Meet the Team: Michael

Posted on February 23, 2009 by Theresa Sampson

MichaelMeet Michael Orr.  Michael is the CEO and overseer of everything here at Cloudspace.  He is one of our top engineers and has recently joined efforts with our Agile Development team.  Outside of work, he is big into comic books (Comic Book Wednesdays!), animals, Nine Inch Nails and traveling. Michael brings his excitement of the internet to the team and is a great person to work with as you will read below…

Where were you born? Where did you grow up & what was it like there?
“I was born in Owensboro, Kentucky and I moved around a lot. After Kentucky I lived in Knoxville, TN; Jacksonville, FL;  Lawrenceville, GA; Lake City, FL; Waycross, GA; Atlanta, GA; Palm City, FL; Orlando, FL.  I’ve lived in Orlando now longer than any of the other places, I came to Orlando in August 2000.”

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New Events Management System for Heartland

Posted on February 20, 2009 by Dixie Daniels

Heartland LogoWe have been creating a lot of event systems for our clients lately.  Heartland for Children (whose website we redesigned recently) has just given us the go-ahead for a new event management system for their site.  With each event Heartland can customize features, color schemes, logos and more to give the perfect feel for each event.  They’ll also be able to send out customizable emails about each event.  We’re really looking forward to launching this new system for them!

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OpenID + OAuth: a followup

Posted on February 20, 2009 by Tim Rosenblatt

Wanted to drop this real quick. There’s some data coming out of the OpenID & OAuth experiment that I discussed at AAC2009. And it looks like there’s high business value resulting from the combination. Check it out!

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Creating a Reusable Dictionary of Steps in Cucumber

Posted on February 18, 2009 by michaelorr

Corey and I have been using Cucumber to write our integration tests on our current project and I thought I’d share a tip with you that has made our lives so much easier. When making steps in Cucumber, try to make them reusable. The idea behind Cucmber’s integration tests is that you are creating a language to talk about (and test) your project. By creating a dictionary of reusable steps we cut down the amount of time it takes to write new features, and decrease the size of the testing language which makes it easier to wrap your head around it. Here is a sample step definition that could be used to check for various http response codes

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Decoding GPS latitude and longitude from EXIF in Ruby

Posted on February 16, 2009 by Tim Rosenblatt

Most camera phones have GPS sensors built in. So do new cameras. What’s this mean? Well, every picture taken with one of these devices has the latitude and longitude of the location that the picture was taken at. But how to get this out? And what’s this funky format that the numbers are coming out as? What’s Rational?

The short answers: use a gem; sexagesimal (yes it is a real word); a way of representing numbers in Ruby.

The long answers:

You’ll need to install a gem to read EXIF data from the image:

gem install exifr

Here’s the code:

require ‘exifr’

a = EXIFR::JPEG.new(photo_path)

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Acts As Conference 09 – Tim talks OAuth

Posted on February 13, 2009 by Tim Rosenblatt

Acts As Conference 09 videos are up! Including mine. It’s everything you ever wanted to know about OAuth. And, watch for the bonus XKCD reference :D

I’m on the internet!

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Meet the Team: Austin

Posted on February 11, 2009 by Theresa Sampson

AustinMeet Austin Flores.  Austin is one of the newest engineers at Cloudspace and is currently working with our Professional Services team.  He came to us from the UCF Techrangers in December last year; yet another programmer we have snatched from them.  Not only is Austin a skilled engineer but he is also a talented swing dancer and beer connoisseur.  He makes his own beer (all different kinds that are yummy) and teaches dance on Friday nights at UCF.  So check him out if you want to learn some moves and drink some homemade brew.  Now on with the interview…

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OAuth followup

Posted on February 10, 2009 by Tim Rosenblatt

Acts As Conference ’09 was a success. We took the team out to the conference, got to see some awesome presentations, and I also presented OAuth and APIs: Sharing your data without leaving your zipper down.

Confreaks was there with wifi and recording the presentations. I’ll be posting the video when it gets put up.

I did want to put one resource online ASAP. I found a small version of the following image online, and wanted to use it in the presentation, but was way too small to zoom in on. Roozbeh made a huge version of it, and it was perfect for the presentation. So, I wanted to put it back out there in the hopes that it will improve someone else’s presentation. :D

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Meet the Team: Roozbeh

Posted on January 29, 2009 by Theresa Sampson

RoozbehMeet Roozbeh Meghdadi.  Roozbeh is our in-house graphic designer, as well as professional photographer. Any website design that we have launched for ourselves and our clients, in the last three years, have all been his creations.  Roozbeh is the type of person that says “anything is possible”, especially with the web; a true go-getter and  as you will read below an inspiring addition to our team.

Where did you grow up & what was it like there?
“I grew up in Tehran, Iran.  It’s not like what you see on TV or the news, it’s a different culture.  It has a big city feel like NYC.”

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Review plans every day, or “The Next Episode”

Posted on January 22, 2009 by Tim Rosenblatt

In the last episode of “Cloudspace does Agile,” I talked about the weekly meetings. I also promised a post about the daily meetings. Here you go. And of course, feel free to comment on this post, or get in touch with me if you’ve got questions. tim @ my company’s domain dot com. (Darn spammers!)

This will be a quick post. Not because I’m lazy, but because I’m making a point. The daily meeting should be quick.

Ever heard the term “stand up meeting”? It’s because people literally stand, so they don’t get comfortable in cushy executive chairs, and drag meetings out. 5-10 minutes tops.

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