I had an amazing weekend at the Techcrunch Disrupt Hackathon and build with Eric Allen and Scott Tran a really cool app called “Karpool”. Karpool is the easiest way to organize carpools with your friends. Sign in with your number, add your riders, and start a trip. Karpool will show your rider’s current locations, and whether or not they’re ready to leave. It also notifies the riders once the driver is nearby and arrived. You can also check your drivers position on a map. Only the driver needs the app, the rest works over SMS and your smartphones browser. Techcrunch picked us as a staff favorite and won TC Disrupt tickets! Check out my 60 second pitch and the page karpool.us.

I just had a little mixup with ordering some business cards at moo.com and had to email customer service. I received this automated email:

Dear Ulf Schwekendiek,

Thanks for contacting the MOO Print Team.

I’m sending this email to confirm that your enquiry is in our customer service queue, and that a real, human MOO Service Agent will get back to you by the end of the next business day (that’s Monday-Friday, excluding Public Holidays).

Remember, I’m just a bit of software, so please don’t reply to this email. You’ll find our Service Agents far more conversational.

Best wishes,

Little MOO
Tireless Print Robot

I think this is the cutest, nicest copy-text for an automated email response I’ve ever read!

Update:
Stay with me. It turns out that there real customer support is even better. My problem was solved immediately. The error was on my side, but I still got free express shipping. Feeling very happy. #thatshowcustomerserviceshouldbe

C’mon, you always wanted those nifty little rails helper functions for your javascript. Here’s my translation to coffee script: https://gist.github.com/1157909 and the corresponding javascript: https://gist.github.com/1157909

Example:

time_ago_in_words((125).seconds().ago().getTime())

results in

"2 minutes ago"

Note: You’ll need the http://www.datejs.com/ library to run this fancy example.

Here an older video from last years event at Babycastles in Queens. We were showing off our research game Wriggle:

I’m so happy to see progress from NYU’s the social game lab. They took my initial prototype and polished it so that it became a really nice math game, that also works for the Playstation Move.

Check the video: http://www.viddler.com/sceablog/videos/1989/

Thanks to this great blog post, we can safely now bind all public methods (all methods that don’t start with ‘_’) of our Backbone classes by calling auto_bind() in the initializer.

Here’s the coffee script version of it:

AutoBind =
	auto_bind: ->

		funcs = _.functions(@constructor.prototype)
		protoFuncs = ['auto_bind', 'constructor'].concat(
			_.functions(Backbone.Collection.prototype),
			_.functions(Backbone.Model.prototype),
			_.functions(Backbone.View.prototype))

		_.each funcs, (f) =>
			if f.charAt(0) != '_' && _.indexOf(protoFuncs, f) == -1
				@[f] = _.bind(@[f], @)

_.extend Backbone.Collection.prototype, AutoBind
_.extend Backbone.Model.prototype, AutoBind
_.extend Backbone.View.prototype, AutoBind

If your ruby interpreter is crashing when you use rmagick on osx and you installed ImageMagick over macports, those simple steps help you to get your system up and running again:

1. sudo port uninstall ImageMagick

2. sudo port edit ImageMagick

3. Add –disable-openmp to configure.args (near line 100)

4. sudo port install ImageMagick

5. Remove rmagick:gem uninstall rmagick

6. Install rmagick:gem install rmagick

That should do it.