New Bamboo Web Development

Bamboo blog. Our thoughts on web technology.


Practising Security

4 months ago by Damon Davison

At the end of last week, it looked like we had made it out of the woods with the Christmas and New Year slowdown, and the unexpected arrival of a Rails security bulletin just a couple of days after all the celebrating was over. It turns out we were wrong.

fire alarm

Yesterday, the Rails security team announced not one but two security issues, one of which affected all versions of Rails. This has kept our current support team very busy with testing, updating, re-testing and deploying our many projects. Within the first 16 hours of the announcement, and within only a few hours of waking up here in the UK, our team had the vast majority of our active projects updated and re-deployed.

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The Joy of d3.js

5 months ago by Makoto Inoue

Happy New Year!!

If you are thinking about learning something new in the New Year, how about learning d3.js?

Since organising the Londinium MMXII Hackathon (Video) last year, I have become a big fan of d3.js for data visualisation.

Last year, I organised a few drinkups and meetups, and am now excited to announce my video tutorials called "The Joy of d3.js", a commit-by-commit guide to building Hans Rosling's "GapMinder" data visualisation in d3.js

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MMXII Hackathon Video

5 months ago by Damon Davison

You might say we've been preparing for Christmas for five months, or you might say that good things need time, but we've finally had time to put together the video of the MMXII Hackathon we helped organise.

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getUserMedia on the server, with Sinatra and Say Cheese

6 months ago by Lee Machin

Say Cheese is a small library that makes it easier to integrate webcams into your website or app, using the recent getUserMedia API. It opens up a whole range of opportunities for web developers, provided their users run modern and up to date browsers (sorry Safari, IE).

One such opportunity is working with the user's webcam stream on the server side. This could be as simple as sending a single frame (what SayCheese calls a snapshot), or pushing the entire stream itself with, say, websockets. I'll start simple and show how you can send a 'snapshot' to the server via AJAX, and then do something interesting with it.

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The first London d3.js meetup

6 months ago by Makoto Inoue

After two successful drinkups, we finally held our first london d3.js meetup.

Special thanks to @timruffles, @CiaranR, and Skimlinks people for providing the venue, pizzas, beers and a talk.

Here is the list of topics we mentioned during/after the meetup.

Introduction and Announcement.

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Zen and the Art of speaking at Ruby Conf 2012, the dRuby way

6 months ago by Makoto Inoue

Me and Seki san

I had a pleasure of giving a presentation about dRuby with Masatoshi Seki, (I call him "Seki san") the author of the library, at this year's RubyConf, and I would like to take you through the journey we've been through.

In this blog post I will talk about

  • How to prepare talk proposals
  • Being inspired by other speakers to strengthen your talk
  • Learning by coding

I hope this blog post gives you an overview of the conference from an angle of "Distributed and Parallel computing in Ruby" and also inspires you to submit a talk proposal of your own at next year's RubyConf in Miami.

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Lend wings to Rails development with Hermes

7 months ago by Damon Davison

(Co-Authored with Claudio Ortolina.)

Hermes screenshot

Here at New Bamboo no one enforces the use of specific development tools: team members choose their own text editor, shell and whatever else they feel can help them get their job done. Some of us have been working entirely in the shell for quite some time, using tools like Vim, Emacs, Screen and Tmux. We enjoy the freedom and flexibility this offers, but we recognize that switching to a text console can be painful, especially for people who have always used a graphical environment.

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Hello World d3.js London

9 months ago by Makoto Inoue

During our last Londinium MMXII Hackathon some of the participants used d3.js, a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data.

Here are a couple of examples.

D3.js is different from other JavaScript graphing libraries (such as Raphael, Google Chart, Protoviz, etc) because it's not a graphing library! Instead of offering an abstraction layer of graphing components, it offers jQuery-like DOM manipulation and an easy way to bind data to DOM. The biggest advantage of this approach (in my opinion) gives flexible way to animate between different visualisation layer or dataset. Here is one amazing example.

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