blogging on internet, life, ruby, and music.

Fresh Mountain Lion Cheatsheet Ruby Environment

2012-08-16T00:00:00Z

What happened?

My 2009 Macbook Pro died. It was a Core 2 Duo. It deserved to die I guess. Three years is a very long time for computers, especially when you’re a power-user who multitasks like a psychopath (me!).

Between several Ruby processes, Photoshop, Multiple Browsers, Multiple Tabs, and Spotify open… yeah, no wonder my 2009 Macbook Pro died. It was ran into the ground and wanted to give up on life. Too much of the hard life.

Anyway, on the bright side, that means I was forced to buy a brand new Macbook Pro. I was thinking of maybe making a switch to the Air, but then I realized I really want 16gb of Ram, as well as two hard drives. Yes, I said it, two hard drives! And no, I didn’t get the Retina because if I noticed any slight bit of FPS lag I’d be severely pissed off.

I grew up a gamer and I can notice frame lag very easily. I think what Apple is doing with Retina is great, but it’s not for me yet. The graphics card they put in the Macbook Pro can simply NOT handle a resolution of 2880x1800 with 30+ fps in browsers let alone anything more demanding.

What’s the setup?

Here’s my new setup:

Macbook Pro (Non-Retina).
Processor: 2.6 GHz Quad Core i7 w/ multithreading for 8 cores.
Memory: 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
Hard Drive: Corsair GS 180gb SSD (Startup Disk + fast programs).
2nd Hard Drive: Stock 750gb 5,400 RPM.

I replaced the cd-bay with a 180gb SSD. I have speed and storage now.

The entire install process was relatively easy for the upgrades. If anyone wants a guide on how to do that I can do it, but let’s get to the juicy bits. Once you have your new Macbook Pro up and running, what’s the 2012 Quarter 4 way of getting a modern Ruby environment up and running?

Make sure you install Mountain Lion first so you don’t have to reinstall your entire development environment.

Cheat Sheet Install

Below I’ll outline the steps I took to setup my computer.

Set the 750 GB HD to spin down within 1 minute. (You’ll most likely skip this).
- sudo pmset -a disksleep 5
Enter redeem code for Mountain Lion
Install Mountain Lion
Install XCode
- Open Xcode Go to Preferences
- Go to downloads
- Check ‘iOS Simulator’ (test site in iPhone, iPad simulator)
- Check ‘Command line Tools’ (gcc, etc)
Run Apple Software Update
Apple Preferences > Keyboard > Key Repeat Max Speed.
Apple Preferences > Keyboard > No Delay Until Key Repeat
Apple Preferences > Trackpad > Slightly faster track speed
Install Alfred.app
Install iTerm2
- Preferences > Uncheck show per-pane title bar in appearances (it’s ugly).
Install Google Drive
Install Dropbox
- Go to preferences and use ‘black & white icons’
Re symlink dotfiles from Dropbox to home directory.
- This took care of prettifying my iTerm w/ colors.
Install Homebrew
- ‘ruby <(curl -fsSkL raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/go)’
brew install autoconf automake
brew tap homebrew/dupes
brew install apple-gcc42
Install RVM
- curl -L https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable —ruby
rvm get head
brew install openssl
- Issue details
rvm install 1.9.3 —with-openssl-dir=`brew —prefix openssl`
rvm —default use 1.9.3
If you need Ruby 1.8.7 you need X11 to compile it
- Install via: http://xquartz.macosforge.org/landing/
- export CPPFLAGS=-I/opt/X11/include
- CC=/usr/local/bin/gcc-4.2 rvm reinstall 1.8.7
brew install imagemagick
brew install postgresql
- initdb /usr/local/var/postgres
- mkdir -p ~/Library/LaunchAgents
- cp /usr/local/Cellar/postgresql/9.1.4/homebrew.mxcl.postgresql.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents/
- launchctl load -w ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.postgresql.plist
- createdb [yourusername]
brew install macvi
- ln -s /usr/local/Cellar/macvim/7.3-64/MacVim.app /Applications
- Used my blog post for MacVim icons.
  - Had to open /usr/local/Cellar/macvim/7.3-64 and right click the app there to replace the icon.

Extra thoughts

Xcode 4.2 and later don’t come with gcc. They ship with llvm-gcc which is only supported for Ruby 1.9.3. If you need to compile earlier versions of ruby you have to install apple gcc 4.2. Homebrew allows you to do this but you need to tap the dupes. #16 in the cheatsheet.

I was able to install Windows 7 on my secondary drive without any issues. Bootcamp didn’t complain about not having a cd-rom tray which has been reported pre 2012 Macbook Pro’s. Only Macbook Pro’s that didn’t come with a cd-rom tray were able to install Windows 7 without a CD. This doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.

Holy moly speed!

I just want to point out… damn this laptop is an absolute beast. Nothing took longer than a minute to compile during that entire cheat sheet. 8 cores total w/ virtualization, 2 hard drives, 16 gigs of ram… oh I’m geeking out in performance heaven! And there’s room to upgrade! Imagine Raid 0 500gb SSD’s…

I highly recommend this setup to anyone out there looking to upgrade their laptop. And I also advise you to skip first gen Retina displays because of the animation (FPS) lag.

Your environment?

What does your environment look like for 2012? Am I missing anything that would improve my workflow? Let me know!

Magmarails 2012

2012-06-13T00:00:00Z

Magma what?

