my recent reads..

Joshua Bell and Kristin Chenoweth performing "My Funny Valentine"

Happenchanced upon this fantastic performance on Channel V the other day. Joshua Bell and Kristin Chenoweth. I'm way impressed by Kristin's vocals, especially the way she manages the transitions. So deliciously smooth when most other singers would break. Perfectly matched by Joshua's playing.


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Casuarina Curry

Google Street View is pretty amazing. Here's my favourite prata place. Local and also one of the best in Singapore;-)
Soundtrack for this post?
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ActiveWarehouse/ETL and Reflections on BI for Rails

I've recently been considering the opportunity to apply Ruby and Rails goodness to mainstream Business Intelligence applications.

During my research into prior art I discovered Anthony Eden's ActiveWarehouse and ActiveWarehouse-ETL projects, and gave them a test drive using a fictitious "Cupcakes Inc" site.

I presented this at the Jan 2010 Singapore Ruby Brigade meetup held at hackerspace.sg. My "point-of-view" slides are embedded below, and you can find the sample project and doco on github.

Conclusions?

  • ActiveWarehouse is a textbook implementation of classic data warehousing techniques. That was clearly Anthony's intention, but it also means it does not really attempt to explore how data warehousing might be approached quite differently with Ruby and Rails

  • ActiveWarehouse/ETL are not for the faint-hearted. When you get them working, they works well, but the lack of documentation basically means it's inevitable you'll end up reading the sources to figure it all out

  • I have concerns about scalability. Having worked on terabyte warehouses using "classic" technology, I know just how far you push databases in order to scale. This bears more investigation and testing before it would be sensible to commit to ActiveWarehouse for a large-scale DWH implementation

Nevertheless, ActiveWarehouse and ActiveWarehouse-ETL are interesting projects, and the underlying implementations make for some educational code reading. Hopefully my slides and the Cupcakes sample project will add a bit to the available documentation, and give a bit of a leg up to anyone intersted in checking out these projects;-)


Soundtrack for this post: Information Overload- Living Color
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Two Ruby Books To Own..

If I had to pick two..

Design Patterns in Ruby by Russ Olsen is the first technical book in a very long time that I have enjoyed reading from cover to cover.

It's more than just a naïve translation of the classic GoF patterns. Olsen manages the dual trick of not only demonstrating how the classic patterns can still be relevant in Ruby, but how to approach them with the full power of ruby at your disposal.

I liked the way that Olsen avoided doing bare minimum implementations. So when looking at the Composite pattern, he spruces things up with a little operator overloading. And where ruby affords a number of possible approaches, these get discussed and compared (like with the Decorator pattern).

The final chapters in the book present a few additional patterns that go beyond the GoF and are particularly topical and relevant for ruby: DSLs, meta-programming, and convention over configuration.

In short, Design Patterns in Ruby is a grand tour, an effective tutorial in a selection of ruby practices, and ultimately a very enjoyable, rewarding, and sometimes even funny book to read.


The second book I'd stowaway with is Ruby Best Practices by Gregory Brown.

It doesn't pretend to be encyclopedic in the manner of The Ruby Way. However, where sometimes I find The Ruby Way curtails topics just when they start to get interesting, Brown dives deep with Ruby Best Practices.

Clear examples are accompanied by thoughtful and full treatments of the subject at hand. It has particularly useful focus on "Mastering the Dynamic Toolkit", "Text Processing", "Functional Programming Techniques", and "Designing Beautiful APIs".

So they're my picks. Now, obviously these are not ideal books for learning ruby from scratch, but once you're past the basics these are the two at the top of my pile;-)

Anyone willing to counter with their top two picks? Agree or disagree with my choice?


Soundtrack for this post: I Like Your Old Stuff Better than Your New Stuff - Regurgitator from the album Unit Re-Booted

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