digital:pardoe

New rFlickr Ruby Gem

After I started to use the rFlickr gem it didn’t take me long to realize that development of the gem had all but halted, yes it worked, which was more than the original Flickr gem did, but it was still a little bit out of date and in the end, a little bit broken.

In one of my older posts I documented a fix for the gem and provided a download to unzip into your plugins folder, however, with the advent of the wonderful GitHub and its marvelous gem support I’ve decided to move the project onto GitHub.

I have preserved the original gem’s GPL license and copied the source code from its original repository on RubyForge to a new, public, GitHub repository. In the process of the move I have dropped old code from the project, updated the readme & license information and generally performed a little house-keeping.

You can find the project at: http://github.com/digitalpardoe/rflickr/. You can install the gem using one of the following methods. First involves adding GitHub as a gem source (always a good idea) and installing the gem:

The second method it to add the gem as a gem dependency to the environment.rb of your Rails project:

And run a rake task to install the gem:

Whilst performing the code migration I also added the fix that was documented in my original post and implemented support for the (not so) new ‘farm’ based Flickr URLs for images (which should make things easier to implement).

The future plans for rFlickr include new tests, improved usage examples, updated readme / documentation and implementation of missing API methods, time permitting of course.

Until the readme is updated please refer to the original post for information on how to use rFlickr.

That’s all for now, enjoy the new gem and as they say, if you don’t like it, fork it.

Guess Who's Back

As you may have noticed, it’s been a long time since my last post. There isn’t really any good reason for this. Plenty has happened, I just haven’t got round to writing any of it down.

First off I’d like to mention the website, it went through a fairly radical redesign a few months ago and I mentioned nothing about it. For some reason it’s not in my nature to be happy with what I make hence the many faces and iterations of the website. This website, whilst being my home on the internet, is also the test bed for my RoR programming, you may get tired of hearing about its re-designs and re-codes but that’s part of the reason I created it. Anyway, another re-design is coming, this time it’s not visual but all back end, the main difference you will notice is that I am doing away with user accounts and having a more open comment system (I could be shooting myself in the foot with this decision, we’ll have to see how the spam bots take it). To the people that have commented on the blog already, your comments will be preserved and, when I roll out the changes, I intend to reply to all the comments I haven’t yet replied to.

The second thing I wanted to mention, again website related, is my hosting. A good proportion of my posts seem to be apologizing for the downtime of the website. I was actually getting pretty bored of this so decided to, quite literally, take matters into my own hands. The website is now hosted on a virtual private server set up and maintained by me. This again, may be a case where I’ve shot myself in the foot. For those of you interested, the VPS is provided by the wonderful folks at Bytemark Hosting.

Number three. Many of the posts of my website relate to the use of the ‘rflickr’ RubyGem. Development of this gem seems to have been at a stand still for a good while now, I’ve therefore taken the decision to clone it and try to continue development in my spare time. More on this in a later post.

Four. Any of you interested in my photography will have noticed a lack of it over the past few months, it’s not that I haven’t been taking any photographs, it’s just that I’ve not published any. To try and remedy this I uploaded a batch of photos today that have been sitting on my computer for a while. You can take a look at them on the photo page of the website or on my Flickr page.

Arghh, Downtime

Apologies to anyone that has visited the website in the last couple of days, it would appear that there has been a fairly large amount of downtime. Everything is back up and operational again. I will be keeping a closer eye on the status of the website from now on to try and prevent this type of situation arising again. Thanks for your understanding.

Check back soon.

Update: It would also appear that the category browsing is currently broken, I am working on a fix and will push it out shortly.

Just An Introduction

I’ve been promising to write this post for a while now, it is exactly what is says in the title, an introduction. A good friend of mine, after much persuasion has finally ‘got his blog on’. Fortunately he has a far better blogging style than me and blogs far more often so it shouldn’t be too much of a strain on the senses to bookmark him and/or add him to your feed reader. Funnily enough he is also a keen photographer so don’t forget to check out his Flickr page, you’ll find a link from his blog.

So here he is, (drum roll please), Mr Rob Young: robyoung.me.uk.

Be nice, I don’t want him scared back off the internet, it took long enough to get him on here.

Don’t forget to check back here sometimes too.

Calculating Work Days In Java

In work this week I came across a couple of problems in which I needed to performs some calculations involving dates and a number of “work days” rather than just normal numbers of days. My first few attempts filed miserably, so I did some Googling to see if I could find anyone else that had come across the same problem and of course, there were plenty of people.

The code I eventually used I found shoehorned into the middle of a coding help forum and, with a little bit of tweaking, it calculated the number of whole work days in between two dates. The code is as follows;

This code solved my first problem, however I couldn’t find any code to solve my second problem, how to calculate a final date from a start date and a specified number of work days, to do the calculation I came up with the following code;

Hope this code works as well for you as it did for me.

Check back soon.

Update: Improved the calculating code with the suggestion from Anass (below) and made some more accuracy & business logic improvements to the ‘calculateDuration’ method. Enjoy.