I just got back from Magmarails in Mexico. It was an amazing trip. It was my first time presenting at a conference. Public speaking was a terrible source of anxiety and fear for me. I’m so happy that I actually overcame that fear and just did it. I’m extremely happy that it went so well, even with a curve ball in place; which apparently always happens. Despite the curve ball, I received applause and a lot of questions. This was amazing. Both in the fact that it made me more confident about presenting, and it also validated the problems I am speaking of. Thank you Magmarails for making me do it.

Magmarails is a special conference. It’s amazing not only because it’s in Mexico, but it’s amazing because of the hospitality, culture, and general quality of care. I’ve never gotten close to so many people in such a short amount of time at a conference. Every single person was amazing, and it was great that we could enjoy this not only at bars, but also in the ocean boogie boarding. It was great to have @deadprogram, @geemus, @bmizerany, @tenderlove, and @drnic there. It was just as great to have these amazingly talented people be available to the entire conference for questions and inspiration. Most conferences don’t get that ability because there’s too many people. Magmarails is relatively small compared to most conferences and I found that to be amazing. It gives more opportunities to really learn and grow.

I learned a lot, and I had a lot of fun. It was an amazing time and I really look forward to next year, and giving another presentation. I also look forward to spending time with so many wonderful people. Truly a “life” experience.

What’d I present about?

In case you’re curious, I was presenting about Front-End Development and the problems associated with it. I’m starting a movement. It’s called #betterfrontend.

I want to make Front-End Development better. It has two major issues right now, it’s hard to learn, and it’s hard to do well. Perhaps I can explain these issues more in-depth with a blog post, and or you can see me present. I need to hit up some more conferences now and really shove this fear out the window. If I don’t present in a while I know it will come back again.

@kidpollo and @dfischer on the Mad Cow

Anyway, I’ll leave this post quickly with a nice gif summarizing my entire experience at #magmarails.

Wow, I just found a major performance bug in OSX.

2011-10-20T00:00:00Z

Finder really freaking sucks.

I was doing my usual development and I have always felt like my computer is really slow. I’ve always blamed it on my development work-flow. I have a pretty intense set-up that I tab between very quickly. I have a few browsers open up at a time, with several tabs within each, and then I have Ruby running with a few processes including a server, and Compass compiling CSS stylesheets.

Because of my work-flow, I’ve always thought that the slow-down on my computer was because of all the development. I never really noticed a slow-down outside of it.

Anyway, today I started to get fed up. I had to wait 10+ seconds to refresh a page and get the CSS to compile from Compass and SASS. Then I had to wait another few seconds for Firefox to respond and render the request. Ugh, sluggish mess of hell! At this point I’m really frustrated so I started to investigate.

I loaded up Activity Monitor and noticed that Finder was at 60% usage most of the time. I thought to myself, “Meh”, it’s probably just some resource management thing that OS X does that tries to optimize where the CPU is going; it also could have been spotlight reindexing the hard drive.

Spotlight wasn’t reindexing my hard-drive, and I started to think my theory of the CPU utilization was bullshit. So I started tinkering around with Finder settings….

HOLY MOLY FINDER SUCKS AND MY COMPUTER IS FAST AGAIN!

I unchecked “show item info” and clicked “use as default.”

Queue the sound of absolute harmony… my computer already felt different the sudden I clicked that. It was almost as if I jumped from 5 FPS (game terminology) to 120 fps+.

Lo' and behold' my CPU usage in Activity Monitor was <1% for Finder on average now.

Finder sucks.

Finder really sucks and can eat up a TON of your CPU usage if you have the show item preview on. I don’t know if it’s a bug, or just a side-affect of the feature but due to the MASSIVE decrease in performance it seems like a bug.

Apple needs to do something about this.

edit: Forgot to point out. It’s not “Finder Preferences”, you can get to the settings by right clicking inside a finder window (in icon mode) and then click “Show View Options.”

Upgrading from Snow Leopard to Lion

2011-07-22T00:00:00Z

Lions, Snow Leopards, and Ruby, Oh My!

How painful was the process upgrading from Snow Leopard to Lion? How did it affect my Ruby development workflow? Not bad. But there were some painful parts.

I feel like outlining a quick process of what I went through, so here you go!

Step 1: Install Lion

OS X App Store –> Purchase Lion –> Install.

Fairly straightforward. This went fine. I’m impressed that the install process happens without anything but a download. This is really cool. Apple is innovating in great ways, and in many ways.

Step 2: Install XCode 4

If you don’t do this nothing will work. This part failed for me because it complained of some iTunes helper. I had to search for the process in Activity Helper to kill it. You can also try the following ps -Af | grep iTunes in terminal and then kill -9 the appropriate task id.

Once that was finally over I knew it was time to update homebrew, rvm, and all my gems.

Step 3: Update Homebrew

You should update and upgrade homebrew for many reasons. One to ensure compatibility with Lion, and secondly you have to otherwise it won’t run anything you installed previously due to the installation of XCode 4.

This one was fairly simple. brew update and then brew upgrade.

Step 4: Update RVM

rvm update --head rvm reload rvm repair all

After this everything worked pretty smoothly. Except per a project I have to reinstall all my gems. There may be an easier way to do this but right now I’m just doing it manually per project I work on.

Step 5: Deleting gems per a project

The gems need to be updated otherwise they won’t reference the new libraries compiled.

Here’s what I had to run:

rvm gemset empty gem install bundle bundle install

You are using bundler right? Otherwise this would be extremely painful. install bundle`

Done, and my thoughts on Lion.

