Enterprise level web and mapping applications, we are your able technology partners.

Able Technology has acquired the on-line mapping and addressing business of ProjectX Technology Ltd.

The acquisition promises an exciting future for ProjectX developments such as the Address Finder service and mapping applications.

Able Technology director Marcus Baguley says ProjectX’s expertise in geospatial data and mapping services will enable Able Tech to quickly deliver location-based applications; from hand held apps to large corporate websites that want to geo-enable existing datasets.

“The acquisition strengthens our specialised online mapping and data visualisation capabilities,” says Marcus.

The move is a natural progression for Able Tech, an influential member of Wellington’s growing Ruby on Rails software development community.

John Clegg, founder and CEO of ProjectX, says he is very pleased to be handing over to Able Technology “because their experience and reputation guarantee our customers will receive exceptional leadership, services and support.”

The ‘new’ Able Technology will be headed by Carl Penwarden who has joined the company from his previous role as Marketing and Product Development Manager at CityLink.

Carl says, “We are very excited about the capabilities we have brought together – the combination of ProjectX’s broad geospatial and addressing experience along with Able Technology’s strengths in agile development offers a compelling proposition for organisations seeking innovative web applications.”

Members of ProjectX’s team joined Able Technology in early July and will continue to support their existing clients. All staff are located together at Able Technology’s Wellington-based office.

About Able Technology

Able Technology specialises in cloud-based software development and consulting. In addition to their loyal customer base, Able Technology is also the developer of SAAS share portfolio management service, ShareSight.

About ProjectX

ProjectX, an award winning software services company, specialised in online maps development and data visualisation. Recognised by the Open Source Society for its use and contribution to Open Source in business, ProjectX has lead modern technologies such as HTML5.

Installing the latest upgrade from Apple of Snow Leopard version 10.6.3 will update the installed version of Ruby.

The version of ruby installed is:

Unfortunately, there is a known problem with patchlevel 173.

Under the previous version of ruby that was shipped with Snow Leopard, you would have received the expected answer of 3.0009.

There is a patch that you could try in the short term, otherwise you're probably best advised to hold off installing 10.6.3. Or, if you've already installed it, you can wait until Apple or someone else releases an update.

Update: We are all using RVM now, as this allows us to easily install and use different ruby implementations. At the moment, this is normally the current version (2010.02) of Ruby Enterprise Edition.

Make your own sign here

I have had a to load a list of valid country and currency mappings for sharesight. It proved difficult to find a current correct list with the mapping between currency and country on the internet that is easily extractable.

wikipedia has a good source of current and obsolete codes – currency codes ISO 4217, country codes ISO 3166.

Here is what we came up with. If anyone knows of a reliable up to date source then please comment.

And to load into your rails app

There’s a recession on at the moment, and we’re doing our bit to help ease the pain.

Able Technology is offering a free half-day session with one of our technical consultants. You can use us for any of our usual services during this time.

We have up to four slots available – one for each week in October. The weeks are:

• 5 October – taken
• 12 October – taken
• 19 October
• 26 October

To apply, speak to Nigel on 0800 14-ABLE (0800 142-253).

Small print

• First-come, first-served
• No strings attached
• For new customers only
• Not available to our competitors

We’re on the lookout for some office space in Te Aro. Somewhere between 75 and 125 square meters.

Our wish list includes:

• Character
• Earthquake safe
• Showers
• Cycle parking

Would appreciate a call if you’re aware of anything like this.

There was a great article in the Herald about Sharesight today. Shame it didn’t mention me or Marcus, but it did explain what we’ve been up to.

Check out Kiwi-made online share trading system hits the market.

We’ve just put together a calculator to work out your savings from Michael Cullen’s Budget 2008. It’s on the Sharesight website here:

http://www.sharesight.co.nz/tools/budget_2008_calculators/

We recently needed to create a new database migration, and needed to insert it into at certain position. Normally what I have done in the past is to alter the migration index of an existing file or two.

But this time, it needed to go in at 003. I was going to have to manually increment about 30 or 40 migration scripts. So, it was time to apply my Ruby skills to do it automatically.

