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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#Amazon, #Audible: can you get your global act together?
I bitched about Audible for not doing a good job of serving the global audience.
Well. I just got an email today that reminded me not to forget lambasting Amazon (now audible's parent company).
Over 800 Albums for $5 Each..
..from the Amazon mp3 store. Or so it said. It was a lie and grand deception.
I so want to buy from Amazon's mp3 store - heaven save me from even considering the Apple iTunes Store - but guess what? I can't. Not authorized outside the US (even though I can buy the exact same thing on a bit of plastic and have it shipped to me).
Now, I know it is not Audible and Amazon that set these policies. It's the RIAA and the rest of the old-fashioned publishing industry (be it books or music). And judging by The Washington Post's recent article "E-books spark battle inside the publishing industry", it seems things may get worse before they get better.
But I wish Audible and Amazon were a little more aggressive in championing consumer rights. In particular, take close aim at the notion of regional distribution deals.
Once upon a time, it was reasonable to ink regional deals. After all, someone needed to provide the warehouse, retail frontage and so on. In far off, foreign lands. But in the digital age, we have global retail frontage. Local distribution deals (and all their attendant evils such as DVD region coding) are an anachronism.
To put it simply: When Amazon, Audible or any other internet distributor puts a product in their stores, it should be available (and have been sold on) a global basis. If publishers are not able to make such a deal, don't stock their stuff. Send them packing and tell them to come back when they've got a deal that works for a global audience.
But is there an incentive for Amazon, Audible and the like to take such a stand against the publishers? Well here's one: the other 80% of the world market. I loo-ve Audible (props @jason), and Amazon has been a favoured source for years. But if you keep jilting me under the control of US-centric publishers, I'll be the first to jump to a regional/truly-global competitor. Your future growth will be limited to the shores of the continental US.
Soundtrack for this post: Can't Take Me Home - Pink
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