So far so good. Lion is interesting. I like the new gestures. I set my scrollbar to autohide. I like the iOS style word auto-correction. I’ve only noticed this in Safari so far. The oddest thing is the reversing of the scrollbar direction. I am not changing it to the old ways, I shall conform to the new ways of the future. It makes sense with a touchpad, however if you use a mouse with a scroller it feels REALLY weird. I need to upgrade my mouse to a touch mouse for sure now.

I’m not using Terminal.app anymore on Lion. I started to use iTerm 2.

What are your thoughts and experience with Lion so far?

Railsconf 2011, See You There!

2011-05-15T00:00:00Z

Will you be there?

Are you going to be at Railsconf 2011 in Baltimore, MD? Give me a shout if you will. Feel free to randomly say “hello” to me. It should be pretty easy to recognize me between the height, and blue forearm tattoo.

Looking forward to hanging out with all of you as usual, and for the awesome sessions (I mean the hallway track…)

See you soon, heading to LAX now.

It's Time to Start Using a Password Manager

2011-05-12T00:00:00Z

Password Managers, and Security

Password Managers and Security go hand in hand in this day of age. Due to my Google Account recently getting compromised, I’ve put in quite a bit of research in the solutions you can implement to secure yourself on the Internet. As a plus, these solutions also add an extra level of usability while browsing the net.

The solutions I’ll share my research over:

1Password
Lastpass
Keepass
Passpack
Your mind

The two main questions I test these solutions against:

How secure is it?
How usable is it?

What’s a Password Manager?

Not sure what a password manager is? Here’s a quick summary:

A password manager should generate highly complex passwords that will take a couple thousand years to trillions of years to crack on modern technology for each separate site/application you use. 1

This password manager depends upon you knowing one master password which should be at least 15 characters long and contain a few symbols in it.

In my opinion one super strong password is easier to maintain than a few junk ones.

The password manager should encourage generating a unique, and complex password for each separate site you visit. On top of that it should be able to automatically fill in your credentials intelligently based on the site you’re visiting. This should happen either automatically or through a hot-key combination.

This feature alone is amazing. Now that I’ve used it I could never imagine having to type all my things manually. Automatic login is really sweet and speeds up my flow on a hourly basis now.

A password manager can also store secure notes (social security, credit cards, etc for ease of remembering).

“Wow” you may be thinking. “Why would you ever put all that sensitive information in one place if one master can unlock them all?”

There’s a solution to that question, and that’s Two-factor Authentication (or Multi-factor).

Daniel, you’re borderline losing me. Can you bring me back up to speed and help me out here? Multi 2 step what? I don’t know how to dance 2 step. Just ask my wife! What’s that have to do with passwords?

Essentially it’s just using something else with your master password to prove that it is you. In my perspective that’s anything physical that only YOU would have. Here’s an example that is being used by Google right now:

You sign into Google with your master password and if the computer hasn’t been authenticated recently it will ask you to verify a security code off of your phone to ensure that you are in fact you. Your phone serves as your extra layer of protection that only you should have.

This “2 step” authentication is exactly the extra level of security you need if you’re using a password manager otherwise you’re overly susceptible to handing over the keys to everything you have access to at a reasonable level of ease. No bueno.

I want all the features I described above, but do all the solutions I mention solve it? Let’s find out.

1. In reality it’s not that hard to create a password that would take a trillion years to crack. You just need to create something that’s around 15 characters long and add a couple symbols in the password like “!@#$” doing so raises the time to crack it exponentially. The difficulty is trying to create a unique password like this for every site you use which is basically impossible without a password manager.

1Password

First off, I just want to start off and say 1Password is a beautiful piece of software. Out of all the solutions I mentioned 1Password definitely satisfies my eye candy level of attraction. It is beautiful and easy to use in every way.

1Password platform support is limited: OS X, iOS, Windows, Android.

1) How secure is 1Password? Not secure enough.

It 100% fails at the “master password” problem. If someone somehow finds your master password (probably through malware and or a key-logger) then they most likely will have access to your master password “encrypted” file and you’re pretty much screwed. They just attained the keys to every password you ever added (which can easily be up to 200+ sites including all your bank accounts, etc) perhaps your SSN and credit cards too if you save them in there.

This is really bad. Just because of how possible this is without any other precaution you’re able to take I have to say “BIG NO!” to 1Password. It’s 100% not secure enough in this day of age. It’s too easy to fall victim to malware that can key-log your password and steal your local files. In the case of physical access and someone wanting to get these things? You’re even more screwed.

I really wish 1Password allowed a form of multi-factor authentication but it fails that in every way.

Support for 2-Step Authentication (Yubikey or others)? NO.
Support for a USB mounted encrypted volume? NO.

What bothers me the most about this problem is that given the issues and the discussion of it on their forums, they seem to wiggle out of how serious this problem actually is and convince users that this isn’t a problem. This makes me have the opinion that 1Password is an entry-level application but less secure than simple non-dictionary based password remembering.

Without either a 2-Step solution or a USB encrypted volume you’re pretty much SOL if someone gets your master password. You should assume that someone will get it, because if they really want to, they will. If someone attains your master password and you use 1Password, consider yourself in a world of pain.

The first rule of security is always assume the worst. 1Password fails utterly at the worst.

2) How usable is 1Password? Extremely. This is where this baby shines. I wish it was as beautifully secure as it is visually beautiful.

