Web Side Attractions

Last week I presented at Raleigh.rb (the local Ruby Brigade) on the Ruby AST and the tools that are available to work with it. I went over briefly what the AST is and the 2 mains ways of getting it in Ruby 1.8.x, ParseTree and ruby_parser.

There’s two types of tools that are generally built on top of ParseTree: code analytics and custom DSLs. I covered 3 of them flog, roodi, and ambition. The first two being code analytics libraries and the second being a custom DSL.

My slides can be found up at SlideShare:

And if you attended you can rate my talk on SpeakerRate.com: http://speakerrate.com/talks/594-ruby-ast-tools

And here’s some more resources for those interested in learning more about the Ruby AST:

• Mark Chung’s slides from his RubyConf2008 talk: “Hacking with Ruby2Ruby”
• Ilya Grigorik’s blog post “Ruby AST for Fund and Profit”
• Chris Wanstrath’s (aka defunkt) presentation at Goruco 2008 on ParseTree

Tags: Ruby, AST, ParseTree, Programming, slides, talks, Raleigh.rb

Recently I started using Twimailer to get improved Twitter follow emails. Shortly after @eliah reminded me that people wouldn’t be able to find me via my email address anymore when using this service.
That seemed like a big Fail to me.

I quickly worked up a hack that gets me both:

1. Keep your Twitter email address as my gmail address.
2. Then add a filter in Gmail that takes all emails from “twitter-follow-GMAILUSERNAME=gmail.com@postmaster.twitter.com” (replacing GMAILUSERNAME with your username of course) and with “following” in the subject, and archives them, marks them as read, and forwards them to your Twimailer email address.

This works perfectly I keep my email address associated with my twitter account and get the enhanced follow emails.

If you don’t use gmail you could easily adapt this to work with whatever email service you use. You just have to get the service to forward the appropriate emails to the correct email address.

Twimailer is a wonderful service and getting to keep your email address findability on twitter with this trick takes out any negatives from the service leaving just the good stuff.

Tags: twitter, gmail, tips, tricks