After much fussing around I’ve finally got the 3d barcode reader on my phone to work. Horray for the technology of the future!
3D barcodes – the way of the future?
March 17th, 200830 million fine for illegal hamster possession
March 15th, 2008On a slightly different note I’ve just read that the Vietnamese authorities have announced a ban on Hamsters. Anyone caught in possession of a hamster will now face a 30 Million Dong fine, around £940.
Hamsters have recently become popular in Vietnam due to a combination of factors including rising incomes and the Chinese year of the Rat. Illegal hamsters have been flooding into Vietnam from nearby China and the government is worried that many of them may harbour Rabies.
30 Million Dong is roughly double the average Vietnamese annual income.
SFTP Drive – mapping a remote drive to a drive letter over SFTP
March 13th, 2008I’ve just bought a licence key for SFTP Drive. This remarkably lovely bit of stuff lets me map remote drives on my server to a local drive letter. It just show up as a drive and I can open and edit files as though they were on my local machine, no more drag and drop or monkeying around with vi, not that I have anything agains vi.
Download SFTP Drive from here. You get a six week free trial and the licence is $40, around £20.
Ajax loading spinners
March 3rd, 2008Again, a big big thank you to the people at AjaxLoad.info for the ajax loading graphic generator. I remember the first time I built one of these it took me almost a day of hacking the Gimp. Now I can make a really nice one in around 20 seconds.
JEdit killer, Textmate for Windows?
February 28th, 2008I’ve been a JEdit user for many years now, building everything from html flatfiles to full rails apps in it, I’ve even contributed. I still love it but I think I may have found something better. E editor has most of the functions I loved about JEdit and a whole load more.
One of the things I use all the time on JEdit is the ability to type in multiple places at once by selecting an area while holding down ctrl. It’s an absolute wonder when editing repetetive chunks of texts, tables, etc. E has this feature, but it’s better! If I hold alt I can select rectangular text regions as in jedit and with ctrl I can select non-contiguous regions. If I select a region off the end of the line E doesn’t blindly insert spaces but rather adds the typing region to the end of the line, just as I always wished JEdit would do. I can type in a dozen places at once.
The project viewer is lovely. Like Textmate I just drag in a folder and up it comes. It also saves recent projects so I can go back to them easily, and because it’s integrated with the windows explorer I never need to press f5 when rails creates a new file.
Home and end keys work correctly. A single press of home takes me back to the start of the line after indentation which is where I generally want to be. textmate fails at this which is one of the reasons I never quite got along with it. Double tapping home takes me to the actual start of the line before leading spaces for the rare occasions when I actually wanted to go there.
Switching indentation types is easy, it’s right there on the status bar and accessible with a single click. This may not seem important bu if you’re ever stuck trying to edit someone’s code from a CVS or subversion repository and they’ve used non-standard indentation this can save about a million conflicts.
Speaking of subversion (SVN), the project viewer integrates with windows explorer which means of course that it also integrates perfectly with Tortoise SVN, the absolute best SVN client available for any operating system. You get all the little icons and all the right click magic right there in the project pane.
Panel splitting is supported, it’s not quite as quick as jedit but it’s almost as flexible. You can tear off tabs and drag them to the side or bottom of the screen to split horrizontally or vertically. Like JEdit there’s no limit to the mumber of times you can do this so you can make your workspace as flexible as you like.
Keyboard shortcuts – this goes without saying – are all there.
Best of all it comes with full support for Textmate bundles. The author, Alexander Stigsen is friends with the Textmate team and has made a deal with them to support Textmate features. Code just comes popping out of this thing like there’s no tomorrow. The only small downside is that its not free, but really for around £15 I’m certainly not complaining. Software as great as this deserves to be paid for.
If you’re interested download te 30 day trial from here http://www.e-texteditor.com/
Links of the Week
February 27th, 2008Integrity, technology and only having things on my desk that make me happy
February 18th, 2008Integrity is, or should be a crucial part of what we do here at Heavenly Media. To me it’s about keeping promises, getting things done on time and doing what we say we will. When we have integrity we all feel better about what we’re doing. In order to have integrity we need to be organised. We need to know what’s expected of us and when we’ll be able to do it by. We also need to be motivated to actually push through the barriers and get it done.
I’m working on a system of short, medium and long term goal setting. Currently I’m thinking spreadsheets, on for each project and one overriding one for deadlines. The other alternative would be to use an intranet. As we get bigger this would be useful. I don’t want it to become a barrier to productivity though as the Runtime intranet was. There should be no hours logging and no tickets with long documentation trails, just task with subtasks and sub-subtasks. Then we will have a clear idea of what needs to be done and how much work is left to do on each project and will be able to give realistic deadlines.
The other part is about motivation. I think this about a combination of things. Partly it’s about showing willing. Coming to work on time, every day. It’s also about things like keeping my desk clean. I’m working on only having things on my desk that make me happy. It’s also about keeping a clean mind, doing the things that need to get done first and quickly. Eating my Frogs as Graeme would say.
So the plan is to move back into a position of integrity, to take the steps, eat the frogs and always get in on time.
Rails 2.01 vs 1.2, an initial impression
January 23rd, 2008Heavenly’s new Flatpack CMS going to be a Rails 2 project which means I get to play with some new features! There have been quite a few changes to the standard rails way of making applications.
There’s a new rake task: rake db:create:all which generates your databases from your yml file. Slightly easier than using yog or similar to do the same job.
The scaffolding system has also changed. In Rails 1 I would generally generate a model, edit the migration, run it and then generate the scaffold to make the views and controller. This doesn’t work in Rails 2 as the generator stops if the migration already exists, the views are created but the controller is not. I have a feeling this may get changed in future versions. Instead we use the extended version of the scaffold. Typing: ruby script\generate scaffold Page title:string text:text permalink:string now builds the entire page model, views, controller, and migration script in one fell swoop.
The list view is no longer generated by the scaffold. Instead, the index template now does everything the old list template used to. This make a whole lot of sense to me.
Templates now use the erb suffix which initially confused my editor. As far as I can tell, the two file types are functionally the same, in fact rhtml was always erb by another name.
Rather wonderfully Ajax support now comes as standard in scaffolded templates as the respond_to block is now autogenerated. This block lets you respond to requests depending on the http request eader submitted by the client. Tell it to respond to a js request and it’ll deal with it nicely. This makes me extremely happy as Flatpack is heavily ajaxified.
I’ll post further information as I find it.
Optimising for “Ruby on Rails Web Development”
January 23rd, 2008After a lot of detective work and a little heated debate we have decided that the key-phrase of the month is “Ruby on Rails Web Development“.
I have been a little heavy handed in my use of the phrase over the site but then I’m looking for some pretty fast results to test the amount of response we get.
I have updated a number of web directories as well as submitting to Web-Development.com, which looks like it may even prove a good source of traffic in itself, so fingers crossed that we might see a decent increase in leads from our Google Campaign pretty soon!
Next its time to plan an adwords campaign…
Continuing the Ruby series with RMagick
January 18th, 2008I now have a lovely brand new dev box which of course means a whole new Ruby install and another opportunity to work through the various issues that can crop up from time to time. In this article I look at installing RMagick on Windows Vista. RMagick is a Ruby wrapper on the popular Image Magick image manipulation software. It’s slightly more tricky than a standard Gem install but only by a fraction.
We’ve used RMagick on several projects now and found it extremely useful. For example in Apollos Pad the design called for a custom font on the h2 titles which initially left us with a hell of a job as these titles changed every few days. Now these are generated on the fly by the CMS.