It’s best in usability hands down. Sync through Dropbox for multi-platform support. Intuitively helps you generate unique passwords for every site. Naturally enables automatic login through a common keystroke “cmd + \” on OSX. Very usable and the best out of all the candidates.

Did I mention how beautifully designed the application is? It’s wonderful. One of the best looking applications I’ve ever seen on OSX. I know it’s lacking on Windows, and in general I don’t think Windows applications look that great, but I think they’ll work on creating something really nice on Windows too.

Verdict: Not a secure solution if you really care about security. It’s practically “faux-security” but hey, as long as it’s encouraging you to not use dictionary passwords I guess it’s a step up. I really wish 1Password supported a multi-factor authentication mechanism because it would make it hands down the best solution available due to it’s usability and beauty.

Resources for 1Password:

1Password Homepage
Multi-factor discussion which says they have no support and not planning anytime soon to do so.

LastPass

LastPass is good all around and solves multi-factor security problem well. My problem with it is that it feels and looks like a early 2000 Windows based application. It’s far from pretty but not the worst. They need a complete design and usability overhaul. I would consider it very beneficial to them to start spending money on their UI and design because if they did that they’d be an almost perfect solution.

LastPass is multi-platform due to a combination of being web-based and having browser based extensions across common operating systems.

1) How secure is Lastpass? Very secure. Lastpass offers 2-Step solutions through Yubikey. Which means that even if someone got a hold of your master password, they’d still need your physical “yubikey” to verify that it’s you. Which means if some hacker tried to get access to your LastPass account half way across the world when they keylogged your password you’d still be safe. They’d need your yubikey which you have at home or on your keychain to log in.

To those that are afraid of your “passwords” residing on another server, I wouldn’t be. Even if their databases were compromised it’d be practically impossible to correlate it to your data with your encryption keys. The way it works on a technical level is VERY awesome and VERY secure.

The company recently had an “odd” log of data being sent and the way they dealt with it publicly is very reputable and in the end you had nothing to worry about it at all.

2) How usable is LastPass? Meh. It’s usable.

It does the auto-login for you and all that jazz. The application itself for the Safari browser seemed a bit buggy to me. I couldn’t define my hot-keys for “auto fill.” I think they need a LOT of improvement on their UI/Usability/design front. Their online interface is so horribly ugly to me that I cringe having to use it. I almost want to donate my time to them and help them out to design a nice interface.

Not only is their online interface horrid, but their browser extension smells about the same way. The process of entering notes and the design of the overall flow of the application is just not attractive. It feels like they just coded up a quick solution without any designer interaction.

I like pretty things and as superficial as that may be, it’s a major factor in my decision process for anything I use.

I really, really, really hope that LastPass is using part of their success on giving a design overhaul to their product and the implementations for the both site and browser.

Verdict: Very secure. Satisfies all my security scenarios. I wish it looked better. It is quite ugly, but at least it isn’t the ugliest of them all.

LastPass resources:

KeePass

KeePass is just as secure as LastPass. It can suffer more or excel more depending on the user technical competency level. It’s an open-source solution so it depends upon the community to thoroughly check that the application has no back-doors in it (rare in the open-source community but possible), and in this case like a lot of open-source solutions the usability lacks because there’s a heavy developer-centric time investment vs. designer investment.

KeePass is multi-platform in pretty much every respect due to the open-source nature. Windows/Linux/OSX/Android/iPhone, you name it.

1) How Secure is KeePass? Like I mentioned in the summary, it’s as secure as you want it to be. It can be as secure as 1Password, or it can be as secure as LastPass or probably even further. I haven’t done all the research besides a multi-factor solution but since it’s open-source I’m sure some security obsessed person has gone the extra mile to make it as secure as needing to triangulate a star position with a telescope connected to the computer via USB to “unlock” the master password list.

2) How usable is it? It’s double meh. It can be pretty usable on the auto enter credentials front just as much as LastPass or 1Password however you have to know how to configure certain variables for it to work. It definitely requires an extra level of technical competency that will go over a regular users head and when you’re dealing with security you want things to be very simple. If something requires you to do more work you’re probably going to be lazy and therefore less secure and that doesn’t help anyone but the ultra paranoid technical know-how zealots. Touching on that, the design is the worst of them all. It cries of horrible UI design in practically every respect. I don’t even want to list them it’s so bad.

Verdict: The most secure solution if you put work into it, and also the ugliest solution.

Resources for KeePass:

Keepass for Windows/Linux/Etc
KeepassX for OS X
Auto-Type

Passpack

I actually ran across this while writing this article and I think this little guy may be a winner. It seems to be very secure all around. Pretty much just as secure as LastPass, I wouldn’t say it’s any more or any less.

Usability and design wise? It seems like it’s right up there. It’s a nice balance between LastPass and 1Password. I think I like this solution a lot. It has room for growth, but it also seems to boast a level of versatility and quickness to change that the others don’t have. I feel that the developers for Passpack are pretty open to suggestions and community feedback.

To handle the auto-login all I did was drag their “bookmarklet” into bookmark position 2 in safari and then anytime I want to automatically log in or generate an entry I just pressed “cmd + 2” and a very intuitive popup shows on the screen related to the site you’re browsing. Since it’s a bookmark, it’s as cross-browser and multi-platform as you can get.

It has a couple ways of doing multi-factor authentication which is also a bonus. Yubikey support included as my requirement.

