I’m been working on an application lately where we need to have some sort of rating. Almost instinctively one thinks of using stars to let the user choose how much they like something. But I soon realized that stars with 1-5 rating does not work. Well, let me elaborate, it does not work like a scale. Most fill them in like a boolean value. If they like it, they put four or five stars, and 1 if they don’t like it. If the product does not create an emotional response, they don’t put any stars at all, because most people only rate something they really like or hate. It would be fun to have a star rating system that actually put you up against the wall when you fill something in. You’ve just watched one of Hollywoods latest money making machine movie, and you liked it well enough. A good time waster. So you put four stars. The system then asks you, “Are you sure that you think this is as good as Deer Hunter?” Most sane persons would realize that they made an error in judgement and lower the score. And then stop using the rating system, because who want’s to be corrected by a computer?
I’m working on learning Ruby on Rails and one great resource that I find myself going to is RailsCast. But as I really need to learn Ruby I wanted to write a quick program to download all the episodes to my harddisk and watch them using Plex Media Center. There’s probably a million different utilities (or podcast managers) that can do that, but using them I won’t learn to program Ruby that way. There’s probably a better way of doing this, but hey, do it and post a comment.
require 'rubygems'
require 'hpricot'
require 'open-uri'
doc = Hpricot.XML(open("http://feeds.feedburner.com/railscasts"))
(doc/"enclosure").each do |para|
filename = File.basename(para[:url])
puts "== Found a file #{filename}"
open(filename,"w").write(open(para[:url]).read)
end
Everytime (well, last night actually) when I need to do something with Applescript I shudder with horror. The syntax is actually something you forget all the time. There must be better alternatives for Apple to use as a scripting language. I agree with this article, but Python or Ruby would be a better alternative I think.
After reading Agile Web development with Rails, I still didn’t feel I had a grasp on how [Ruby on Rails][rails] worked. It didn’t go into detail on how everything worked made it harder to learn. I don’t feel I was ripped off when buying this book, but I looked for a better one. And I found it. Ruby on Rails: Up and Running
is a much better beginners book. Following the examples really helps you get to grips with all the ins and outs of Rails programming. Highly recommended.
[rails]:http://rubyonrails.org
I finally completed a new version of JackenIAX. It now has up to four lines support. I also added a searchable call log. Lot’s of other small improvements as well.
I finally have a version of JackenIAX that supports multiple lines. I have added so you can choose to output background music for the calls on hold. There’s a lot of testing, and I also have to rethink the user interface to be able to handle multiple calls. But i think it’s going to be cool.
Every time I answer the phone (yes, I’m using JackenIAX), I have to pause iTunes before answering. So today I added an option so when you answer or dial, iTunes pauses automatically. It will be in the next release (within a couple of days) I had to rewrite a large section of code for some other features that I have planned. I’m getting a bit more comfortable with Cocoa programming, and discovers old code full of brain farts. And the code is getting smaller with more features. A step in the right direction…
I just put up a new version of JackenIAX. Added Applescript support, URL dialing (currently only via Applescript), DTMF tones when dialing etc.
I just received a mail from a user of JackenIAX. He’s running a patched version of Mac OS X on a generic PC, and now the program works on his machine. Cool! So now I guess JackenIAX is working on Intel Macs as well. Debugging via proxy (I don’t have an Intel Mac) is not the way to go. You could press the Donate button on this page, and I promise to buy a Intel Mac for debugging. Nudge Nudge…
I’ve added a couple of new features in JackenIAX.
Added a symbol to indicate when you got new voice messages in your Asterisk server.
Rewrote all of the code for the indicator symbols. Nothing you will notice, but I feel good about it.
Now the codec selection actually work.
Input validation of all preferences.
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