• Gibson Firebird I’m just into the Hawk’s head;

To that selection, I would probably add an ES and a Telecaster kinds of guitars, if I were to settle on a particular model. I could also possibly wish for either an Music Man Axis or an EVH Wolfgang.

So, in the following, I will give my impressions of Sass, CoffeeScript and Hogan.js.

Sass

As its name implies, this CSS extension is AWESOME and makes CSS easier to write and read, and I haven’t even used yet half the features (it’s not like I required those).

It eases the writing of a hierarchy of rules and eliminates the redundancy of the rules when applying styles to deep elements. Obviously, mixins and variables allow to keep most repetition of things like colors or fonts down to the minimum.

One can compare the new improved stylesheet compared to the old version.

CoffeeScript

Using CoffeeScript is really a matter of taste. It enhances the Javascript experience, but it has some quirks, especially with a ruby environment in mind. For example, for a method call, if you have parameters you can omit parentheses (à la ruby), but without any you need them since it would otherwise think you’re using the function reference (à la javascript). And some shortcuts are not available (an empty jQuery object is not a false value). But having proper class support and automatic variable scope management is helpful.

Hogan.js

I had one big chunk of my javascript code which was building a HTML component from JSON data and I found it sometimes a bit hard to edit and modify. I had recently seen mention of a templating framework used by LinkedIn, dust.js and I noted this in a corner of my mind. More recently I stumbled on Twitter’s Hogan.js templating engine. And what’s more, I also found a asset integration for rails. So I jumped in. And the result is pleasing enough to use.

So, I forgot they were playing last night, but I still was able to catch Paradise City live before heading to youtube to check how it went.

First, the conditions were almost extreme, the rain was pouring in all night, and the stage looked dangerous (not even talking about using electrical instruments and equipments)
DJ Ashba may be a good guitar player, but I wish he could spend less time wearing tshirts of the band and doing mods to the bodies of his guitars and more time learning how to bend correctly the notes in his solos.
Bumblefoot may have fucked up on Welcome (hey, not everyone can solo and wear a buck^H^H^H^Hhelmet at the same time) but he did more than necessary to redeem himself. He probably improvised (because the timing was a bit off) but the ending solo on November rain was a killer, leaving behind what Slash did and using more of the song melodies. And the RATM/Van Halen teases ? But did something happen during the concert ? At some point, on some videos it sounds like he’s playing through a POD or something…
Axl, as usual, was on and off. His voices was changing at times, sounding like the early 00’s. And he missed chords and verses during November rain, but it seems like he saw something that threw him off. But overall, he was almost in a good mood and it was a good performance.

• Parseexcel: Not sure if it is still maintained. Reads data sort of ok while looping rows with an iterator but not in random-access mode;
• Roo: More pain than anything just to get is installed. Didn’t even bothered to try to make it work to access the data;

• Jruby-poi: Apparently, the formulas that I need are not correctly (if at all) handled by this one.

Ok, thanks everyone, I think I’ll go back to CSV parsing.

I rewrote entirely the javascript and display to look (and somehow act) like Google’s API explorer, with the main difference with the previous version being the ability to switch between APIs (for example, the bikes/alerts API) and versions. It also display the raw response (currently only JSON) (and the HTTP result code, but it’s not like it would help much anyway, heh!).

But it is still work in progress: the listed API are not complete, it does not handle parameters of parameters (but only a single level of parameters, which can be confusing at times), it would be nice to have a user-friendly key storage mechanism and the overall display could be better.

Rennes OpenData API explorer

First, you need to create a connection to the web services, by passing credentials to the constructor:

storage = Fog::Storage.new( :provider => 'AWS',
                        :aws_access_key_id => your_key_id, 
                        :aws_secret_access_key => your_secret_key,
                        :region => your_region )

The region is not mandatory but may help performances (and keeping warnings away).
Once you’re connected, you need to get the directories stored in your bucket:

directory = storage.directories.get( your_bucket )

If the bucket does not exist of for some other reason the directory might be nil, so obviously you have to check for that. Now, you have to get a reference to the file in the directories and then you will be able to destroy it:

remote_file = directory.files.get( your_path )
remote_file.destroy

Be aware that the path must not include a leading slash (as one could get by splitting a S3 URL and using the path component).