Hungry Machine

As you may have seen on TechCrunch and in the New York Times, Google is days away from the developer launch of Open Social.
As a trusted tester/launch partner, we’ve been busy porting our social shopping suite (such as Visual Bookshelf) to OpenSocial.
I’ll follow up tomorrow with more thoughts, but I wanted to congratulate [...]

In Super fast IP to lat/lng in Rails, I showed a solution for fast IP to lat/lng resolution in rails. I called it “Super fast” because it performed orders of magnitude faster the the RESTful interface, but it was also “Super fast” to implement. That being said, Kyle made a comment to [...]

Paul Gross from Thoughtworks recently created a pulse gem. The gem adds a simple action to your rails app, “/pulse”, which acts as a heartbeat.
The pulse gem currently defines the method as:

def pulse
render :text => "OK"
end

Then you can configure haproxy to monitor your application by hitting http://server/pulse and verifying the response [...]

This morning the Chicago Tribune had an article entitled “Facebook lets money flow”, which among other recent articles, outlines something Facebook got right. I spoke with the article’s author Eric Benderoff earlier in the week to discuss Hungry Machine’s monetization strategies on Facebook.
While MySpace has allowed third party companies to embed widgets for [...]

In building the eye candy demo for the Graphing Social conference, I needed a quick way to geo-locate users by IP address. For Rails, GeoKit is an awesome plugin. It supports a list of providers, and overlays distance calculations, before_filter helpers, all sorts of good stuff.
It uses hostip.info to do IP to lat/lng, using [...]

We just got back from several conferences around the social media space. CommunityNext was a developer-centric event that allowed for many interactions and trading of best practices with several top Facebook developers. GraphingSocial was a slightly larger gathering that brought together an impressive list of speakers including Reid Hoffman, Michael Arrington, Danny Sullivan and others. [...]