Working With Rails

@digitalanger Warum hält Deine Mieze nicht so schön still: http://is.gd/eFEU :) #dailykatze (via Twitter)

Michael posted a message on Twitter “@digitalanger Warum hält Deine Mieze nicht so schön still: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://is.gd/eFEU" title="http://flickr.com/photos/46457493@N00/3141964506/in/set-72157612156282365">http://is.gd/eFEU :) #dailykatze” 39 seconds ago - Comment - Like

@janitzki Ihr habts echt gut... Schnee Mittags in der Sonne ist durchaus schöner als morgen als Matsch auf der Straße. :) (via Twitter)

Michael posted a message on Twitter “@janitzki Ihr habts echt gut... Schnee Mittags in der Sonne ist durchaus schöner als morgen als Matsch auf der Straße. :)” 2 minutes ago - Comment - Like

Tankkaart gevonden

Ik was op zoek naar een tankkaart. Tot nu had ik KBC de tankkaartfunctie op mijn normale bedrijfsbankkaart laten activeren. Het voordeel was dat ik niet alleen een mooi overzicht kreeg elke maand, maar bovendien een “echte” factuur waardoor we een deel van de BTW konden recupereren. De banken hadden dit uitbesteed aan Banksys / Atos Wordline, en die deden dat relatief goed. Banksys kan/wil dat blijkbaar niet meer doen, dus was ik op zoek.

Na lang wikken en wegen heb ik besloten een DKV Euroservice kaart te nemen. Het lijkt me een zeer uitgebreid netwerk, ik moet me niet vastpinnen op een bepaald aantal minimum liter, en moest geen waarborg/voorschot storten. Hoewel het duidelijk op vrachtwagengebruikers gericht is, kan je als gewone personenwagen ook inschrijven. Je moet je wel door een stapel papierwerk worstelen, maar al bij al verliep de aansluiting vlot.

De service is wel niet gratis. Ze rekenen een bepaald percentage kosten aan, maar die leken me bijzonder beperkt (paar eurocent op mijn eerste tankbeurt van 30 euro), en in ieder geval was de KBC tankkaartfunctie ook niet gratis. Je krijgt elke twee weken een factuur en het gaat automatisch van je bankrekening met domiciliëring. Je betaalt dus pas na een of twee weken, niet onmiddellijk.

Een bijkomend voordeel is dat het een afzonderlijke kaart is en dat ze gekoppeld is aan de wagen, niet aan mij persoonlijk. Als een van mijn collega’s dus met mijn auto weg is en ergens moet tanken, doen ze dat met dezelfde kaart.

Wie dus op zoek is naar een vervanging voor de tankkaartfunctie op zijn bankkaart, kan ik DKV aanraden. Ook in de commentaren op mijn vorig artikel staan interessante alternatieven.

I <3 Helvetica

From the Typophile forum (via i love typography) — man gets tattoo on impulse. The first comment:

What made you go with bold?

Genius.

RE: Система авторизации с поддоменами

Untitled (via Flickr)

tylr favorited a photo on Flickr Untitled 1 hour ago - Comment - Like

links for 2009-01-06

The perfect program

What is a Completely Outrageous Thing You Want to do This Year?

1. Tattoo You We have our first Style Statement tattoo! Long live...
2. Tattoos, For Real: 8 Things To Know About Getting Inked Do NOT get a tattoo. Just don't do it....
3. What adventure are you craving (or planning for)? Whether it's your inner world, a foreign frontier or the...

Links for 2009-01-05 [del.icio.us]

• ҫι滮ְҵ

[del.icio.us] skpsmtpmessage - Google Code

rares committed to rares/livingsocial

rares pushed to master at rares/livingsocial

Hm, -15 Grad in der Voreifel. Habe heute mal aufs Radfahren verzichtet. Ansonsten: Herrliches Wetter. (via Twitter)

Michael posted a message on Twitter “Hm, -15 Grad in der Voreifel. Habe heute mal aufs Radfahren verzichtet. Ansonsten: Herrliches Wetter.” 33 seconds ago - Comment - Like

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hjw3001 posted a photo:

Christmas - 2008

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hjw3001 posted a photo:

Christmas - 2008

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Christmas - 2008

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hjw3001 posted a photo:

Christmas - 2008

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hjw3001 posted a photo:

Christmas - 2008

Bad Fucking UI Design - WordPress 2.8 feature poll

FriendFeed/Disqus Comment Sync v0.2

A look at some Jibber design decisions.

Review: Foundation Rails 2

Redirection plugin for WordPress: A SEO must-have

My Setup and Software

I too read Al3x's interview the other day, and like John Nunemaker, figured I'd share my setup, as I enjoy reading what others use and often can pick up a few interesting tools or tidbits.