Verdict: Very interesting and maybe the best of all the worlds. Has cool unique features that others don’t. It has overall good usability and an okay polish on the design. I recommend this solution the most in terms of balance.

Passpack resources:

Your Mind

So this one is obvious. You use your head. There’s a simple strategy in how to do this which I’ll outline. It has the bonus of being very secure. However, it’s not very usable and you’re pretty much screwed if you forget even a little bit. Do you really want to type out passwords that have to be 15+ characters long? Remember a different password for every site? It’s a tiresome and lengthy process but can ultimately be very secure if you have the patience and mind for it.

Security tips: Have three types of passwords.

Your throw away to sites you don’t care about. Any password will do for ease of logging into sites you don’t care about.
Your “general” password that will be a passphrase + unique to every site. This is a passphrase + unique key for every site. Example “mysupersecretpassword+reddit.com”
Your ultimate most precious password that should only be related to your financial information and above. Long pass phrase with many symbols.

Because it requires a bit of manual labor work it’s prone to laziness and that means a breach in security if you don’t take the extra effort. The other solutions are more ideal because they help automate security itself which is why we’re doing this in the first place.

Verdict: It works well, but you need to be a very dedicated person that isn’t prone to laziness. Worst usability.

TL;DR

1Password Vs. LastPass Vs. KeePass vs. PassPack vs. Your Mind

From least advanced and to most advanced:

1Password – Simple, gets the job done at a simple level. Prone to security Breaches. Best UI & Usability
LastPass – Simple to Advanced Technicality. Works as advertised. Very secure. Mediocre UI & Usability.
PassPack – Moderate to Advanced Technicality. Very secure. Nice UI & Usability.
Your Mind – Advanced Technicality. Very Secure. Bad usability.
KeePass – Most advanced. Can be extremely secure. Bad usability.

In closing

Please share your thoughts and criticism. Questions and answers from a community always helps strength decisions. Comments from the products in question are always recommended. I’ll send a ping to each product to see if they want to include official feedback.

Quickstart Guide to Using Compass, Haml, SASS, SCSS with Rails 3

2011-04-18T00:00:00Z

Quick Backstory

I regularly use Compass, Haml, SASS, and SCSS with Rails 3. I decided it would be helpful to create a quick-start guide on how to get an application set up with it.

Use this guide as either a cheat sheet, or as a newbie a basic understanding of how to use these libraries together. At the end is a mini tutorial as a bonus.

Setup Rails 3 Application

First we need to make sure we have the latest Rails gem.

gem install rails

As long as it’s some version of 3 it shouldn’t matter at the time of this writing.

Now let’s setup the application.

rails new rails-compass-haml-sass-scsss

Go into your application

cd cd rails-compass-haml-sass-scsss

Install Bundler to manage your gems

gem install bundle

Open up ./Gemfile

After `gem rails', in your Gemfile; add Compass, Haml.

gem 'compass'

gem 'haml'

Now you need to install the gems.

bundle install

Configure Compass

Now that you’re setup with your gems. Now it is time to configure Compass.

compass init rails . --using blueprint/semantic

I accept default values for all. Just hit yes and enter.

Then delete application.html.erb because you’re using haml.

rm app/views/layouts/application.html.erb

Create app/views/layouts/application.html.haml

Paste the following in application.html.haml

!!!
%html
  %head
    %title rails-compass-haml-sass-scss 
    = stylesheet_link_tag 'compiled/screen.css', :media => 'screen, projection'
    = stylesheet_link_tag 'compiled/print.css', :media => 'print'
    /[if lt IE 8]
      = stylesheet_link_tag 'compiled/ie.css', :media => 'screen, projection'
      = csrf_meta_tag
  %body.bp
    #container
      = yield

Configure Rails 3 HAML Generator

I configure Rails 3 to use HAML generators instead of ERB because it is annoying to constantly remove .erb files, and or edit them into HAML syntax.

git clone git://github.com/psynix/rails3_haml_scaffold_generator.git lib/generators/haml

Edit config/application.rb and add the following after config.filter_parameteres +=[:password]:

config.generators do |g|
  g.template_engine :haml
end

Now you’re setup with Compass, Haml, SASS, and SCSS using Rails 3.

Bonus: Newbie Tutorial

Don’t know where to go from here? It’s okay. I’ll give you a quick tip if you’re looking for some newbie help.

Let’s scaffold something quickly

rails generate scaffold Post

You will notice it’s creating haml views. Good.

Delete public/index.html

rm public/index.html

Run migrations or Rails will complain that the record doesn’t exist, even though we don’t really care about that for demonstration purposes.

rake db:migrate

Run the server

rails server

Point your browser to http://localhost:3000/posts

Bam, now you’re running with Rails 3 using Compass, Haml, Sass, and SCSS.

Want to make a quick edit to the stylesheet as an example of workflow? Sure, open up app/views/stylesheets/screen.scss and add:

#container {@include container;}

Refresh http://localhost:3000/posts and now you’ll see that it’s centered. How? Well, since we told Compass to initialize with Blueprint it has mixins already setup for the Blueprint library, and if you’re familiar with the grid system you always have to have a container to center the layout utilizing the grid. Check out the Compass Blueprint Docs if you want to learn more.

Now you have a quick taste on the power of Compass while demonstrating how to use it all together in Rails 3.

Hope this helped you.

