Archive for the ‘Rails’ Category

Write Music Notation in your browser!

Monday, May 31st, 2010

Gregory Dyke and Paul Rosen are pleased to announce version 1.0 of abcjs.

Abcjs is an open source parsing and rendering tool for ABC written entirely in javascript, so it allows sheet music to be rendered as both standard notation and MIDI entirely with the browser.

Here are a couple ways to use this:

For rendering any ABC notation found on a web page as standard notation, see http://drawthedots.com/abcplugin

For the simplest ABC editor in a web page, see http://drawthedots.com/abcjs

For a free on-line editor and tune storage website, see http://drawthedots.com

Enjoy! And we’d appreciate feedback of all kinds.

Notes:

1) ABC 1.6 is mostly done, and many parts of ABC 2.0 are supported. We are actively working on improving the rendering.

2) We know that the rendering in IE is not as pretty as Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, but we’re working it!

Posted in Internet Programming, Music, Rails | No Comments »

Racquetball website

Sunday, March 22nd, 2009

A year or so ago I took up racquetball and found I have a natural affinity for it. I have pretty quick reflexes, I don’t mind diving for a ball, I play really intensely, and I’m left-handed.

I joined the racquetball tournament at the local health club, and was appalled that the standings were sent out once a week as an Excel spreadsheet attachment. Since I was just making the leap into internet programming from application programming, I volunteered to write a site for free in Ruby on Rails just for the experience.

It’s turned out great, and each season I’ve been spending a few hours on it to improve a couple of small things. The original code was pretty embarrassing, since I was just blindly trying to find my way. There is still lots of refactoring to do, but, it works, so there’s no hurry.

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Posted in Internet Programming, Rails, Sports | No Comments »

The Contradance website

Sunday, March 22nd, 2009

I rewrote the Charlottesville Contradance website a couple of years ago when I was learning .NET. I found that .NET is a good platform in some ways, and a weak platform in others.

What is good is that I was able to easily place widgets on the screen and associate them with data. I created a fairly rich site (for the time!) without learning a thing about JavaScript. It also has “master pages”, so you can create a template for a number of pages without having to repeat the same HTML over and over.

What is bad is pretty much the same thing: I was an applications programmer and I was able to create the site without having to change my paradigm and without having to learn much about HMTL, CSS, or JavaScript. Some of the .NET pages I created tended to be pretty heavy. What is also bad is that the site needs to be hosted by a Windows server, and that limits your choices.

The entire schedule is driven by a set of XML files. My thinking was that I’d like to keep an entire mirror of the site on my computer and just FTP it up. That way, I can’t lose data if the ISP goes under. In retrospect, I think the way to go is to use a database, but have backup procedures in place.

One of these days I’ll rewrite the site in Ruby on Rails.

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Posted in Contradance, Internet Programming, Programming, Rails | 3 Comments »