Peeja.com - Blog

Barackula. No, really.

2008-03-31T17:40:00Z

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but this thing’s really good. Behold, Barackula: The Musical. Yes, I’m serious. Imagine the musical episode of Buffy. Now make it about Obama. Need I say more?

It’s also a great example for the famous Red Camera.

Suggested listening: Scott Bakula by Sunspot

BarCamp: Twitter in Real Life

2008-03-26T22:15:00Z

Back on the 15th, I had one of he best weekends of my life. I went to BarCampNYC3. BarCamp is so amazingly simple and brilliant–a lot like Twitter in a way.

A whole bunch of people show up for a conference, with nothing planned. They gather around The Grid and sign up for time slots to talk about just about anything: database design, traveling the world, funding a startup, anything. And then they’re off! Look at the Grid, find something interesting, and go engage.

At the core of BarCamp is the Law of Two Feet, which states that if you’re not interested in what’s happening in one place you have the right and the responsibility to use your two feet to go somewhere else. The corollary to that is that if someone leaves while you’re presenting, that’s ok. They’re just doing their duty to the Law of Two Feet.

The atmosphere of BarCamp is electric with potential. Anything could happen. Again, it’s like Twitter: remember when 90% of Twitter chose color teams in 24 hours? You never know what’s going to happen next at BarCamp, but if you want you can be the cause of it.

Thanks to everyone who was a part of BarCampNYC3. I can’t wait for next year, and I hope to see a lot of you before then.

Pictures from Flickr
More media from Technorati

Let's be clear.

2008-02-14T19:20:00Z

From the W3C’s recommendation on Ruby Annotation in Asian character sets:

1. Introduction
This section is informative.

Oh good. I was wondering.

Use RSpec, but beware the bundle

2008-01-30T04:09:00Z

If you haven’t heard of RSpec yet, go check it out. If you write any code in Ruby, you should be testing it with RSpec. It’s a little like Test::Unit written in English. With Test::Unit I was never sure how much to test. RSpec makes it clear to test and clear to read. This is exactly why Ruby rocks.

The RSpec folks have just kicked it up a notch with support for Stories. Specs give you what Rails people would call unit and functional tests: they test individual objects. Stories give you integration tests, which make sure everyone plays nice together. As of yet there’s very little in the way of documentation on the RSpec site, but there’s already a great Peepcode screencast. Check it out, gape in awe, write some stories.

HOWEVER: if you use TextMate, don’t use the RSpec bundle that’s in the repository. It’s old. I spent a good hour trying to patch it up before I had to give up, and then I found a better solution. Turns out the RSpec guys host a TM bundle on RubyForge alongside RSpec itself. Go figure. Grab the latest version from there, and everything should work fine.

What's in that Installer package?

2008-01-27T19:24:00Z

The great thing about Mac applications is that they’re usually dead simple to install: just drag the app to Applications. That’s it. Some things, however, are a little more complex, and need an installer. I don’t know about you, but I’m always a little nervous letting an installer have its way with my system.

That’s why I was happy to discover this little trick. To find out just what that installer’s going to install, just choose File → Show Files. It’s that simple.

Now that's good copy

2008-01-10T16:33:00Z

I mean, how could you not open that?

Changing the Drapes

2008-01-09T23:08:00Z

Phew! I just spent all day upgrading the blog to Mephisto Trunk. The new theme, Fresh, runs on Haml, which I can’t wait to dig around in. I’ve wanted to use Haml for a while now, and its simplicity will make it easier to dart in, make some quick changes, and get out quickly. I’ll be making the theme my own over the next few weeks. Right now I’m just glad it’s running.

If you’d like to use Haml on Mephisto, here’s how you can make it work.

First, you’ll have to upgrade to trunk. To be safe, I set up a fresh trunk installation next to my 0.7.3 installation. To check it out from Subversion, use the following line:

svn co http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/mephisto/trunk/ mephisto-trunk

Now you’ll have a clean installation in mephisto-trunk. Just like I wanted to keep my old working Mephisto around just in case, I wanted to keep its database around too, so I made a duplicate for trunk. Once you use trunk on the database, it won’t want to go back. The easiest way to do this is by exporting the database, creating a new one, and importing into it.

