Make your own IM bot in Ruby, and interface it with your Rails app

Make your own IM bot in Ruby, and interface it with your Rails app:

"What about your average Joe on the street, how come they get forced into having to log in to the site to update their data, etc.? Why not provide a means of carrying out simple tasks in an application they probably already have? And so an Instant Messaging interface was designed to send a instruction to a robot, and it’s relatively simple to get setup."

I have been thinking a lot lately about providing API's through IM or Email. If you think about it, Unix geeks have interacted with complex systems with three letter commands, manpages and the every helpful -h option on everything. Why not allow users to the same flexibility, because believe it or not, you new fancy web 2.0 application is way simpler than 'ps' or 'top'.

GitHub is Freaking Me Out!!

I found myself perplexed and a little concerned last night while searching for the latest and greatest Rails authentication plugin. One of the general issues that I have with the current PlugScape for Rails is that it is difficult to determine quality and recency. I was overjoyed last night after finding an authentication plugin with OpenId support!! Yahoo!! And it had even been updated in May of this year!! But then I noticed something:

It seems to me that this will make it more difficult to ensure quality and, for those of us that don't read all the code in the installed plugin, this could even be dangerous. Thanks to GitHub and Google these three versions have equal footing. I guess I'll trust Google and click on I'm Feeling Lucky.

SquirrelFish Makes the Day Just a Little Bit Better

Over at the Surfin' Safari Blog they just announced SquirrelFish, a super fast Javascript interpreter.

I just gave it a test drive on our site MeetingWave, and I have to say this thing is rockin!! I am going to use it from now on for all my browsing as well as functional sanity checks of the site. Anything javascript is running much faster and is most noticeable on our Meeting Map .

My work day just got a little better... Thanks SquirellFish...

Check out the MeemCloud I made for WebKit