I'm back!
My absence for the last 4 weeks was due to a much needed vacation, most of which was spent sailing down the Pelleponese with my father on the gaff-rigged schooner he built. Part vacation, part training so I'll be able to sail Iliopotissa without help, we had quite the adventure.
In the 3 …
Monday was planned to be our release day of a new version of Viviti, but it was not to be. An underground explosion and fire took down a chunk of the power in downtown Vancouver, and while the water cooled generators worked, they stopped working in a hurry when the Vancouver Fire Department tapped i…
After riding a supermarket giveaway bike (which proudly displayed the MJB Coffee logo on it's frame) for a couple years I finally gave in and bought a new bike. Perhaps more accurately, the bike gave out and I replaced it!
I love it - but it won't stay clean for very long, so I took some pictures …
The Conservatives have finally introduced the DMCA, resulting in somewhat predictable outrage from Canadians. For those not familiar with what this means if it's passed, I urge you to read some of Micheal Geist's recent posts - he breaks down the fine print. He's also posted a nice list of 30 things…
In Rails 2.1, they added partial updates - which is a great idea and a long time coming. This makes ActiveRecord only updates the parts of a model that has actually changed, and also gives you the ability to see if a field (or a record) has changed since retrieving it from the database. (via mode…
I've regressed back to the late 90's in terms of design for my personal blog, and once again have a black-based design. Not sure how long it will last, but for now I like it!
Also, in the name of 'eating your own dogfood' I am now using Viviti for this blog. Previously it was custom blog software, w…
A friend was complaining that there was nowhere he could find to get an RSS listing of movie showtimes, so I made a little script using Hpricot to parse forreel.com. Hopefully they don't mind!
Fr those of you locally, feel free to use it: http://jerrett.nullcreations.net/files/nanaimo_movies.xml
Well we've finally launched Viviti - It's a web based/hosted CMS system that's component based. Fully themable using normal HTML, and all editable in browser (drag-n-drop to move stuff around, etc.).
As it is now, it supports adding custom blocks (text or html blocks), rss feeds, blogs, and a few ot…
For anyone doing stuff requiring a good MIME library in Ruby, shared-mime-info works well. On OS X a few things are necessary to make it work though.
First, use ports to install the shared-mime-info database:
sudo port install shared-mime-info
Then you have to set XDG_DATA_DIRS to point at the right…
After using git for a little bit I started tinkering with ZSH, to get the current branch in my prompt. What I ended up with is this:
Turns out it's pretty easy - somewhere in your .zshrc you need to put the following:
# get the name of the branch we are on
git_prompt_info() {
ref=$(git-symbolic-…Clearing floating elements is pretty commonly handled by a a div or br tag with clear: both.
Recently I ran into a problem with this; the layout I was working with was using floats for the sidebar and part of the main content had floated list of images. Using the clear both trick caused it to clear …
There is a post on RubyInside today that spawned quite the cascade of comments on the topic of deploying rails. While a lot to wade through, there are some interesting comments buried in there. I still find it strange that everyone is clamoring for a solution, while ignoring one that exists because …
I've found a couple nifty tools that I figured I'd share:
Rak is a grep replacement written in ruby - it has some pretty neat features including nicer output by default, ignoring .svn and other similar directories. Definitely worth poking through at least the info on the website.
Reggy is a very sim…
The internet is abuzz with Facebook and privacy due to the beacon thing - but another less discussed topic is the ownership of content issue. Simply uploading content to Facebook grants them full rights, commercial and otherwise, including sublicensing - their TOS really puts it into perspective. Th…
Yesterday Tor checked in some new changes to netbeans 6.x which improve refactoring tools for ruby. Added are Extract method, introduce variable, introduce field, and introduce constant.
Tor goes into more depth on his blog, complete with examples and screenshots.
It took awhile, but I've finally switched over to OSX - and from what I can tell by googling for "OSX Ruby mysql gem", have gone through what seems to be an initiation.
There are many, many, many posts on how to make it install - and most of them didn't work for me. I did get it to work though and a…
Well, I'm back from Charlotte and RubyConf 07!
This year was quite good, and again being larger than previous years. Notable was the focus mostly back on Ruby, as opposed to Rails. Ruby Central's plan of RailsConf to take the ruby focus back worked. Lots of people have been of course uploading pictu…
I sent Tor an email with a screenshot of a dark theme I put together for Netbeans, and he's got it bundled up in the new versions, and available as a plugin. Hooray!
The theme is called 'Dark Pastels', and Tor has screenshots and more details on his blog. If I missed anything or anyone has suggesti…
I found a fun gotcha! today with CruiseControl - if you create a custom cruise task you have to set the RAILS_ENV AND ENV["RAILS_ENV"] to test.
If you do not, CruiseControl will run against your production database. Before CruiseControl invokes it's own built-in cruise task it sets the RAILS_ENV to …
ChainReading is back, with all the data restored... I apologize again for the downtime, and promise I'll find some time to do some much needed and long promised improvements on the site.
As it stands currently, it should be back in the exact state it went down - but if anyone notices anything, missi…
I'm a programmer and shutterbug living on the West Coast of Canada.
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