Once you’ve got your trunk database, set up your config/databases.yml. If you followed what I did above, you can just copy over your old one and change which database it should use. Now we can migrate your data to the most recent database schema:

rake db:migrate

Your new clean Mephisto is going to wonder where its themes went, so copy the contents of old-mephisto/themes/site-1 to mephisto-trunk/themes/site-1.

Next, we’re going to freeze to edge rails. Anything post-2.0 will probably do, and if that’s what you have installed on the machine then this might not be necessary. For edge, run:

rake rails:freeze:edge

For Rails 2.0, run:

rake rails:freeze:edge TAG=rel_2-0-0

Now you’ll need Haml. If you haven’t installed the Haml gem, do that. If you can’t install gems because you don’t administrate your server, no problem. This post from Nate Clark will show you how to install gems anyhow. It’s written specifically for DreamHost, but it should hold for any environment where you’re not an admin. Once you’re set to install gems, run

gem install --no-ri haml

Then install Haml in your Mephisto

haml --rails /path/to/mephisto/trunk

Now you’ll need the magic plugin that makes Haml run on Mephisto. From your Mephisto directory, run:

script/plugin install -x http://svn.nanorails.com/plugins/mephisto_haml_templates/

However, the plugin seems to be slightly outdated in terms of both Haml and Rails. It took some wrangling to get it to work, but here’s a patch that should make it good as new. From your Mephisto directory run:

patch -p0 < /path/to/mephisto_haml_templates_fixes.diff

Now just install a Haml-based theme and it should work like a charm. It’s possible that I’ve missed a step, though I think that’s everything. I you try it and have trouble, leave a comment and I’ll try to help.

Productivity Hangover

2008-01-04T20:29:00Z

The holidays have thrown me for an absolute loop. Between being at my parents’ for a week for Christmas (with spotty Internet access) and having friends visit for New Years who we never see because they live in Japan, my productivity systems have been almost completely offline for two weeks. That’s a scary thought.

Now I’ve got what I can only describe as a productivity hangover. I’m sitting next to a full inbox, and it’s 3:30 in the afternoon. I should be doing, but I’m futzing (technical term) because that’s all I’ve been able to do for so long.

Hey, there horsey. Good horsey. Now lemme up again. That’s it.

Artie's MO

2007-12-13T13:51:44Z

Why do Apple customers care so much? Tom Krazit thinks he has the answer.

I think the roots of this zealotry go back to a time when Apple was on the ropes financially and someone who worked on a Mac was ridiculed by other computer users. Ten years ago, Mac users in the corporate world were viewed as rubes playing with “toys” not suitable for getting real work done, and there were plenty of people ready to remind the Mac community in not-so-subtle ways that the revolution promised in the 1980s by the original Macintosh was being fulfilled by Microsoft software.

I’m inclined to agree. The article also talks about Artie MacStrawman, who is arguably the real reason so many people “hate Mac users”.

I think I’ve figured out just how Artie does what he does: confuse PC users into hating Mac users. In mathematical terms, I think some people just don’t have their quantifiers straight. Consider this comment from the TalkBack below Krazit’s article.

Mac users say the same thing over and over and over again. However, none of their comments tend to have any concrete evidence. They talk of severe problems with Microsoft technologies. Why is it then that Microsoft is the most trusted technology company in the world? They’d say that Windows is a rip-off of OSX. All cars have steering wheels, but nobody claims that the invention was theirs.

Notice the missing quantifiers. It sounds like he’s saying “All Mac users say the same thing over and over”, but he might mean “There exist Mac users who say the same thing over and over”. The latter is very likely true. However, the poster has probably convinced himself of the former, or it wouldn’t be worth making the comment. It’s an important distinction.

Chocolate Rain v2.0

2007-12-11T14:32:31Z

Ok, yes, it’s corporate. And it’s “viral”. But it’s still Tay being Tay. And kudos to Dr Pepper for playing this one well.

In Mr. Zonday’s own words: “Dr Pepper decided to make me a music video to celebrate their new Cherry Chocolate beverage! It was a fantastic shoot and I met lots of talented people!”

(Link)

Alouette! (Alouette.)

2007-12-02T01:19:26Z

Jonathan Coulton, one of my musical heroes, has just released a translation of his zombie-rock classic “Re: Your Brains” into French. You can find the result, Re: Vos Cerveaux on his blog.