Unlike Mr. Nunemaker, my desk is too messy, IMHO, to photograph right now :) However, many similarities aside from that. On with it...

I use a 17" MacBook Pro as my only machine these days. Like Alex and John, I really like having just a single machine, and I no longer work for a corporation where I'd worry about that. DealBase is cool and wouldn't try to make some wacko claim to some work not relevant (and we've explicitly discussed my use of a single machine, etc.). I have my MBP open on a laptop arm from Ergotron, and then my primary monitor is a 30" Dell. Really love the big monitor. I do my main work o the 30", and then the laptop screen has TweetDeck, iChat, Things, some Fluid apps, and other things that I tend to more glance at, and aren't primary work items.

Further, I use a wireless Apple keyboard, and like John, I just love this thing. I can't tell you how long I'd been looking for a keyboard that was just a keyboard (but with arrow keys). I hate normal keyboards that take up so much extra space on the right side (my mouse side) with stuff I rarely use - which only exacerbates problems with having my arm/elbow canitlevered further out to use the mouse, sometimes causing arm strain after long days of coding. I use Logitech MX Revolution cordless mouse, which I like quite a lot.

Transitioning to music... I use JBL Creature speakers, and listen to a variety of things, or nothing. Pandora, via a Fluid app, iTunes (my own playlists, or various Ambient "radio" stations), etc. Either that, or we have a whole-house NuVo Concerto audio system, so sometimes I have that on either with XM satellite radio, or to a playlist from the iPod we have hooked into it. The NuVo setup is nice because it fills my office with sound a bit better (via in-ceiling speakers), but I have more variety via the computer.

As with Alex and John, I am absolutely in love with my iPhone 3G. It is even better than expected. It has essentially replaced my 80GB iPod in the car, typically because it's more up to date, and I like it's UI better; I can remotely work on servers if I have to via iSSH, play games if I'm bored, use InstaPaper to read things I've set for reading later, sync with Address Book and iCal, and of course Twitter, via Tweetie. So, yes, I use Apple's Address Book and iCal, for great sync, simplicity, etc.

Ok, onto dev stuff. My primary work is on Rails-based web-apps, although I dabble with other things as well. DealBase is my day job, and I'm also involved with Bring Light.

Yet again, like Alex and John, I spend the bulk of my time in TextMate, iTerm (a better Terminal, IMHO), and Safari. And actually, I do my development testing in nightly builds of WebKit/Safari, and all my other browsing in standard Safari. I do pull up Firefox for testing, and to use YSlow and sometimes Firebug (although I've been finding the dev tools in WebKit nightlies work well). I've used Emacs - did so for about a year when working with Linux as my desktop. I ditched it back then in favor of Visual SlickEdit, but these days TextMate just rules. I don't get the Emacs passion - why do you want to press two keys for everything, especially the most common things? Yes, I know, you can setup different bindings, etc., but come on the most basic things like saving, opening, copy, paste, etc. should be "single" key (and by single I mean some meta+key) strokes by default. I do fire up vi all the time at the command line on remote servers, and even occasionally on my MBP for some real quick edit. Also, I spend the bulk of my day in my text editor, so yes, appearance matters, and TextMate kills others. I've also used a lot of IDE's in the past, from IDEA, to Eclipse, to Visual Studio. Visual Studio is actually quite good if you have to suffer in that world, but I find Eclipse just plain crappy. IDEA was great for Java, and their Ruby setup will be something to keep an eye on, but generally, the setup I have now works well.

I have all my code for nearly everything I do (e.g. both private and open source/public) on GitHub, and truly love it. Git has been a huge win, and gives me the best of, as well as improving SVN and Perforce. I'm using GitX for most of my commits and history browsing these days.

I use RSpactor for continuously running our RSpec suite, and we also use RSpec stories (but haven't converted to Cucumber yet). I recently added speech output to RSpactor, and that is my preferred notification instead of Growl. We use Pivotal Tracker for tasks/stories/features as well as bug tracking. We used to use Lighthouse, but having it all in one place was nicer, and Tracker wins big time in my opinion. If you want GitHub post-receive hook for Tracker, I recently whipped that up, and its been a real nice addition. We too use Hoptoad for exception notification, and really like it. Also, New Relic is in use at DealBase. I also like viewing Google Analytics with Analytics Reporting Suite, a slick AIR app.

I really like Navicat as a GUI for database stuff. It's proprietary/pay software, but honestly, it's worth it to me. I can do all this stuff command line fine, but the GUI simply makes it a heck of a lot faster to view the results, quickly re-sort on a column, mess around with queries, etc. Also, it has great SSH support, so I can tunnel into all my server's DB's with ease.

I have CruiseControl.rb setups for all my Rails apps, and make use of CCMenu for a nice little status menu item showing me what's going on with those.

I pretty much can't live without LaunchBar. Same goes for 1Password.

