Our Geek Space

We are sponsoring one of the greatest technology events here in Uruguay. The Second RubyConf taking place within less than two weeks, the 11th and 12th November 2011, where many IT experts from all over the world get together in order to be immersed in this dynamic world and and up to date get with the latest trends of Ruby and Agile methodologies.

RubyConf Uruguay 2011

We are hungry for knowledge and refreshment, and we all want to be on the same train.

Please welcome all the new members to this awesome community. And help spreading the news, but even more important, do not miss the opportunity to meet the experts, discuss the future of RoR, and be Rail!

We have been to the top 10 places to visit in the US. From a business perspective, Silicon Valley is the place to go. We share the same passion as the area of the world’s largest technology corporations and high-tech firms: Great Ruby on Rails design & development work. Outsourcing has never been so much fun here in Uruguay. And now our Schools friends are wearing Moove-IT shirts, so we are virtually present—though also planning to re- meet in the flesh soon…

Thanks to Howard Kao, Lane Lillquist, Michael Staton, Nick Punt, and Daniel Jabbour from Inigral!

From South America with love, working offshore

Last weekend four members of moove-it took part in the rally on rails (www.rallyonrails.com).

• Pablo Ifran
• Gonzalo Arreche
• Juan Pablo Blanco
• Ivan Etchart

Rally on Rails is a competition to make a Web app from scratch in 48 hours ! Obviously this project/game/etc had to be made in rails !

Our team created www.buscandoatanatos.com a game about the search for “Tánatos” (the leader of Sotirias … a secret organization). Based on Google street view , rails, and a lot of gems.

Here go some pictures of this weekend …

Cast your vote from 18 to 20 of August … www.rallyonrails.com

The last Wednesday we made a workshop in the ORT University.
Pablo Ifran, Gianfranco Zas, Ariel Ludueña and I

We share the presentations to everybody

All_in_One_Agile_Development (in spanish)

Ruby_and_Rails (in spanish)

Moove-IT is now part of the Ruby on Rails Workshops and Conferences around the world.

Even when Ruby seems to be the most popular modern programming language in America, there was nowhere in Uruguay you could actually learn it. Moove-IT will give you a heads up on this exciting language and Rails framework on July 6, 2011 (please see ad below).

This will be the first in a series of workshops focusing on Ruby, RoR, Scrum and hands on training exercises.

We are so proud to have made so much progress working with this technology and methodology that we feel the need to contribute to the local Ruby community.

Join us! Be part.

We are doing a good job, that’s right, but Michael Staton and Howard Kao from Inigral did not exactly decide to move to Uruguay and work from here now on, they just paid us a one week visit, and worked with us like any other member of the Moove-iT team. The Schools project is exciting itself, but having Howard and Michael here made us feel it even closer, and the boundaries between Inigral and Moove-iT were sort of a blur, for good.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I am really positive we have made them feel at home.

We worked for a week straight, but we also had time to have fun.
No doubts about it, having visitors from around the globe is always refreshing and truly motivating…

Let me tell you why.

We conduct daily meeting with clients from different countries. Most of the times we use skype, and we are about 4 or 5 people in the same room, talking in English, though our primary language is Spanish. On the other end, there is a person whose native language is generally English, but who is normally thousands of miles away, many Fahrenheits apart and only a few hours ahead or behind us. We rarely use a camera, so we do not even know what the room he or she is in looks like.

I believe that the third dimension is definitely more important than we might think. And being in the same room with someone whose voice is extremely familiar to us, and has been part of our work lives for over an year, but whose looks, posture or gestures we used to have little or no idea about is just fantastic. We shared this sort of energy and connection you could only generate when meeting in person.

The truth is we all love to put a name to a face.

And this time we had two new faces to look at, to talk to and to laugh with. In the flesh we met Michael and Howard.

THANK YOU!

Sass is used for generating css files based on his own syntax, it’s very useful because allows you to avoid repeating code across the different scss files using import (allows you to import code from other scss file), or mixins(scss functions). Also, allows you to write varibles, for using in different scss, this makes easier to do different templates based on colors or images for example.

_sprites.scss

@mixin sprite_for($image_class, $x, $y, $image: "/images/sprite_image.png") {
  .sprite_image.#{$image_class} {
    background: transparent url($image) no-repeat scroll $x $y;
    height:16px;
    width:16px;
  }
}
_images.scss

$my_sprite_image_path: "/images/my_sprite_image_path.png";

default.scss

@import "sprites", "images";

@include sprite_for("my_image", 0, 0, $my_sprite_image_path);

That generates

default.css

  .sprite_image.my_image {
    background: transparent url(/images/my_sprite_image_path.png) no-repeat scroll 0 0;
    height:16px;
    width:16px;
  }

So, this is best sorted using this method, because you have the image path in a single file and you use it in other files only by importing the file with the images path, it’s also simpler to remove an image because you only need to find the references to that variable and delete them.

