This Week @ Etech 2007

posted by ryan on March 30th, 2007

So we spent the week down here in San Diego at Etech. Hampton showed off Haml and we had a kick-ass vaultcamp party with Dan Grigsby and Radiant Core. The theme this year was ‘magic’ and as with most themes the results were mixed. Here are some of the things I found interesting to the work we do here at unspace.

Haml and a VaultParty @ Etech 07

posted by ryan on March 25th, 2007

We are down in San Diego this week at Etech (3rd year for Pete and I). This year is extra special since our boy Hampton is speaking (Haml: A Semantic Rebellion in Template Land).

And to celebrate we are having a Vaultcamp on Wed night!

Looking Real Good

posted by ryan on March 20th, 2007

Unspace’s latest pet project has launched. Every day Looking Real Good brings a fresh new face; a daily reminder that the web is made of charismatic and bizarre folks from all over the map.

The site is simple; no commenting, share buttons, voting or fancy javascript just vanity, pure and simple.

*Tip: add it to your RSS feed and get a new pic every day.

RESTful @ Redmond

posted by ryan on March 19th, 2007

So I spend the past week in Redmond at MS attending the MVP Summit and chatting with the MS Access team about Office 14. I think I sometimes forget how BIG Microsoft is and traveling around the Redmond Campus was a pretty cool experience. From the in house shuttle service to the Vista branded water it’s quite the operation.

I got to show off Rails and demo some MS Access based REST API stuff to help push the cause of destroying WS-DeathStar which was a treat!

Don't Judge a Book by it's Cover

posted by ryan on March 10th, 2007

So we have a new unspace labour of love project to be released shortly called Looking Real Good, more on that later. Since the main focus of the site is an image we wanted to make sure that as the image gets passed around the internet or stored on a hard drive the photographer still gets credit and the user always knows where the image came from.

Facebook Just Gets It Right

posted by pete on March 8th, 2007

Facebook raises the bar for what a social network should be so high that all existing current breed sites should be embarassed. Specifically, it gets three things right that might not be revolutionary on their own, but in the context of the site's implementation, it feels perfect:

All Roads Lead to Rails

posted by ryan on March 6th, 2007

Back on October I was invited to speak at the Seneca Free Software and Open Source Symposium about how we develop software at unspace

We posted the video in the middle of Feb and have gotten over 850 full views (all the way through to the revver ad content at the end). Also many nice folks had positive feedback about it.

• Ruby Inside
• Kane Mar
• Steve Eichert
• Steffen Rusitschka

My New TV Guide

posted by ryan on March 5th, 2007

I always think it’s awesome when someone takes something that sucks (Online TV Listings) and makes them not only better but fun! I came across couchville and was very impressed. You can pick your city (Canada works too!) and you get a google maps style interface to navigate the listings. You can add shows to your favorites and get full episode guides. My favorite feature is that you can pick a show and you get a list of all the other times/channels that show is playing, which is invaluable when you tape a lot of stuff and need to use the time shift channels. The data is the same as my onscreen guide but the interface is actually usable.

Why I love Videoegg & Amazon

posted by ryan on March 3rd, 2007

So when we were developing Project Breakout we had one big issue… video. Video encoding, storage and playback is the backbone of a video contest site as you can imagine. So we knew that we wanted to avoid as many of the big three as possible. As a first stab, Hampton built video uploading and encoding abilities right into the Rails app on the server and then wrote code to take the newly encoded Flash video files and upload them to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). That solved two of the issues but as we started to test run the app encoding reared it’s ugly little head. Since it’s so server-intensive to process the video files we had the choice of having a big delay for the user between uploading and playback or faced having to stock up on servers, neither option felt right.

That’s where Videoegg came in. Their flash based upload tool handled all the encoding and their network takes care of all the storage through Akamai. The price? Free with small unobtrusive ads during the video (No pre-roll). As of this writing the site has been up for a couple weeks and no ads have actually appeared in the videos so I think they are still building up an ad base. Now the downside is the user needs download and install the Videoegg upload tool, but it’s less than .5MB and allows you to record directly from your webcam or plug in your camcorder as well as basic cropping. We figured since our users were entering a contest with prizes it would be a small hurdle and as of yet no issues.

We still kept our S3 account to store all the user images which means our server doesn’t have to worry about delivering any media just HTML & JS. This makes the cost of running the site much lower for out client and takes a big chuck of the scalability off our shoulders. Leveraging third party services allows us to rapidly build and deploy + keep our focus on what we do best.

Building A Relationship

posted by ryan on March 2nd, 2007

About 30 days ago I switched from PC to Mac. “Parallels”http://parallels.com is the sole reason behind the move. Since in my other life I develop MS Access apps and I enjoy Microsoft Office (especially 2007) I had stayed using PC Laptops until now.

So I got a phone call today from Alexander an Account Representative from Parallels. He was calling to make sure I was enjoying the software and that a new version has been released last week I should download. I already loved parallels but now I have connected my feeling for the software to the company that made it and I think that’s an important thing to note. At unspace we try to imbue not just applications with our passion and creativity but also the relationship with our clients. Users should feel the same way about our apps that our clients feel about working with us; open, friendly, engaged and involved.

My Invite to Redmond

posted by ryan on March 1st, 2007

So in my other life I am a partner in Unspace’s sister company M7 Database Services. We are proudly one of the only (if not the only) dedicated MS Access development shoppes. I could get into how I feel about Rails and Access sharing some of the same values but I will leave that to another day.

Anyway I have been invited down to Redmond from March 14-16th to attend MVP sessions (I am not actually an MVP) and a special 5 hour session where I get to see (under a 5 page NDA) what the plans are for the next version of access. Also I am going to be showing off rails and letting them in on the secrets that make working with rails such a joyous experience. I am going to take lots of pictures!