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Archive for the ‘Ruby’ Category

Python the new VBA ?

Posted in BI, ETL, Palo, Ruby, SQLite, Web2.0, data, excel, news, tagged , , , , on April 11, 2008 | 6 Comments »

These last two weeks, Python has been on my mind. First off, last week I decided to make time to fully investigate Picalo, an open-source Python-based data analysis tool, and then, this week, Google announced their long awaited cloud-computing offering, Google Apps Engine, with the language at its core.
Python was the first of [...]

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Zimki - the spirt lives on …

Posted in JavaScript, Ruby, Web2.0, news, programming, tagged , , , , , , on December 13, 2007 | 2 Comments »

Although Zimki is to shut down on Christmas Eve, the ideas behind the service live on. Two new offerings, Horuku and AppJet, offer variations on the idea of hosted application development/deployment.
AppJet, funded by Paul Graham’s Y-Combinator, is very similar to Zimki, being a server-side JavaScript platform. No details yet as to what [...]

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Ruby plus Amazon S3 - Document Centric Database

Posted in EC2, ETL, Ruby, S3, Web2.0, data, tagged , , , on November 6, 2007 | 1 Comment »

I’ve said it before and I’m going to repeat myself; learning Ruby has proven to be a great investment, not so much for the language itself but for the insights it gives into other technologies. As soon as a new ‘cool’ technology or idea hits the street some smart Rubyist is bound to attack [...]

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Google Spreadsheets - ETL tool

Posted in BI, ETL, GoogleApps, RSSBus, Ruby, SQLite, Talend, VBA, Web2.0, excel, kettle, tagged on September 6, 2007 | 1 Comment »

Although I’m a total Excel fanboy, I most admit I rarely use it any longer for personal stuff such as home budgets, tax calculations, what-ifs, to-do lists etc.; I now tend to use Google Spreadsheets. Likewise, personal notes, drafts and useful bits of code are stored using Google Docs rather than MS Word. [...]

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Facebook Apps using Ruby on Rails

Posted in Java, Ruby, Web2.0, tagged , , on July 19, 2007 | 2 Comments »

This is what I love about Ruby and Ruby on Rails, once you learn the basics of Ruby and how a RoR app is put together you can use this knowledge to learn about other technologies, in this case Facebook Applications. The reason for this is, as soon as a new technology hits the [...]

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Like Excel macros? You’ll love this..

Posted in ETL, GoogleApps, Ruby, VBA, excel on July 17, 2007 | 5 Comments »

One of the most used (and abused) features of Excel is its macro recording facility. How many mundane and repetitive actions have been automated using this feature? How many people found the courage to program in VBA by using the recorder as their training-wheels? Well now iMacros (from German company iOpus [...]

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RoR Data Warehouse on EC2

Posted in EC2, ETL, Ruby, data, tagged , on June 25, 2007 | 3 Comments »

If you’ve been putting off evaluating Ruby on Rails and you’re lucky enough to have an Amazon EC2 beta account then it’s your lucky day. Paul Dowman has just made a public AMI (think of it like a virtual machine spec from which you can create a running EC2 instance) with various [...]

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Talend vs. Kettle (Pentaho PDI)

Posted in BI, ETL, Java, JavaFX, JavaScript, Palo, Ruby, SQLite, Talend, kettle, xLite, tagged on May 27, 2007 | 5 Comments »

Over the last few weeks I’ve received a lot of traffic from Goggle searches comparing Talend and Kettle and also from Vincent McBurney’s ITtoolbox article comparing the two products, so where do I stand?
As ETL tools they take different approaches, Kettle is a meta data driven framework (which is in turn tightly integrated into an [...]

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JavaFX - a GUI DSL

Posted in ETL, Java, JavaFX, JavaScript, Ruby, SQLite, Talend, VBA, excel, programming on May 19, 2007 | 4 Comments »

Having mastered JavaScript (OK master is too strong a word - having become comfortable with both its syntax and usage patterns) my next port of call is JavaFX the recently announced Flash/Silverlight competitor. What led me to JavaFX Script was not its role in this Flash/AJAX alternative platform (which unless  Sun improves [...]

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VBx - the future VBA?

Posted in Ruby, VBA, excel, tagged on May 2, 2007 | No Comments »

With the future of VBA being a concern for many Office professionals, some of the  MIX07 announcements around dynamic language support in Silverlight may shed some light on a potential replacement for the VBA, VBx.
There’s life in the old dog yet, it may yet get to share the limelight with its cooler cousins Ruby and [...]

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HacketyHack from WhyTheLuckyStiff

Posted in Ruby, education, news on April 26, 2007 | No Comments »

No it’s not a tip for the 5.50 at Punchestown it’s the latest project from _why (a legend in the world of Ruby, if a language as young as Ruby can have legends). HacketyHack is a framework to teach kids how to program, built using Ruby and the gekco browser engine, it’s free [...]

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Want your kids to have the programming itch, then Scratch it!

Posted in Ruby, education, excel, programming on February 19, 2007 | 4 Comments »

Having looked in the past for a suitable introduction to programming for my 10 year old son I had come to the conclusion that the existing options (such as KPL) where too ‘wordy’ and not able to compete with the point and click powered online/gaming worlds that youngsters now inhabit. That was until [...]

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Build a Data Warehouse using Ruby On Rails

Posted in ETL, Palo, Ruby, tagged on February 4, 2007 | 2 Comments »

Nikola pointed out ActiveWarehouse , a new RoR Data Warehousing project. Haven’t tried it out myself but the author has posted an excellent tutorial on using the plug-in to create an example warehouse. Along with its ETL and SQL Views sub-projects ActiveWarehouse provides a great foundation for Ruby based BI systems. [...]

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What’s so good about SQLite?

Posted in ETL, Ruby, SQLite on February 1, 2007 | 2 Comments »

…continuing my posts on Ruby and SQLite as a micro ETL environment.
I’ve written before that my most important take-away from Ruby On Rails was the language Ruby, but RoR also introduced me to SQLite. Although its typical use in Rails is as a development database I quickly realised this open source ,very fast [...]

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Why Ruby?

Posted in ETL, Ruby, excel on January 16, 2007 | 3 Comments »

.…continuing my posts on Ruby and SQLite as a micro ETL environment.
Like many people my first introduction to Ruby was via Ruby On Rails and like others, RoR introduced me to a best of breed approach to developing scalable MVC based web sites. But as building scalable web sites is not what I do, [...]

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