The sass framework also allows you to use the DRY principle because you can write nested selector, I’ll show you with an example:

default.scss

.some_class {
  width: 100px;
  .some_other_class {
    display: block;
  }
}

default.css

.some_class {width:100px;}
.some_class .some_other_class {display:block;}

Doesn’t affect the performance because it generates a css file at development time.

It also allows you to benefit from some of the advantages of css 3 right now.

When you are working with svn (pulling your project from the svn to the web server) and you want to deploy a system into production with apache (mod_rails), you must filter the svn folders (to prevent that other users view your svn files).

To do that task, you must add the following lines to the apache configuration.


<DirectoryMatch "^/.*/\.svn/">
  ErrorDocument 403 /404.html
  Order allow,deny
  Deny from all
  Satisfy All
</DirectoryMatch>


Hello everyone … in moove-iT we develop and management faltauno.com.
It is a social network specializes in organizing matches, managing a team and administer and manage a championship.

On August 1 begins the first championship was organized by faltauno.com “Copa CUTI” (www.cuti.org.uy).
This championship brings together all the software companies of uruguay.

We invite everyone to visit and see what are the best !

Welcome to part 3 of the facebooker trilogy

I’m kind of tyred of writing the same title over and over again and changing just the last number, problem is there are so many things we can do with this stuff we could write tons of this. I could put in the title what we will talk about specifically in this post, but the idea is to follow this post/tutorials in order. This will probably be the last part of this set of posts, the following ones will refer in it’s specifically to what will be done.

So far we explained how to configure facebooker, sign up, invite friends and bit of the theory. So today we’ll publish something in the users dashboard, so him and all his friends can see it his wall. So go to
developers.facebook.com/tools.php and select “Feed Template Console”, select the application you want and click next.

Give me a minute to explain you what we are doing.

We are going to register our feeds in facebook, and then we are going to call them by a number they will give us.
You can do this using facebooker, or you can register them in the link I gave you above. I think that using the facebook tools is way easier and also facebooker may be a bit out of date regarding this area due to all the legal and business changes in facebook. Also not event facebook has yet clear what they want: “At this time, the policy on automatically publishing one line stories has not been finalized”.

Anyway, complete the step guide for feeds in facebook and keep the number of the template you created. BTW while completing it you will find this kind of stuff “{*actor*}” without quotes. These are tokens that allow to put variable stuff (like names, links, etc.), you can read about them while creating the templates since they are well explained over there.

Now, you have the story. You need the users approval to publish it, so what facebook does is shows the story to the user and gives him otions to skip or publish. If we are in luck the users hits “publish”.

So we now obviously want to show it to the user so he can choose. Here’s the code

FB.ensureInit(function() {
var body_general = "Join them in my facebook connect site"
var template_data =
{
"actor":  "<%= @_logged_user.name %>",
"friends":"<%= @event.users.collect{|u| u.name_or_alias}.join(', ') %>",
"event":  "<%= @event.description %>",
"place":  "<%= @event.place %>",
"time" :  "<%= @event.start.strftime('%m/%d/%Y %I:%M %p') %>"
};
var user_message_prompt = "<%= @match.comment %>";
FB.Connect.showFeedDialog('the_number_of_your_template', template_data, [], body_general, null, FB.RequireConnect.require, FB.RequireConnect.promptConnect, user_message_prompt);
});

In the template data you have to complete the tokens you created when publishing your story. You can everything pretty well explained in this couple of links:

http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/JS_API_M_FB.Connect.ShowFeedDialog
http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Feed.publishUserAction
http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Publishing_Feed_Stories_to_Facebook

Pay attention to the “FB.ensureInit(function(){“, I don’t know why I couldn’t find anywhere in facebook that mention this should be there. If you don’t add this nothing will happen, maybe it’s obvios for some people, but it wasn’t for me. I’m sory I can’t remember where I find this, but you can read here what it does.

Well, that’s kind of the big picture of what you have to do to publish stories, remember this isn’t supposed to be a complete tutorial of everything you can do, just a guide based on my personal experience to get started.

Your facebook connect site should be quite complete now that you can signup, invite your friends and write stuff that will appear directly in facebook. Not to mention if you have used all the other resources facebook give us and facebooker facilitate us.

Thanks for reading!