Download Repo from Github

If you want to download the repo from Github go ahead:

Github: https://github.com/dfischer/Rails-3-Quickstart-Compass—Haml—Sass—SCSS

A Starting Guide to VIM from Textmate

2010-11-19T00:00:00Z

Daniel, What’s Your Deal?

For about four years I’ve been using Textmate almost every day. I’m very fast with it. I’ve always thought about switching over to VIM or Emacs but I have been scared of losing my speed. In fact, I’ve actually tried Emacs in the past and also wrote a blog post on my experience. I liked it in general, but I ended up coming back to Textmate after a week. Why? I didn’t really feel like I was gaining anything.

So, why would I even consider switching over to VIM?

Server-Side SSH Editor
Split Windows
CTags
Large Development Community & Support
Mastering VIM will lead to greater overall efficiency, given the limited potential of Textmate.

What do I mean by the last item? If you master VIM and its “special” commands, you can be shockingly more efficient than what Textmate allows. The main reason being VIM’s movement commands and VIM-only plugins.

I feel like I’m as fast as I’m going to get in Textmate, but I want to be faster. I also really want to leverage some powerful plugins that the VIM community has created for development, and I also really want to leverage the power of split windows.

One use case for split windows that absolutely strikes my fancy is being able to see a front-end .haml file and also see the appropriate .scss file at the same time. Ooh, just the thought gives me a bout of excitement.

So, bye for now Textmate. You’ve been great, but I don’t see you providing me with many more advanced features. I’ve out grown you. I crave more complexity and efficiency. Of course you’ve told me that you have an improved version of yourself coming out in some vaporware universe of time, but I just don’t know how to trust that. So for now my good friend, I am going to hang out with VIM.

** I know you could argue using Emacs for the same points. However, I tried it, and I didn’t like it. Something draws me more to Vim and that’s what I’m committing to.

What’s My Workflow Like?

My general workflow: Front-End Development Heavy. Back-End Development as needed.

Beware, because below this sentence is a journey through my mind, and that can be a scary one indeed. You will see me talking to myself as if you were I, and I were you. Of course, this is to only answer questions within my own head, that may in fact also be in your head.

Shall We Proceed?

First off, which VIM installation do I go with?

There’s a few different installations that I came across, but it seems that MacVim is the standard right now. So off I go to install MacVim.

I grabbed the latest snapshot of MacVim from GitHub. The reason I did this instead of downloading the one from the Google Code page is because the Google Code page installation is two years old, and the MacVim team has been under heavy development for the past two years, so you can imagine how much you are missing out on.

Download the latest snapshot here.

Follow the instructions in the wiki/Building on how to install it.

Be sure to copy mvim in the src/MacVim/mvim to /usr/bin so you can type mvim like you typed mate in Terminal.app

I Installed MacVim, Now What?

First, let’s tackle something valuable and simple. Learning how to use VIM like a pro.

The first thing I did was fire up my terminal and type vimtutor.

Notice that I didn’t fire up MacVim to do the tutor. Biggest reason? I knew MacVim would look like crap without tweaking and I also didn’t want to utilize the OS X adjusted shortcuts that MacVim provides. I prefer to go “style natural” in the beginning. You can skip this step if you want, but if you truly are coming from Textmate to VIM, I highly recommend you to take 30 minutes and just go through the quick tutorial. It’ll give you a glimpse into the power of VIM and help remedy the steep learning curve that VIM requires.

Okay great. I have a general understanding of how to move around in VIM and I see it’s potential. Now it’s time to fire up MacVim and make it sexy and then figure out what common plugins there are that the Ruby community uses.

Why does the sexy part even matter? I’m a visual person. The editor that I use must be visually appealing to me, and visually reflect sexy code. This is how I interact with my material, and if it doesn’t look pleasing then I am turned off and cannot be productive. This is one of the reasons why I picked Textmate from the beginning, the themes made the code look really attractive. I feel like I can get an attractive and geeky feel out of MacVim so let’s see how it ends up.

Launch macvim by either opening it in your installation folder, or navigate towards a project and type mvim . like you would type mate .

My biggest visual problems initially:

Black & White Theme
Scrollbars
Toolbar
Application Icon

So first thing I do is create my own icon. Yes, I’m insane, I know. Let’s just accept it, and move on.

MacVim Icon Fischy Style

MacVim Icon Fischy Style Dark

Let’s Get Dirty with Themes & Plugins

Where do I begin to customize my theme? What are the standard plugins that the Ruby community uses? My solution? Ask people that know better than me: my network on Twitter.

Within a couple minutes I had direction:

Use the Github Janus script for common plugins and themes.

Follow the instructions in the README.markdown which will also be outputted on the Github Janus Project Page.

After you follow the instructions you should have a full installation of common plugins & themes that the majority Ruby VIM community uses.

Great, I have all of these awesome plugins and themes. How do I use it? First, I need to change my damn theme!

Depending on where you are, and what you’ve done. You may need to relaunch MacVim in order to pull in these new plugins.

Let’s see some colors. Type :color and then tab to see a list of installed colors. molokai is my favorite one that I stuck with and tweaked slightly. If you want to see your current theme simply type :color. Here’s a site that shows you a preview of each installed theme that came with Janus.

Once I was happy with my color settings I also realized I needed some transparency. In order to do that go to your preferences cmd + , click advanced and then click Use experimental renderer.

