December 2011
1 post
1 tag
Running a Rails app in production using rbenv,...
Recently, I upgraded NZ Walks Info to Rails 3 and Ruby 1.9.3. In order to run this new setup successfully, I needed to upgrade the Ruby version on the server. I chose ruby-build and the rbenv Ruby Version Manager to do so and would like to share some simple instructions that worked for me.
The Setup
I am running the site on a Linode server running Ubuntu Linux 10.04. Here’s the software...
April 2011
1 post
1 tag
Pow and Rails 2.3.x apps
Pow has just been released by 37signals:
Knock Out Rails & Rack Apps Like a Superhero.
Pow is a zero-config Rack server for Mac OS X. Have it serving your apps locally in under a minute.
Usually, there’s no configuration needed at all, but in order to get my old Rails 2.3.x apps running, I needed to “rackup” all of these. Following the Rails Guides instructions, I...
March 2011
1 post
3 tags
One month after the Christchurch earthquake
We have been lucky. We weren’t in Christchurch when the 6.3 earthquake hit just before 1pm on Tuesday, Feb. 22nd 2011. We were hiking through the mountains near Glenorchy/Queenstown (approx. 400km away to the south-west).
A hut warden was present on this track and he told us on Wednesday morning what has happened. He also offered us to make one call via radio (there’s no cell-phone...
January 2011
7 posts
“The best software should be understated and unobtrusive.”
– Programming is not a craft « DanNorth.net
An absolute must-read!
(via Instapaper)
“[Birds] are not all smart - there are too many species and variations for that -...”
– Alex Vlack in the epilogue to Andrew Zuckerman’s “Bird”
1 tag
Feature Branches
When I am creating a new feature for an app, I sometimes realize halfway through that the way I am building it, is not the proper way to do so. Or the specification changes. Or there was a misunderstanding. Or there’s an unexpected bug that needs to be fixed and go onto the production server as soon as possible.
Then, when you did all development on the main branch (we use Git, so...
“For example, the word “Google” is usually the top query at other...”
– Mental Models (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
Have you ever asked yourself this question? Have you ever given computer support via phone? Have you ever wondered why “normal” people do not understand the simplest most obvious things when it comes to software? I know I did!
This...
Maniacal Rage: Time for a Change →
maniacalrage:
Here’s the frustrating thing about Tumblr: If you ignore all the downtime, errors, server outages and all that annoying stuff, which took sites down for nearly two full days recently and still continues to crop up regularly—if you somehow ignore all of that—simple things still don’t work properly, like the queue.
Sad but true. I have the same problems with the queue. It’s...
“My practice is rooted in minimalism. If someone’s really trying to get something...”
– One on One: Andrew Zuckerman (via Instapaper)
December 2010
4 posts
1 tag
Pinboard →
onethingwell:
Yahoo! are shutting down del.icio.us, ending their careless stewardship of a once-great service.
If you’re still using the bookmarking service, I recommend jumping ship to Pinboard. It will happily import all your del.icio.us bookmarks, and works very much like del.icio.us used to, minus the social aspects.
That’s exactly what I am going to do. I was never really happy...
Can you make Govt data creative? - Nightline -... →
Mix and Mash winner entries. On TV. :-)
1 tag
Mix & Mash Recap
I couldn’t believe my eyes when the winners of the 2010 Mix and Mash competition were announced last Friday on Twitter. I read my name for the price of the “Best Visitor Experience using DOC Data” and the “Supreme Mashup” categories (the “Supreme Mashup” is the highest price).
This is more than I have hoped for and a great honour.
The Mix and Mash...
1 tag
Watch“Why Ruby?” - RubyConf X Keynote (by David Heinemeier Hansson)
Great talk. Good points and entertaining.
November 2010
6 posts
1 tag
“I believe:
The user interface should drive design decisions because it’s...”
– Ryan Singer - Software and User Interface Design
Spot-on!
2 tags
Marco.org: My Default.png dilemma →
More inspiring Instapaper development insights…
2 tags
Instapaper Blog: Instapaper 2.3 for iPhone and... →
Great update for one of my favorite iPad apps, including a new feature I have been waiting for (length & progress indicators). But what really strikes me with this update and blog post, is to see how much thought goes into Instapaper’s features and Marco’s attention to detail.
Just look at the section about the new automatic dark mode preference:
You can now have Instapaper...
1 tag
Rails Rumble Recap
During the weekend of October 16th and 18th, I participated in the Rails Rumble 2010 coding competition. The exercise was to build a web app from scratch in 48 hours using Ruby and Rails.
Our team consisted of 3 people: Tim, Falk and myself.
The app we produced: Pianrra - An online keyboard with recording and playback functionality.
It was a rather spontaneous decision to participate....
1 tag
5v3n's opinion on the GF2 →
Sven’s comment and question after giving his opinion to my GF2 quote post:
And: you need a comment system, Daniel ;-)! Reblogging seems a bit heavy for leaving comments to me.
Doesn’t toto with karakuri look tempting to you?
toto and karakuri do look interesting but not really tempting at the moment. It’s just gives me more stuff to fiddle around with. While I like that, it...
1 tag
“My dream camera is something whittled down to the essence of an M9, but in a...”
– Initial thoughts on the GF2 announcement — Satellite — Craig Mod
That’s pretty much what I am after as well. I think a Leica M9 is an incredible sexy and capable camera (without ever having used one) and the only full-frame camera I’d be interested in. But financially it’s just...