Skitch is quite handy for showing sharing and annotating screen shots, and we use Google Docs and Gmail. Speaking of email, I am a huge fan of Mailplane, which is a Mac app for Gmail. Integration is superb, and I can quickly switch around my 15 or so Gmail accounts with ease. I find it superior to a Fluid app for Gmail, since the integration is better and it handles multiple accounts.

I host most of my own web apps on Slicehost, and DealBase is at EngineYard.

I also use Backpack some, although not nearly as much as I used to, and access it about 99% of the time via Packrat. MarsEdit is my blog authoring tool of choice. NetNewsWire is my RSS reader.

All of my photography and photo processing, etc. are done in Adobe Lightroom. I use the Flickr plugin for it as well.

Various other bits:

• TextPander


• WeatherDock


• Pukka


• Flickr


• Del.icio.us


• xScope - a great screen ruler app


• Photoshop CS3 (look for my name in the about box too :)


• JungleDisk - I do some backups with this


• SuperDuper! Still my favorite backup, although I use TimeMachine too


• CSS Edit and XyleScope sometimes


• Last.fm - is running all the time, but I really don't actually make use of it, kinda silly.


• Acrobat Pro and Reader


• XCode (or TextMate) if I'm working on an Objective-C/Cocoa app.


• iStat menus


• YouControl Tunes

p.s. One other bit I can't live without but really isn't computing hardware/software, is my espresso setup. I use an Expobar Brewtus II machine, Macap MC4 stepless doserless grinder and a variety of cups (mostly Nuova Pointe and Illy). I use only totally fresh beans from a variety of places (favorites include Blue Bottle, Ecco Caffe, PT's, 49th Parallel (unfortunately not often, since shipping from Canada makes it a bit cost prohibitive), etc.). Coffelab tamper and Bumper stand and knock box. My espresso bar is kept clean (unlike my desk). The pictures are a bit older, so don't show bottomless portafilter in use these days.

Whew, that's more than plenty. What's your setup?

RE: Ruby + Apache = Internal Server Error

The Missing Months, Restored

Links for 2009-01-05 [del.icio.us]

• MichaelCrichton.com | How To Fight
  Actually, everybody knows this rule, deep down. You’ll notice that when an issue is really important to somebody, they control themselves. They only let fly when it doesn’t matter that much.

Links for 2009-01-05 [del.icio.us]

• 一个图片管理网站LAMP环境搭建 - kakapo's nest - My Technical Knowledge Management System

Links for 2009-01-05 [del.icio.us]

• Wrapping a Method in Ruby
• GemPlugins: A Brief Introduction to the Future of Rails Plugins

Links for 2009-01-05 [del.icio.us]

• buchstabenmuseum.de

Rails module include way

Free Speech, Free Minds, Free Markets

Fun With Flickr Contacts

One of the fun things about the API I created with the Fleakr gem is that many of the chained associations available were provided "for free." For example, you can find the contacts for a user:

Fleakr.api_key = 'sekrit'

user = Fleakr.user('teamviget')

puts user.contacts.map(&:username)
  # =>  ["benscofield", "Brian Landau", "Brian Williams", "carolynhack", ...
  #       "ryanmoede", "Samanthatoy", "stephay22", "The Mindinator", "whafro"]

puts user.contacts.length          # => 21
puts user.contacts.first.name      # => "Ben Scofield"
puts user.contacts.last.name       # => "M. Jackson Wilkinson"
puts user.contacts.last.location   # => "Washington, DC, USA"

Not really that earth-shattering. But since a "contact" is really an instance of the User class, I can chain the calls to do some strange and useless things:

puts user.contacts.last.contacts.length # => 70
puts user.contacts.last.contacts.first.sets.last.photos.first.url
  # => "http://www.flickr.com/photos/aarongustafson/55410766/"    

There are other attributes available for your contacts as well:

# Attributes available from the API
puts user.class.attributes.map(&:name)
  # => [:id, :username, :name, :location, :photos_url, :profile_url,
  #     :photos_count, :icon_server, :icon_farm, :pro, :admin]

# Additional attributes
puts user.pro?      # => true
puts user.admin?    # => false
puts user.icon_url
  # => "http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1018/buddyicons/11166619@N03.jpg"

And associations:

puts user.photos.map(&:title)[0..1]
  # => ["VigeTurf Loves Boston!", "Turf in Central Cali"]

puts user.groups.map(&:name)[0..1]
  # => ["Refresh DC", "Happy at work"]

puts user.sets.map(&:title)[0..1]
  # => ["Viget South Holiday Dinner 2008", "VigeTurf Shots"]

Use your powers for good, and beware the random strange images.

Let’s try again: Castalia 2008.4.2

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Tweets from this day in history… or maybe just today: 2009-01-05