Lately, I’ve been working on a Google Maps mashup that calculates CO2 emissions for automobile, bus, and rail trips. Since Google Maps has such a great JavaScript API, I decided to write the application almost entirely in JavaScript. Thus, Carbon.js was born!

Recently, we spiffed up some of our emitters with enhanced documentation using Rocco, a Ruby port of Docco. We combined this with github’s ability to set up static html pages for a repo. By setting up a branch called gh-pages, Github will serve any html files in that branch. We use this feature to display Rocco-generated documentation of our carbon models (check out the flight emitter for an example).

I just got back from JRubyConf in Columbus, Ohio. I had a great time meeting other Rubyists and learned a great deal about how Ruby is being integrated into enterprise environments via JRuby. It’s really exciting to see “the big guys” embracing a language and ecosystem that we at Brighter Planet enjoy using on a daily basis.

I have been spending the past few weeks creating and refactoring our carbon model gems, with the goal of making them easy to enhance, fix, and test by climate scientists and Ruby developers. I wanted to make contributing a simple process and bundler fit the bill quite well.

I don’t follow Yehuda Katz’ blog (though I should) but he posted an article on basic gem configuration and build steps. It irks me to no end when I clone a git repo and run through the following process:

My wife is a graduate student who spends most of her time reading a ton of articles for her classes.  Once a week, she has to drive an hour and a half to Detroit for work.  One night, she was worried that she’d have enough time to work in Detroit and read all of her articles.  The proverbial light bulb went off in my head and I remembered a feature that Mac OS X has had since Jaguar (2002): Text to Speech.