John P. Wood

I’ve spent some time over the past couple of months cleaning up the Rails apps I’ve written with the goal of making them available for download on this site. I wrapped that up last week with the release of Addressbook. However, I soon realized that making the code available on this site was not ideal, and it would be much better if I made the code available via some code hosting site, like Sourceforge or GitHub. This gives the projects a little more visibility, allows for easier contributions to the projects, and simply provides a better home for the code. So, I spent the past few days making Diners Club, Addressbook, and Karate Journal available on GitHub. Please check the project pages on this site for links to the GitHub repositories.

Choosing GitHub was fairly easy. I’ve been wanting to learn Git for a while now, GitHub has all of the features I needed (plus some nice-to-haves), and it seemed pretty straight forward to use. So far so good!

I did however have to do some additional cleanup before the move to GitHub. Previously, I had a bash script that I ran that would export the code from my local Subversion repository, and wipe out any user names, passwords, or other configuration that I didn’t want to publish with the code. The script would then tar and zip up the code, and push it to the site. This wouldn’t fly with GitHub, since everybody would be able to see the code in the repository. So, some work was needed to provide template config files (database.yml.template for example) for people to specify their own configuration, and I removed the original files from source control.

All things considered, I’m very happy with the move, and wish I’d done it sooner. I think from now on, I’ll be using GitHub from the start with new projects.

Merry Christmas everybody!

Software git, GitHub, personal projects

Yay for me! I set a personal goal to have the code for all of my Rails apps on this site by the end of the year. Tonight, I can check that one off the list. The code for the Addressbook webapp is now available for download. Addressbook was not only my first Rails app, but also my first experience with Ajax. And trust me, it shows. I learned a lot from this project, especially what not to do. However, I must also say that I use Addressbook more than any other personal project I have ever completed. So, it can’t be that bad I love the fact that I can access my contact information from anywhere, and that I can manage groups of addresses and print mailing labels with the click of a button. Sure, the UI can be a bit unintuitive, but it’s not that big of an issue for me. There are a few more things I’d like to do with this project. We’ll see where it goes from here.

Software personal projects, rails, ruby

I finished cleaning up the Karate Journal code, and it is now available here. Two down, one to go. I hope to have the Addressbook webapp code on the site by the end of the year.

Software personal projects, rails

I finally got around to cleaning up and publishing the code for the Diners Club web application. Like everything else I release, I’m not sure who will actually use it. But, I find that the whole exercise of releasing your code is beneficial to you and your code. So, it’s worth the effort. It’s available via the MIT license, so have at it.

Kind of a funny side note about this project. I recently found out that a couple of co-workers of mine spend some of their spare time working on Planypus, which is a site for making plans with your friends. Sounds familiar! I was talking to them, and it turns out that Planypus started the exact same way that the Diners Club webapp started, as just a way to organize dinner outings with friends. They however took it to the next level and threw a business plan around it. I’m just not that business savvy I guess

Software personal projects, rails, ruby, Software

I’ve just completed the initial release of my second Gnome Do plugin. It’s called TravelAgent. TravelAgent allows you to kick off searches for flights, rental cars, and hotel rooms on select travel agency websites right from Do. To use TravelAgent, you tell Do what you want to search for (flights, cars, or hotels), provide Do a simple search query string (see the plugin’s wiki page for details), and specify which of the supported travel agencies you’d like to use to conduct the search. Do will then open up a web browser, bringing you to the search results page on the travel agency’s website.

Let me just state this right from the start. I have no idea who will use this plugin, or who, if anybody, will find it useful. This is just something I wanted to do. If others find it useful, then that’s great. But, that was not my main motivation. Searching for travel can be complicated, as there are many options to consider. Take flights for example. The number of passengers you’re looking to book a flight for, and the “types” of those passengers (adults, children, seniors, etc) can vary from search to search. The departure time, arrival time, and flight time is often very important to people. Some people only fly certain airlines or certain cabin classes (coach, first class, etc). Trying to sum all of this up into a Do plugin is difficult. Do’s interface is simple…it needs to be. That’s one of the reasons why Do rocks so much. So, using the plugin had to be just as simple. To do that, many assumptions were made about the search being conducted, greatly reducing the flexibility of the search as compared to doing the search right on the travel agency’s website.