Ye Olde Podcast

2007-11-20T18:07:00Z

I came across this today while cleaning up some old files. It’s the promo for the second season of my old podcast, Jesus on the Radio (A Show That Has Nothing to Do With Jesus). SarahKat and I have recorded two or three shows since then, but due to technical difficulties we could never get her half and my half together. I’ve been trying to put together a better solution, but no luck yet. Besides, neither of us have had the time to record a show lately anyhow. I do miss it though.

Mondeggcorn

2007-11-14T14:06:00Z

Can you spot the mistake (or interesting evolution of the English language) in this xkcd strip?

Here’s what the Language Log has to say.

It's never to late to not be perfect.

2007-11-13T23:50:00Z

Daniel Jalkut wrote a post back in October that inspired me. The inspiration took some time to really sink in, but finally, it has. Daniel wants you to blog. He wants me to blog, too.

I’ve been telling anybody who will listen, since even before I acquired MarsEdit, that if you want to be a significant member of the Mac developer community, you need to have a blog. In fact, you need a blog even if you’re not a Mac developer. It’s good for your business, it’s good for your social life, and it can even be good for your ego. You don’t have to use MarsEdit to write it, but you need to have one. Case closed.

I think he’s right. And I’ve thought that he was right for over a month now, yet there lay poor Peeja.com, stuck in a hard-to-read theme and untouched since March. (Heck, I’ve moved from kGTD to iGTD to OmniFocus since then.)

Well, that changes now. And in the hopes of keeping this post from being pure blogsterbation, I want to make Daniel’s point again, to you. You have something to say. Start a blog. Use any software. Find a nice, pre-made template. Don’t think about it too much. I’m sure I’ll play with the layout of the site sooner or later, but I’m not going to wait until it’s perfect to post. You don’t have to either.

Daily agendas from Kinkless GTD: kgtd2agendas

2007-03-24T16:51:00Z

Update: Link to script is working now.

I’m a Getting Things Done guy. I use Kinkless GTD as my GTD system, and it works great for me. In this entry, I’m going to share a Ruby script I’ve worked up that makes kGTD work even better for me.

I’m not going to explain GTD or kGTD here. If you don’t know about them, you should go check them out. If you’re not using kGTD, this script’s not a lot of good to you, but it does showcase a nifty trick.

Over the summer, my PowerBook died, and I was left using my fiancée’s iBook (which she graciously allowed me to hoard without complaining more than one or two times; I’m a really lucky guy). Her machine still runs Panther, and kGTD only works on Tiger. So for a while I was forced to create a new system, and I decided to use notecards.

I’d start with a notecard labeled with the date. Then I’d list the things I had to do that day. If I needed to schedule something for a later day, I’d make up that day’s notecard and keep it in a file. At the end of the day I’d roll over anything I missed onto the next day’s card. It wasn’t really GTD because I couldn’t deal with projects and I didn’t account for context, but it worked well enough.

When I got my MacBook Pro and moved back into kGTD, I found I missed having tasks assigned to days. I missed having an agenda I could work my way down. Over time, I began to use (or abuse) the Due Date column for this. It’s really become a “do date” column. Now today’s tasks appear in orange, and tasks I should have done already appear in red. But at this point I still didn’t have an agenda.

So I came up with this Ruby script. It extracts tasks from kGTD and prints out an agenda like this:

Tuesday, March 20, 2007
  [Campus]
    - Read Edgar Snow (reserve).
  [Home]
    - Fold laundry.
    - Purge office.
    - Reconcile receipts.

The trick here is that the script is in Ruby, but it’s using AppleScript behind the scenes. For the full code, you can download the script at the end of the entry. Here’s the gist of it, though: (BTW, the &#8220/1 things are supposed to be quotes; that’s a bug in my blog…)

IO.popen(&#8220;osascript&#8221;, &#8220;r+&#8221;) do |osascript|
  osascript << <<-EOS
    # AppleScript that returns the data as a string
  EOS

  # Let osascript compile and run the script.
  osascript.close_write

  # Ruby code to read from osascript and parse the string

  end
end

That’s it! We open a two-way pipe to the command osascript. Then we feed it a script. We have to close the write side of the pipe or the script won’t compile and run. Once it does, we can get the output and parse it. Again, details in the source.

Now, what good is a command that prints your agenda to the terminal? Enter GeekTool. With this nifty PrefPane you can put the output of any command on your desktop. Voilá: your agenda on your desktop.

Here’s the file. Feel free to modify it and use it for whatever nefarious purposes you desire.