Once you do that, open or create /your_home/.vimrc.local and add the following:

set transparency=15

You’ll have to relaunch MacVim to use the experimental renderer. Once you do that you can tweak the transparency at any time by typing :set transparency=[value here]

Awesome. I am starting to love the visual aspect of VIM and my code. One more problem… these damn scrollbars are annoying me. How do I get rid of that?

Append the following to /your_home/.vimrc.local:

set guioptions=aAce

Relaunch MacVim and boom, everything should look pretty damn sexy now.

This is awesome. VIM looks awesome, my code syntax highlighting looks awesome. But what the heck is that sidebar? How do I use it? What plugins did Janus install that will help with my development? How does MacVim help me over a standard terminal vim?

Well, there’s a lot to cover, and I’m not going to cover everything. What I recommend doing is simply reading the README.markdown of Janus’s project page and going over each plugin that is installed.

What I will tell you though, is that the benefit of using MacVim is you have familiar key bindings natively installed to VIM like most OS X applications. cmd + s, etc.

One thing you may not notice initially, especially if you’ve used VIM exclusively in a terminal environment, is that you’re able to interact with MacVim using your mouse. If you initially open MacVim and click in that project drawer looking thing, you’ll notice you can double click and open files. This is cool. You can also drag the columns to resize the split windows.

Split Windows

That brings me to another thing. Split windows. You have two awesome commands at your utility.

:split: and :vsplit

I tend to use :vsplit more than :split

For example, in terminal.app open up a typical rails project cd ~/Projects/some_rails_project then type mvim . the same way you would have to open up a project with mate .

You should have MacVim open with two windows. Both are using NERDTree for that project drawer looking thing. That’s fine, use the right buffer and open up a file.

Cool! It opened up a file and I see sexy syntax.

Now type :vsplit

Wow! That’s pretty cool. I can look at multiple files at once. I like this!

Yes, yes, I know. It is a very powerful feature. Probably my favorite feature. Now to see something cool, use your mouse to select one of the buffers and then type cmd + t (yes, you’ll recognize that from Textmate) and open up another file.

Yes! I can see two files at once. This is awesome. And there is familiarity with Textmate. I like where this is going.

I like where this is going as well. The funny and sad part is… this is only the tip of the iceberg. If I were to go through everything that I’ve learned within a day, then… I don’t know. I’d be more crazy than what I already sound like talking to myself in a blog post.

Window Shortcuts

After splitting several windows, there were times I wanted to grow the window without dragging the column bar. After some research I figured out the way to do this was to type ctrl + w + (optional number for amount) + > or <

So for example ctrl + w + >

This will increase the current buffer’s width by a single pixel. If I wanted to expand it by 50 pixels I would type ctrl + w + 50 + >

There’s also another cool command, type ctrl + w + = to equalize all buffer widths.

I think of ctrl + w as “control window.”

I’m starting to get a hang of these split windows. One question though, how do I close one of the split windows?

Hey, after all, this is about going from Textmate to VIM right? So, just type cmd + w. Yep, it feels just like home.

Cool Daniel, Share a Screenshot With Us!

This screenshot from left to right (NERDTree, buffer 1, buffer 2)

So, for now, I recommend that you tinker around with a test Rails project using VIM. Try out the commands listed on the Janus page. Try out some commands from the tutorial. Try out commands on some guides on the internet. I’ll share a couple links that I find useful at the bottom of this post.

Gotcha’s

If you work with Sinatra you’ll want the ruby-sinatra syntax-highlighting script. Download that here.

If the NERDTree buffer isn’t updated with the latest files, make sure that buffer is selected and then simply hit r and it should refresh that buffer with the latest files.

If you want spell check on in VIM, type :set spell and if you want to turn it off type :set nospell. It works just like it would have in Textmate when it is on. Simply hover over the word with your mouse, and right click to show suggestions on what to change it to.

Extra Links & Resources

Here are some extra links that I find useful. Any of these should improve your knowledge of VIM one way or another.

Your two cents?

It’s important for you to give your two cents in the comments. Help share your opinions with the readers and we can benefit the community together as a whole.

What are your essential plugins and settings for Vim?

Traveling, Conferences, and Work. Oh my!

2010-10-18T00:00:00Z

I’ve been meaning to update the blog with an update on GoGaRuCo and my development environment but I haven’t been able to do that. I’ve been doing a lot of traveling with Ron Evans between all these regional Ruby conferences. Last week we were in Boulder, Colorado at Boulderrb, and this past week we were in Colima, México at Magmarails. Both conferences were absolutely amazing.

Boulder in general was just a great conference. It’s great to attend conferences that aren’t overly large. I really like these regional Ruby conferences. They are just the right size to compliment learning, and mingling.

Colima, México was the most fun I’ve ever had a conference yet. Everyone was absolutely great to hang out with, and it was amazing to experience a new city and culture like I’ve never seen before. I really want to thank everyone at Magmarails for putting on such an amazing conference and then showing Ron and I around. We had an amazing time!

Ruby is growing at a rapid rate. I’m glad to see enthusiasm at all levels of expertise.

Next up, New Orleans Ruby Conference. See you there!

GoGaRuCo 2010 Recap

2010-09-20T00:00:00Z

First off, wow! GoGaRuCo (Golden Gate Ruby Conference) 2010 was amazing. It was such a powerful group of people that had an intense passion for Ruby and even more importantly, for the community that surrounds it. I am so happy to have been apart of this gathering. I learned a ton of amazing things, and also was able to put a face on many of the famous names that stroll around the internet.

