Robby Colvin

My Merb Textmate Bundle

2008-11-17T00:41:03Z

The awesome Dr Nic Williams has a Textmate bundle for Merb that makes development go a bit faster. If you’re used to using Rails in Textmate, you are most likely familiar with the large amount of snippets and commands that are available. Since Merb is still so new, the amount of snippets and commands for Textmate are not as robust as Rails. So I decided to fork Dr Nic’s Github repo and try to help out as much as I can. So far I’ve only added a few validation snippets for Datamapper, but I’m hoping to add much more as I find the time:

http://github.com/geetarista/merb-tmbundle

Please let me know if you have any changes or recommendations for these snippets. Hopefully more people will take a little time to add to Dr Nic’s repo so we can have a nice suite of snippets for making development in Merb even faster.

Merb/Rubygems Upgrade Errors

2008-11-13T22:39:55Z

The Merb team worked very hard to realease Merb 1.0 after several release candidates and it is a wicked framework. Upgrading is pretty easy since all you have to do is install the Merb metapackage. However, several people have been having issues with Rubygems when upgrading to the new version of Merb. If you’re in Leopard, you may get a response saying that Merb requires Rubygems version > 1.3 to work. You may try to upgrade Rubygems, but you get another response saying there is nothing to update. Hmmm….what to do?

Well, the fix is pretty simple. All you have to do is run one line of code (technically it’s two, but this is easier):

sudo gem install rubygems-update && sudo update_rubygems

Then all you have to do is install Merb and everything should work fine:

sudo gem install merb

Now you can play around with the beautifulness that is Merb 1.0!

More Merb at MerbCamp

2008-10-13T21:51:27Z

I spent this weekend in San Diego to attend MerbCamp, a conference dedicated entirely to the Merb framework. I have been so happy with the time I have spent learning Ruby and Rails, but learning more about Merb this weekend literally made me giddy. I started looking at Merb a little while ago, but I didn’t do much with it since it was constantly changing and I did not want to adjust to the overhauls that were occurring. I wanted to wait until it was more stable before I gave it a shot. Since the first release candidate of Merb is almost out, I thought now was the time to get my feet wet.

To me, the most important difference or advantage for Merb so far has been the philosophy. Rails (DHH) is very opinionated, which is great, but it does not allow flexibility when you need to do something that Rails does not support. Merb on the other hand has been built from the ground up with the opinion that the developer should have the freedom to mold the framework to their needs, if necessary. Merb is framework and library agnostic, so wanting or needing to use jQuery or DataMapper for your application isn’t a pain at all. In fact, it’s ideal. There is so much more to Merb that just makes sense to me as a developer.

Although Rails will still be in the picture, I am looking forward to using Merb much more often and maybe even completely replacing Rails some time in the future.

Information Overload

2008-08-25T19:27:42Z

I like to be informed. I like knowing what is happening in the world, especially when it comes to technology. Lately I think I have been receiving just a little too much information, though. My current Google Reader subscription count is 1,141 feeds. From those 1,141 subscriptions, I have read 20,559 items in the last 30 days. I don’t know if Google planned on people having that many descriptions since I can’t even see them all on my subscriptions page:

That black space goes all the way down to the page so I cannot even see any of my subscriptions past this point. My main problem is that whenever I find something that I like on the web, I subscribe to that feed since I’m sure I’ll like whatever they post in the future. Alas, that is not always the case and I become too overwhelmed when I have so many things to read. I love information and I love to read, but this is just going too far.

DreamHost Supports Phusion Passenger

2008-05-21T18:47:42Z

I discussed previously that I switched over to DreamHost for this website and I have been very happy with them so far. Something that made me even happier was their announcement of DreamHost support for Phusion Passenger. This is huge for both Ruby and Rails since DreamHost is a major hosting provider and will provide a cheaper solution to other Rails hosting providers. Using Phusion with DreamHost is super easy and I tried it out just to see how easy it was.

I first started on their Passenger wiki page which gives just a few steps to get a Rails app working. This is literally all I had to do to set up an installation of Typo:

Transfer over my typo folder to my server
Set up a sub-domain with the Passenger option pointing to my typo/public folder
Set up the databases

That was literally all I had to do. Check it out. I will probably try and convert this site over to a Rails blogging system soon.

