Every Rails programmer out there should have heard about Railscasts. It’s a great blog that every monday posts a new short screencast about some topic related to Ruby on Rails programming. It can be about features of the upcoming or just released new version of Rails, about how to integrate other services and softwares with Rails, about hot plugins and gems that can be really useful, or anything related that you can think of. It’s been running for over three years and keeps its content amazingly up to date. The credits go for Ryan Bates.
But you probably haven’t heard of ASCIIcasts, which is a text version of the original blog, including a transcript of Ryan’s voice from the original video, along with key code samples and screenshots of the main features explained. Think of it as a textual equivalent of the screencast. It can serve various purposes, including being search friendly (you can make a full text search on Ryan’s spoken words), but also for people like me with a slow connection, it can help me have a glimpse of any episode before actually downloading it, maybe even sparing me the effort and bandwidth. If any of these or other reasons are good for you, or even for the sake of it, take a look as ASCIIcasts. You’ll love it almost as much as the original.
I desperately need a change of habits in my life. I need to better manage my time and be able to make the most out of it for all the projects that I have been undertaking in the last few months. Currently it’s a mess.
I’ve been flirting around with this idea for a while without actually taking some action, and a recentsetofblogposts about these subjects have prompted me to start doing something about it. These and other posts, mostly from a couple of blogs I started reading not so long ago, are giving me ideas on how to break the inertia and start doing instead of just thinking and planning. They’ve shown me some of the obstacles in my way, mostly related to things you can change, instead of things that are out of our control. I spend a lot of time blaming my stagnation on external conditions, when there are lots of things under my own control that I can start changing to be more productive, things like the Internet and e-mail habits, lack of time scheduling, etc. Continued…
Google Chrome is a great browser, and with extensions it gets even better. Here are five extensions I love, and that might be helpful for others too.
Readability Redux
This one takes an article or blog post page and presents it in a reading-friendly format, leaving out all the clutter (sidebars, navigation menus, etc.) and also with a customized font and text styling that makes it more suitable for reading and printing.
A blog post shown in readability mode
I was envy when Safari 5 went out with this as a core feature, so much that I actually considered switching now that Safari has got extensions too. I detest to read articles and blog posts with all the clutter of the page. Particularly when you intend to print the article for further reading, not always web sites provide a good printed alternative, if they provide one at all. Continued…
Two great icons of cinema and music get merged in this wonderful interpretation of The Godfather theme by Slash, the emblematic guitar of the original Guns n’ Roses. I just enjoyed every piece of it, and I wanted to share it with you.
There’s this great tool for browsing and searching the Rails API. Give it a try at http://railsapi.com
It allows you to select what version of Rails (and Ruby) to browse, and the most awesome part is that you can download a compressed package to browse it offline locally in your own computer. It includes Rails 3 beta and Ruby 1.9.x as well.
Most people are going crazy these days talking about the most recent gadget announced by Apple. They’ve seen the video, they went to the announcement conference, they are wondering when will they get one in their hands. They simply can’t wait.
Meanwhile I am enjoying a similar experience. Somebody noticed out there that there are many of us with an iPad already (kind of). The iPad nano has been around for a couple of years now but with another name. And I recently got one and I am delighted with it. Why going crazy about the new one when you can have the nano version which fits in your pocket, has a camera and makes phone calls too!
iPad nano
Now seriously, after using the iPhone for some days I understand why people are crazy to experiment with its big but younger brother. Touch screens are seriously redefining how we interact with computers and from a developer standpoint it’s amazing the whole new set of possibilities that arise. And it’s not only touch screens and multi-touch, but also the ability to make a program adapt to different orientations of the device, to be able to access hardware services like a compass, accelerometer, GPS, etc.
I’ve tried. I swear that I tried. But I can’t make Safari my main browser. It’s the simple things that keep me from liking it. But most of the time simple things can (and do) make the difference.
There’s no way to make it open links by default in new tabs in the background. And no, I do not want to be doing ⌘-click to achieve this. And I do hate browsers opening new windows unless specifically told. Tabbed browsing was invented long ago and most browsers do it fine (read Opera, Firefox and Chrome). At the very least they give you enough options for you to control how you want it to behave. Safari gives some options, but they’re not enough. I know this is Apple’s way of doing things, and most of the time they get it right, but in this case their lack of options and their selection of defaults is not good for me.
And finally, to make things even worse, I cannot see the URL of a link when I hover it. I do not need Safari to have a permanent status bar. It could adopt Google Chrome’s way to do this, which is to show a small tooltip in the place where the status bar would be, but only for the time I am hovering the link.
Google Chrome would be the right choice, and I do use it a lot, but why on Earth does it lack Gears? How is it that Google supports its plugin on Firefox and Safari but not on their own browser??!! I cannot live without Gmail Offline, so that’s why I haven’t been able to dump Firefox completely.
I always wondered why Rails developers on the Mac keep adding those .DS_Store files into the .gitignore file of their project repo. It just doesn’t feel right. When I cloned some of these repos in ubuntu I always wondered what the held that file has to do with me. I also felt bad every time I added my nbproject folders and *.kpf files to my .gitignore list back in the days when I used Netbeans and Komodo to program in Rails. People interested in my projects need not be seeing this when they clone my code. Continued…
I received with great joy today the news that Google’s web browser, Google Chrome, has been officially released for Mac (and Linux), even if it is still tagged as beta.
Since its first appearance in the web browsers scene more than a year ago, Google Chrome has been a source of innovation the area, with isolated processes per tabs, a revolutionary javascript engine, and the great news that its source code would be freely available as open source.
Sure that many were worried by its controversial privacy-violation practices, but the openness of its source code will always allow anyone with the know-how to modify it to their own needs, and that of the worried ones (me included to some extent, I’ll give you that). Indeed there’s a project called Iron which offers precisely that: Google Chrome for the privacy fanatics. Continued…
If you are a programmer and you already know something about git, mercurial, bazaar or some other modern distributed version control system, you should give AMP a try. And no, it is not a VCS in the most strict sense of the concept, but a meta-tool for VCS ease of use.
Currently it works as a Ruby interface to Mercurial, but they are aiming high. According to their own definition, “[their] goal is to produce a piece of software that lets you forget that you’re working on git project one moment and a Mercurial project the next.” A sort of meta-interface for most modern distributed VCS’s out there, so that you can use them all with the same set of commands, or maybe even interact between different VCS’s. Although I haven’t had the time yet to truly play with it, It appears to be highly customizable.
BTW, they also mention svn and cvs as VCS’s they want to support, but I can’t see why to drain out resources into these dinosaurs. I still don’t get why people still use centralized-only VCS’s if they have the choice of distributed version control. But anyway, I wish them good luck with the project overall, and I will sure keep an eye on it for a while.
