I’ve been playing around with the iPhone SDK mainly for the purposes of integrating the iPhone with the Ublip GPS tracking system. If you’re interested, you can read some of the research I’ve done regarding iPhone GPS tracking. I’ll be continuing my research and sharing it in the Ublip blog. But the point of this post is to mention that just this morning my iPhone went into emergency mode where I couldn’t get it to sync with my Mac and it was completely off the network. It turns out that Apple just released a new version of the iPhone SDK and OS today. So I started downloading the 195 MB file about two hours ago. Apparently I have 5 hours to go. Needless to say, Apple’s servers are getting hammered right now. The image below about says it all. I feel like I’m on dial-up again!

If you’ve developed in Rails for a decent amount of time then you’ve most likely needed to use the interactive console: ruby script/console. This has saved me within our production application on many occasions. As you probably know, when using the console in production mode, logging is disabled. Sometimes it’s useful to see the queries generated by ActiveRecord, which brings me to my scenario from yesterday. I badly needed to see what query was being gererated by one of my model methods and stumbled across this snippet of code:

ActiveRecord::Base.logger = Logger.new(STDOUT)

Be sure to restart your console before running this command and when you execute a statement like User.find(1) you’ll be presented with some handy debug info.

Just a quick post to announce the launch of the JoeyTracker at Tufts University. We worked a couple of Tufts students to help them bring the project to life and allow them to track their campus bus (aka “The Joey”) online. Read this article posted by the Tufts Daily if you’re interested in more details.

If you’re really bored and decide you want to lobby for a GPS bus tracker on your campus then be sure to check out the video below. I recently posted this article about a Tufts GPS bus tracking project with Ublip. At Ublip, we’re working hard to connect people with remote assets and this project is a great demonstration of our technology foundation.

If you’re new to developing Facebook applications with Rails then here’s a tip for you. You’ll need to install the RFacebook gem for starters: gem install rfacebook. If you read any of the online tutorials you’ll read that you need to run the rake facebook:setup task to create the facebook.yml file. You may end up seeing the following error message:

Don’t know how to build task ‘facebook:setup’

If so, you’ll need to install the rfacebook plugin using script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/rfacebook/plugins/rfacebook_on_rails. After you install the plugin then rake facebook:setup should run perfectly and create your default facebook.yml file.