Here is the result:

<br /> #!/usr/bin/ruby<br /> #<br /> # Increments the number in Rails migrations from a given starting index. Run<br /> # this in the db/migrations directory only.<br /> #<br /> # Example:<br /> #<br /> # increment_migrations 3 RUN<br /> #<br /> # this would add 1 to to all your migrations from 003_create_XXXXX.rb onwards</p> <p>case ARGV.size<br /> when 1, 2<br /> from_index = ARGV[0].to_i<br /> dir = Dir.new(‘.’)<br /> file_list = dir.to_a.sort</p> <p> file_list.each do |fn|<br /> if fn =~ /(\d{3})(.*\.rb)/<br /> index = $1.to_i<br /> if index >= from_index<br /> index += 1<br /> new_name = case index.to_s.length<br /> when 1<br /> “00#{index}#{$2}”<br /> when 2<br /> “0#{index}#{$2}”<br /> else<br /> “#{index}#{$2}”<br /> end<br /> puts “Converting ‘#{fn}’ to ‘#{new_name}’”<br /> File.rename fn, new_name if ARGV[1] == “RUN”<br /> else<br /> puts “Skipping ‘#{fn}’”<br /> end<br /> else<br /> puts “Ignoring ‘#{fn}’”<br /> end<br /> end<br /> else<br /> puts “Usage: #{$0} <number> [RUN]“<br /> puts ” where”<br /> puts ” number – migration number to start from (mandatory)”<br /> puts ” RUN – add to run to make the changes (default does not rename)”<br /> end<br />

So when you run it, you will get output such as:

<br /> $ increment_migrations.rb 3<br /> Ignoring ‘.’<br /> Ignoring ‘..’<br /> Skipping ’001_create_people.rb’<br /> Skipping ’002_create_rejection_templates.rb’<br /> Converting ’003_create_users.rb’ to ’004_create_users.rb’<br /> Converting ’004_create_alive_statuses.rb’ to ’005_create_alive_statuses.rb’<br /> Converting ’005_create_contributors.rb’ to ’006_create_contributors.rb’<br />

Instructions

1. Cut and paste the file, or download it from increment_migrations.rb.
2. Save it somewhere
3. Make it executable chmod 755 /path/to/increment_migrations.rb
4. The change directory to ./db/migrations
5. then run /path/to/increment_migrations.rb 3
6. and if the output looks as expected
7. finally run /path/to/increment_migrations.rb 3 RUN

Finally, thanks to the client for permission to publish. Thanks for giving back to the community!

I’ve just configured Rails to run in a subfolder on a client’s website. Ran into a few issues, that are worth documenting:

In this configuration, you can visit the Rails site by visiting something like http://www.hostname.com/coolsite/

1. There is a Rails bug (ticket 10913) that effects links to assets. I have a link to our combined stylesheets defined as:

<br /> <%= stylesheet_link_tag 'reset-fonts',<br /> ‘base-min’,<br /> ‘calendar_date_select_silver’,<br /> ‘application’,<br /> ‘header’,<br /> ‘tables’,<br /> ‘form’, :media => “all”, :cache => ‘coolsite’ %><br />

The bug is that Rails looks for all of your stylesheets in /public/coolsite/stylesheets/*.css, where ‘coolsite’ is the name of your subdirectory. Obviously, it should not be including the ‘coolsite’ folder in the path.

The workaround I use, is to create a soft link after capistrano deploys the code to our production server. I added this to my /config/deploy.rb file.

<br /> # Work around for bug http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/10913<br /> desc “Create Apache prefix link”<br /> task :create_apache_prefix_link do<br /> run “ln -s #{release_path}/public #{release_path}/public/#{apache_prefix}”<br /> end</p> <p>after “deploy:update”, “create_apache_prefix_link”<br />

Now, whenever you do a cap:deploy, a soft link will be created in your public software, and this will allow Rails to resolve the stylesheet (and other asses files) in the faulty path. When the ticket is fixed, just remove the capistrano task.