Styled Browser Tooltips

2008-05-08T20:27:07Z

There are many solutions out there to style cool-looking tooltips using css, javascript, or a mixture of both. Usually people try to go with CSS-only solutions since they degrade nicely and are more accessible. I have seen really nice tooltips that look really nice, but it makes me wonder about something. Most of these implementations use a class on elements that are basically created to act as a tooltip. So why does CSS not have the ability to style specific HTML attributes such as title, alt, etc.? Default title attributes look exactly the same in most browsers and there is obviously a way for browsers to style those attributes. CSS3 adds to the possibilities of creating good looking tooltips, but it still does not offer the ability to style the browser’s own tooltips. I really wonder why since this is so much simpler than most of the hacks out there. Is this something that can be done with Greasemonkey? I understand that most people create their own tooltips for effect, but this type of application could help with design and accessibility as well. Think about a site that uses mostly yellow in its design. A standard title tooltip would obviously be difficult to read.

Could this also open up more possibilities for the rest of the HTML attributes? I know I am raising several questions here, but I do not see why this could be so hard to implement. Maybe there is an obvious answer out there, but I have yet to find it.

Firefox 3 Beta 5 is Beautiful

2008-04-04T19:55:52Z

I have been watching the progress of Firefox 3 and I have been very happy with the results. Since the 5th beta was recently released, I decided that it was time to take the plunge and try it out.

The most important thing that I have been waiting for are improvements in speed and memory use. I use Firefox for almost everything, so it can get pretty heavy when I’ve got 50 tabs open and trying to do so many things. Since switching over to beta 5, everything in Firefox has been so much faster! Usually when I start opening a lot of tabs, Firefox gets real slow and I have to wait before opening the next tab. Now I can just keep opening tabs without any lag whatsoever. Since the JavaScript engine was improved as well, almost every website that I visit has had noticeable speed gains.

I really love everything else about Firefox 3 and I think that it will be a great step for Mozilla. There are so many changes and improvements that I would not even possibly begin talking about them. The only issue I have so far is that half of my plug-ins do not work, but I’ll just have to wait for those plug-in developers to get up to speed. Overall, I think Firefox 3 is going to blow away Internet Explorer even more than it already does.

Upgrade to Wordpress 2.5

2008-03-31T00:06:45Z

Wordpress 2.5 has been out for a little bit now, so I have decided to upgrade. Everything went surprisingly well and I luckily did not run into any problems whatsoever.

I really like the new interface as it seems much cleaner and easier to use. My favorite new feature is the ability to upgrade plug-ins with just one click. After upgrading Wordpress, I realized that I had a ton of plug-ins that were way out of date. Before this I had to download each individual plug-in and manually upgrade it to my Wordpress installation. Not anymore!

Overall, the upgrade went very well and I recommend that anyone that uses Wordpress do the same. Not only is it worth doing so for aesthetic reasons, but for security as well.

I Love Gnome Do

2008-03-25T19:51:55Z

I previously wrote about an alternative to Quicksilver in Linux, but I think I have finally found what I’ve been looking for: Gnome Do. I previously saw Gnome Do when it was in its infancy and haven’t really taken a look at it since then. However, Gnome Do has greatly improved its functionality and consequently many plug-ins have been created. It still has quite a way to go to until it has the full capabilities of Quicksilver, but this beautiful app is definitely on its way.

To install in Ubuntu, just add the following two lines to your sources.list:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/do-core/ubuntu gutsy main

deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/do-core/ubuntu gutsy main

Then just run:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install gnome-do gnome-do-plugins

And you’re set! Just add gnome-do to your session and it will start up every time you log in. To use it, just hit Super (Win) + Space and start searching! Then head over to the plug-ins page to add additional plug-ins that meet your needs.

Google Reader: Slow Starred Items

2008-03-19T19:39:56Z

I really love Google Reader and all of its wonderful features. However, I do have only one small issue that really drives me crazy: slow starred items. No matter if I only have one starred item, Google Reader will sit there “Loading…” for sometimes up to five minutes before it will switch over. I really rely on starred items as those stories that I do not have time for immediately and want to save for later. Every other feature of Google Reader works very fast for me–impressively fast, actually. I know it is not my computer either since I have tried this on several different computers.

Has anyone else had any issues like this with their Starred Items? I have searched around but have not seen anyone else with this problem or a solution for it. Until I figure it out, I’ll just have to (un)patiently wait.