmail using my Linux box using the following technique:

  • Saved all my emails in mbox format in Apple Mail (just do Save As… and choose the mbox format as export type). I guess all modern email clients can save in the mbox format now.
  • Set up a POP3 server on my PC at home. I used dovecot.
  • Create the user pop3user, give it a sensible password and copy the mbox file to /var/mail/pop3user
  • Configure the firewall (in my case, my Livebox) to allow incoming connections to my PC to the POP3 TCP port (port 110)
  • Configure Gmail to fetch emails from my Linux box (I used DynDNS to solve my dynamic IP issue. PS: Don’t forget that there is a built-in DynDNS updater in the Livebox. It works perfectly!)

And the result is:

Gmail has perfectly imported more than 1 gigabyte of emails. The only gripe is that this is a very lengthy process as Gmail only fetches 200 emails at a time and then pauses for some long minutes. I guess the whole import took around 3-4 days (at least).

I have to stress that the dates, the sender and the recipient(s) of the emails are not changed when Gmail imports them. This is extremely cool!

But the result is worth waiting for: I now have ALL my emails since 1997 online. I’m so happy :-)