October 2010
4 posts
1 tag
Divide Your Attention – Say No To Others, Say No... →
minimalmac:
The only way I can focus on my craft and my art is if I don’t constantly dilute it.
Lots to learn from in this excellent post from Randy Murray about the importance of saying “no”: This has been a hard lesson for me to learn (and I’m still learning). More often than not, it is the most compassionate answer one can give. Remembering this bit helps:
The key to saying no...
Dan Benjamin interviewed [Marco Arment] on The... →
marco:
I’m honored to be a guest on one of my favorite podcasts, produced and hosted by the incredibly professional Dan Benjamin.
40 minutes of interesting, insightful talk. Highly recommended!
1 tag
September 2010
6 posts
1 tag
Show the version number of your Rails app using...
I use Git tags to manage the version numbers of my Rails apps. Every time a new version is ready, I tag the current commit like this1:
git tag -a v2.3 -m "adding version tag v2.3"
My environment.rb file defines a constant to hold this information (in this case “v2.3”):
APP_VERSION = `git describe --always` unless defined? APP_VERSION
This constant simply contains the output of...
New Twitter has Gist Support!
thechangelog:
This is just too awesome.
/via Yehuda Katz
Instapaper Blog: Article limit calculation fix →
instapaper:
Prior to last week, the limit was improperly calculated: articles in folders weren’t being counted. I fixed the bug so that up to 250 articles were downloaded from the Read Later folder, and the other folders were downloaded in order, as long as there were any slots left, until it hit 250.
And then I got a deluge of email.
My email was one of them.
Great to see an explanation...
1 tag
Ruby/ProgressBar: A Text Progress Bar Library for... →
This nice little Ruby library/gem/plugin is a great helper when you need to execute long running tasks from the terminal.
As the name suggests, it displays the progress of the task and even gives you an ETA for when it thinks it will be done.
Check their examples:
% irb --simple-prompt -r progressbar
>> pbar = ProgressBar.new("test", 100)
=> (ProgressBar: 0/100)
>> 100.times...
“[…] if you like to shoot RAW and you’re only interested in some casual...”
– Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF1 In Depth Review | neutralday
Sounds great to me!
“These little cameras are the future of digital. Big SLRs will still stick around...”
– Ken Rockwell in his PMA 2010 Report
August 2010
2 posts
Installing the heroku gem
I had some problems installing the heroku gem on Leopard:
$ sudo gem install heroku
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
ERROR: Error installing heroku:
heroku requires json_pure (>= 1.2.0, < 1.5.0, runtime)
So I tried to install the json_pure gem first (sudo gem install json_pure), but this always seemed to install/update the json gem instead of the json_pure...
July 2010
3 posts
Browse your Git Repository locally! Way Cool!
webvampire:
cd [your git repo]
git instaweb --httpd webrick
Watching a lighting talk of the Mountain West Ruby Conf, and this guy walked up and demoed this one command!
git instaweb --httpd webrick
automatically launch a web server and browser to your get repository!
Way Cool!
Source
Pretty cool indeed!
June 2010
1 post
May 2010
22 posts
“Try to avoid burdening your users with choices on how to perform an action....”
– How To Critique An Interface « Aza on Design
Efficiently Rendering CSS →
So we know that ID’s are the most efficient selectors. If you wanted to make the most efficiently rendering page possible, you would literally give every single element on the page a unique ID, then apply styling with single ID selectors. That would be super fast, and also super ridiculous. It would probably be extremely non-semantic and extremely difficult to maintain. You don’t see this...
Children Of Men: Extended Takes
I learned about ‘Extended Takes’ a while ago, and yesterday I watched one movie from the list ‘20 Greatest Extended Takes In Movie History’: Children of Men.
This movie contains a lot of these long scenes without cut. Two of those immediately got my attention. But first, here’s some context on what the movie is about:
Set in the United Kingdom of 2027, the film...
nikf.org: An Observation →
I’m all for pointing out the iPhones flaws: it may be polished, but we’d all agree it has some. But to sting it in reviews based on the promise that a third-party will ship a media plugin at a yet-to-be-determined date, seems petty. […]
I guess judging a device based on actual features and user experience, instead of its ‘inability to run a hypothetical, hither-to-unseen media plugin’,...
Duncan's Journal: Android VM Performance is not a... →
A faster VM will certainly help things out. But Android’s eventual fate will have little to do with how fast the VM is or how long method dispatches take on the iPhone. Instead, it’ll have to do with harder things like user experience, service plans, interoperability, and excellent applications.
A lot of developers - and tech folks in general - seem to be so obsessed with benchmarks and raw,...
Watchfiltercake:
Pictured Fences 1 by Mntl Gassi (via rebel:art)
Incredible!
Watch5v3n:
filtercake:
“A nine-minute history of corporatism.”
Life Inc. The Movie (by Douglas Rushkoff)
OK, so “digital renaissance” was a bad catchphrase for my recent post. Apart from that sad insight - great thoughts on taylorism / scientific management & the resulting social disconnection.
5v3n.com: A Digital Renaissance? →
Is programming our era’s equivalent of literacy?
“Do me a favor, will you? Stop giving me the run around just like the rest of the...”
–
From the saddest email I’ve received today.
It’s from an Internet Explorer user, frustrated that he couldn’t get Instapaper’s “Read Later” bookmarklet installed. (It’s incredibly clunky to do in IE, because IE doesn’t support the troops, poisons your children, and gives you cancer.)
...