So, what is it useful for then? Well, it’s a quick an easy way to do a price check. And if you’re interested in purchasing some travel, then you can always tweak the search right from the search results page, to get it just the way you want it, before continuing down the purchase path.

As for the list of agencies supported, they are all Orbitz Worldwide agencies. All of the agencies are also running our global travel platform, which means I can interact with all of them the same way. The plugin currently works by building a URL, which contains all of the necessary search criteria, and feeding that URL to the web browser. It was the simplest way to get up and running. So, where is Orbitz you ask? Well, Orbitz is still running the classic platform. It does not have pretty URLs, or any other type of publicly available web services that I could use to conduct a search. I could write a screen scraper to get the job done, but that was beyond the scope of this initial 0.1 release. Cheaptickets suffers from the same issue. Soon, we will be rolling some of the other Ebookers agencies onto the new platform. When those sites go on, I will add support for them in the plugin. Orbitz and Cheaptickets are still a ways out, so I may look into scraping those sites for the time being.

So, what’s next for the plugin? Here’s a short list of stuff I’d like to do:

• Add support for additional OWW agencies
• Add support for searching packages (flight + car rental, flight + hotel, flight + car rental + hotel)
• Change the plugin to display the search results in Do, instead of on the agency’s search results page (but still giving the user the option to see the full search results page)
• Add support for pre-configured search options, like cabin class, preferred airline, etc. This would give the user more control over the search, while keeping the search query string simple.

I’m sure more features will come up as time goes on. We’ll see where this heads. If you have any ideas for what you’d like this plugin to be able to do, I’m all ears.

Software Gnome Do, personal projects, TravelAgent

I just pushed the code for my first Gnome Do plugin. It is a plugin for Confluence, a popular wiki package, and allows you to search your wiki from within Gnome Do. Do will present you with the results, and selecting one of the results will open that page in a web browser.

I want to give a shout out to the Do developers. Because of their very powerful and flexible plugin architecture, writing the plugin was a snap. Very little code was required. I probably spent no more than 10 hours total on this plugin, and the majority of that time was spent learning the plugin architecture, and learning how to install and test my plugin.

The code is currently on its own branch, waiting to be merged with the Gnome Do community plugins branch. If interested, you can currently find the code at https://code.launchpad.net/~john-p-wood/do-plugins/confluence. Eventually, it will be merged to https://code.launchpad.net/~do-plugins/do-plugins/community.

Next up, I’m working on a Do plugin that will interact with the many Orbitz Worldwide travel websites. Stay tuned!

Software Gnome Do, personal projects

You know that piece of code that you wrote a while back? That webapp that you wrote to help organize some aspect of your life? That library you wrote to abstract away some details of a specific task? Release it! That’s right. Set it free!

One of the reasons I set up this website was to give me a way to “showcase” and release some of the code I had written over the last couple of years. I guess some part of me thought it would be as simple as tarring up the code and throwing it on the site. Well, it turns out it’s not that simple (at least for me), and that’s a good thing.

I’ve found that releasing code forces you to make it better! Over the last couple of days, I’ve found myself adding more test cases, fixing bugs, removing assumptions, bulking up the documentation, and cleaning up the code. In general, now that the code will be out there in the public eye, I want to make sure it represents my best effort. When I write code for my own use, I generally focus on keeping it clean, and making it work. I don’t usually write doc outside of the code. I sometimes make assumptions in the code based on the box that I know will be running the code. I put up with small bugs that don’t really cause that big of a problem. But at the same time, when I use somebody else’s code, I expect more. I expect good doc. I expect that the code doesn’t assume to be running in any specific environment or on any specific setup. I expect those small bugs to be fixed. So, I’ve found myself cleaning up the code to meet my own standards. And, this is great for the code.

Releasing code also engages the community. You never know who may be out there looking for something like what you have created. You could be helping your fellow man by providing a solution to a problem they could be experiencing, perhaps the same problem that prompted you to write the code in the first place. Engaging the community has several other benefits. In true open source fashion, if users feel that your code is missing something, they will often add it. If there are bugs in the code that you missed, sometimes they will get fixed. An increased user base will sometimes serve as a source of innovation. All of these end up making your code better.

So, in short, I’ve found that releasing your code makes it better! So, release that code!

Software career development, personal projects