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’ve been flirting around with this idea for a while without actually taking some action, and a recent set of blog posts 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.

It’s not an easy task though. It requires discipline, because you can be told what to do and still do nothing, but in that case you have no excuse. This way, you’re at least more conscious that you need to take some responsibility for your life, that you can’t get always away with blaming everything on external conditions out of your control.

By the way, the two blogs I mention are Freestyle Mind and Michael Hyatt‘s personal blog. Not all of what they post is about this subject, and I do not agree with all of what they post about it, but they are great for a start, so I’ll be playing around with some of the ideas and adapt them to my own environment.

Do you know any other useful blogs or sources of information that can help me and others in changing habits, being more productive, being a doer instead of just a planner?

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.

Get Readability Redux

Proxy Switchy!

This one I couldn’t live without. It’s pretty much the equivalent of FoxyProxy on Firefox, if you ever used that. It allows you to define several proxy configurations for you to switch to, and you can also create rules so that different specific web-sites that you define are automatically routed through certain proxies all the time, without you having to remember switching. For an active Tor user like me, this one is very handy.

Get Proxy Switchy

Twitter share this page

Tweetie for Mac is great. It helps you keep informed of tweets from those you follow, and you can tweet yourself as well. But when you’re on Chrome reading a web page that you feel you ought to share with the world, it’s simpler to use this extension instead. Otherwise you would need to manually copy and paste the URL and then type your message.

With ‘Twitter share this page’ you just press a twitter icon on the right side of the address bar and voilá! Chrome opens Twitter in another tab with your message ready to be sent, or to be customized first if you wish. It automatically uses the web page title as a message along with the URL already shortened if needed.

Get Twitter share this page

XML Tree

Ever tried to load a XML document in Chrome? It simply shows the text without all the node tags and structure of the XML. This extension fixes this odd behavior, showing the XML tree structure. It says it allows you to collapse and expand nodes, but that doesn’t work for me, perhaps because I am using Chrome 6 from the Dev channel.

An XML Document being shown as a structured tree of nodes

For a developer like myself this one is a must. I always wondered why this was not a core feature of the browser itself, like it is in Firefox. Even for uneducated users who know nothing about XML, the structured presentation will almost always be more friendly and comprehensible than the default soup of text.

Get XML Tree

Docs PDF/PowerPoint Viewer

I have a couple of other extensions from Google itself, but this one is the most useful. Every time you click a PDF, Word or PowerPoint document on the web, it’ll show a preview using Google Docs’ interface, from which you’ll be able to download the document if you wish.

An online PDF file being shown in the Google Docs viewer

Before this, my downloads folder was always full of lots of documents that I once opened just to take a short look and discard. Now I can have a glimpse of what I clicked on, before I decide if I want to keep it.

Get Docs PDF/PowerPoint Viewer

Other extensions I use

Besides this featured five extensions above, there are a few more I use occasionally.

Also, take a look at this list of recommended extensions, from Google itself!

But not everything is perfect…

I am yet to find a youtube downloader extension that actually works. I’ve tried a few with no success. Currently I have to resort to Safari 5 which just recently got extensions support and there’s a pretty good one for this purpose. Besides that, there’s nothing left that I need and haven’t found.

Have something to share about this? What extensions do you find useful? Is there some feature you need for which there’s no suitable extension yet?

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.

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.

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.

It turns out that git offers three mechanisms to specify which files to ignore. Most people know about the .gitignore files inside the working tree. But if you take a look at the gitignore documentation you’ll find out that there’s a second file to specify ignore patterns that are specific to a given user’s work-flow, but that shouldn’t be cluttering the .gitignore files inside the repo, which are normally also versioned by git and thus shared by all the developers working in the project. Patterns like these should go in the $GIT_DIR/info/exclude file, where $GIT_DIR usually refers to the .git/ directory inside your working tree.

Nobody cares what’s your favorite editor and you shouldn’t be cluttering the ignore files versioned inside the repo with the patterns of the files generated by your working environment. That way your buddies on a Mac won’t laugh at you when they notice you are stuck with Netbeans because you’re on Linux, or that you are geeky enough to use Emacs or Vim instead of the sexy TextMate.

But wait. We still have to repeat all those pesky private ignore patterns in every different project, when we should be able to tell git globally about the garbage we normally want to ignore. DRY anybody?

You’re right. That sounds very stupid. We are programmers after all. We’re supposed to be clever and lazy. So is the guy who invented all this git thing. It turns out that you can specify a global .gitignore file via git-config.

git-config --global core.excludesfile /Users/ernesto/.gitignore

The file doesn’t have to be named .gitignore and it doesn’t have to be in your home directory. The core.excludesfile configuration directive is there precisely so that you can put this global ignore file anywhere you want. Also, beware of using ~/ to specify that the file is in your home directory. The documentation says that it works and expands it to the value of the $HOME environment variable, but it doesn’t work in my Mac.

So now you can go and edit that file and put the things that bother you privately. Mine for instance is something like this.

.DS_Store
.svn
*~
*.[oa]
*.kpf
nbproject
Thumbs.db

Google Chrome running on Leopard

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.

But just as about anything that’s new, Chrome for the Mac and Linux has several shortcomings compared to its Windows version that most people are accustomed to. The Apple Blog notes a few of these issues, at least those that affect Mac users, which are probably the same features not present yet in the Linux version as well. The most striking absence, at least for me, is Gears, of which I have become extremely dependent since Gmail offline appeared. This one even comes as a great negative surprise, since Chrome is the only browser that comes with Gears bundled, and being both (Gears and Chrome) from the same provider, I kind of assumed that they were inseparable

Not everything is bad news though. Google Chrome for both platforms integrates itself very well, or so they say. At least for the Mac I can confirm it. Google Chrome feels more like a Mac app than Opera does, which is kind of surprising if you take into account that Opera has been around for the Mac since, well, forever, I guess. And according to the official announcement in Google Chrome’s blog post about this beta release, Chrome seems to blend just well with a variety of GTK themes.

I really hope that this browser and the open source project behind it continue to improve. This news today is indeed a big step, and I’m sure those differences in feature sets will become smaller with time. I also hope that projects similar to the Iron alternative appear for other platforms too. Its open source nature makes it possible for this to come true.

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.