March 2008
2 posts
Life Scientists and Social Media
I just got an email from BioInformatics LLC advertising their new new report, The New Collaboration: Social Media and the Life Science Opportunity. It is a great report, and is closely related to what we are doing here at the Assay Depot. A few things jumped out at me while reading it.
Product Information
According to the report, third party online portals are the least trusted source of...
Create Your Own EC2 Image
We have been working day and night preparing for our beta launch in April, which is just one of the many excuses I have for not posting in so long. Part of preparing for that launch is setting up the platform that we are going to deploy to. For numerous reasons, we’ve chosen Amazon’s EC2 for our production system. EC2 is a great service, and getting up and running with it isn’t...
November 2007
2 posts
Geocoding in Ruby
The Geocode Module
Have you ever needed to turn a partial address into a full one? Have you ever wanted to get the latitude or longitude for a particular address? Maybe you want to plot addresses on a Google Map, or maybe, like a colleague of mine, you find it redundant to ask for city, state AND zip when creating a form. If any of these apply to you, you might be interested in geocoding.
...
Stats on Rails
The Stats Module
Have you ever had an array of numbers and needed to know if one was a statistical outlier? Ever needed the standard deviation of those numbers? Well, I was recently working on an app, where I did. I packaged up the functionality as the following Module.
z
end
def grubbs_outlier_test(value, mean, stddev)
((mean - value)/stddev).abs
end
def critical_z(n)
...
October 2007
1 post
Instantly add wiki functionality to your Rails app
Introduction
Its been a while since we’ve posted. That’s because we’ve been busy preparing for our beta launch. Toward that end, we’ve hired Rob Kaufman of Notch8 to strengthen our development effort. This post is about one of the plugins that has come out of that work, wiki_column.
wiki_column, allows you to add wiki functionality to any (textual) attribute of any...
August 2007
2 posts
ActiveCalendar Update, Validators and added...
Introduction
We posted the ActiveCalendar project a couple of months ago (incidentally it was the first post on this blog as well). Since then, the response has been great. It seems like people are actually using it. For that, thank you, we’re very happy people have found this code useful. Some of you have been kind enough to post comments and questions. In response, we’ve been...
IE PNG Fix in Rails
Introduction
PNGs are great, having a full 8 bits of alpha transparency makes designing web pages so much easier. That being said, I’m sure anyone reading this post is well aware of the gross inadequacies of Internet Explorer 6 in terms to the rendering of PNGs. IE7 has remedied the situation, however, according to Google Analytics, 6% of the visitors to this website still use IE6, and...
July 2007
3 posts
Setup a Central Logging Server using Splunk,...
Introduction
As you may already know, that I love Virtual Computing. My program of choice is VMWare, but regardless of what you use, I just love the concept. Virtual computing allows a small company like the Assay Depot to create many virtual computers, each handling a different aspect of the business. However, nothing is free in this world, and Virtual Computing comes with its own set of...
Build Your Own Deb File and Repository Server
Introduction
How do you install software on an Ubuntu machine? How do you create a deb file? How does apt-get work? These are the questions I will try to answer in this post, but first a little background.
Background
I love Virtual Computing. I can run tons of virtual servers on a very limited number of physical machines. This allows me to segregate applications exactly as I choose. I can...
ActiveUpload - Easy File Uploads in Rails
Introduction
Our goal was to create a Rails plugin that allows the user to upload multiple files to a website, quickly and easily. This plugin should also give the developer control over what is uploaded, such as maximum filesize allowed, and what filetypes are acceptable. To accomplish this goal, we created the ActiveUpload project.
After researching some alternatives, we settled on a Flash...
June 2007
2 posts
ActiveAuthentication - Active Directory...
Introduction
In addition to managing our public presence on the web, we spend a considerable amount of time developing internal applications and services. Ruby on Rails makes creating generic webapps a snap; however, for any practical application you need more than just simple CRUD.
How about Authentication?
Most businesses out there, in no small part due to the inflexibility of Windows...
ActiveCalendar - Javascript Calendar on Rails
Background
When I first started with Rails I was amazed at how quickly you can get a project up and running. Coming from a Java background I was used to configuring either Hibernate, then Spring or spending my days tweaking EJB interfaces. The scaffolding in Rails blew me away. However, the basic date and date time renderer, as I’m sure you will agree, left a little something to be...