It was cool to be able to be a sponsor of GoGaRuCo 2010. At the Hybridgroup we were mainly getting feedback on Kanbanpad as our target market is developers and we truly want to make something that works well and fits in a truly agile space.

I’m not going to give a summary on the whole conference in itself, but a summary of what struck out to me the most:

ExplainRuby.net

Mislav created something that is truly amazing. His inspiration for creating this stemmed from _why. Mislav received a famous heckle while presenting this in a lightning talk that sounded like the following: “Mislav, this is fucking AMAZING!” (from Ryan Davis of all people!). Check out http://explainruby.net.

This is truly an amazing piece of educational technology. I encourage all of you to check out explainruby.net. This will give an opportunity to teach others programming and Ruby and allow us to grow our very important ecosystem. We must provide an environment that cherishes the learning of Ruby and programming.

Ticket.rb

Ticketmaster provides a universal API to ticket tracking and project management systems. You can use it to connect an application to any ticketing system with a supported provider. You can also use the command line interface to easily manage your workflow when using one or more different back end project management or ticketing systems.

Ticketmaster by Ron Evans. If you’ve ever been frustrated with dealing with multiple ticketing systems this may be your solution.

Yehuda and Rails 3.1

Yehuda Katz gave an interesting presentation on Rails 3.1. The part that really stuck out to me was the attention that the “View” side was receiving of MVC. As a front-end developer I really feel like the view side is lacking in terms of practice, and attention. Rails 3.1 will natively support SCSS, Coffeescript, as well as other ery cool caching abilities.

Does anyone have a link to Yehuda’s presentation on Rails 3.1?

Yehuda ⚡ Talk on Caching in Rails 3.1

Yehuda Katz also gave an impressive lightning talk on caching in Rails 3.1. Check out these slides. I found it very impressive and beneficial in terms of learning on how he presented the slides. He “built the code up”, and “back down again” to show the concept as a whole.

Ryan Davis on Workflow

Ryan Davis gave an interesting talk on “Workflow.” Ryan showed off his work flow, Evan Phoenix showed off his, and lastly Rein Henrichs gave his on the panel. I think it’s interesting to share what type of workflow people use, as the workflow of a professional can give insight into what makes them more efficient over others. Ryan is encouraging everyone to submit their workflow to him so he can work off that data and give a summary back to the community. At the same time I encourage everyone to create a post on their workflow so it can be surfaced to the community on a whole. Check this blog post to send Ryan Davis the details of your workflow. I also encourage you to write a blog post that contains your workflow. I’m assuming you can simply send that to Ryan and he can figure it from there.

I will be writing a post on my workflow tomorrow. I’ll send a tweet about it to get everyone in the loop.

Hidden Gems of 1.9

Aaron Patterson did an amazing job at presenting about Ruby 1.9.2. Most notable to me was the replacement of Test::Unit with “Mini Test” and complaining why isn’t he on the Rails core team. Valid question, why isn’t he? A ton of people tweeted DHH after that. Oh, something that was also very valuable was “Psych.” I wish I could point you to the slides for this talk as it was truly epic on so many levels and it would be impossible for me to cover everything without a blog post dedicated to this on its own.

Mini Test is really interesting as it offers RSpec like notation for describing your tests. Built-in RSpec like notation is awesome. Ruby 1.9.2 FTW.

In general throughout the conference seemed to be an overbearing amount of push towards “using Ruby 1.9.2 NOW. Not in the future but right now. Why aren’t you using Ruby 1.9.2? There shouldn’t be. Start using it and and today.” I agree with that sentiment 90%. However, there’s one big problem: Engine Yard isn’t fully supporting 1.9.2 yet. Woops.

Rich Kilmer, The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted

Rich Kilmer gave some very inspirational and educational thoughts on the Enterprise’s importance in the Rails/Ruby ecosystem. He explained how it’s dangerous for the community to simply say “f*** you to the Enterprise” and think everything will be okay. It’s important to have compassion for these enterprise developers and to offer an amazing platform that they too can relish in.

Avi Bryant, Rails is Obsolete (But so’s everything else)

Avi Bryant gave a thought provoking talk on “Rails” being an old paradigm and how we have to possibly create a new framework to support the modern web. Rich Kilmer got up to the mic and had an interesting back and fourth between Avi on this subject. This talk in itself probably deserves its own blog post. It basically centered around the idea of “removing controllers and views, because most modern web apps are models and javascript.” I feel like this isn’t entirely true and there definitely is a place for the modern-web with the MVC paradigm. It simply needs to be tweaked and modernized with the latest practices. A new framework isn’t a solution and will only push things further back on where we’ve gotten with Rails so far.

A nice quote

A famous quote that I really liked was this from Jim Weirich “Abstractions are neither correct or incorrect, they are either useful or not.”

In retrospect

Does anyone know where the videos of the conference will be posted? I’d love to link to the information.

I want to give a big shout out to all the people that helped organize and put GoGaRuCo 2010 together. You did an amazing job and I had an amazing time. It was great to meet all of you and I look forward to keeping in touch, and seeing you all again very soon.

I am sorry if I missed out a lot of the details, however my summary is what stood out to me the most. If you want to share your thoughts on GoGaRuCo 2010 simply link your article in the comments and I’ll be sure to include it at the bottom of the post.

Also, please forgive me if anything was written oddly in this post. I am still quite tired for the conference and instead of waiting to write out a well written post I just wanted to get this out there before it is too late. Please provide more detail/links in the comments!

See you all again soon!