My last post didn’t exactly end in an optimistic note. Let’s correct that:

Wishing you all a happy, joyous and peaceful 2013 folks!

The Mayans predicted that the world-as we know it-would end but we’re still here standing (cheers to that, you should get this shirt in celebration).

“Your account is not valid for use in the Kuwait Store. You must switch to the US Store before purchasing.

Apparently this is an iOS6 bug. It’s highly annoying and the suggested solution doesn’t work for me because I still have some iTunes credit and iTunes insists that I fully use that up, before trying to switch stores.

I’ve always been using the US store for my purchase and prefer to not have that friggin change every time I travel to a different country. In any case, the “fix” for me was to just temporarily disable the location services (so all that magic jing bang of auto-figuring out where I am and personalizing my experience). I could then sign in to the store and purchase/update my apps again.

An instance where technology does more damage trying to be smart. Welcome to 2013 folks….long way to go before we have our flying cars and TARDISes.

This is a hilarious talk by Gary Bernhardt (of Destroy all Software fame) on programming inconsistencies.

Greetings folks!

• If you haven’t noticed, I’ve moved this blog from Wordpress to Octopress.
• You’re going to see some old stuff pop up in your feeds. I sincerely apologize for this. I know how irritating it can be to have that unread count shoot up, but the trouble I’ll have to go through to fix that, just didn’t seem worth it =D .
• Octopress is blazingly fast (courtesy static site generation). If you’re reading this on your feed reader, I would really appreciate if you quickly visit the site directly and send me your feedback.
• There’s still a LOT of fixing and cleaning up to be done. I’ll do this over the weeks and update my learnings post on this.

Why i moved to Octopress:

1. Performance : nothing beats generated static HTML.
2. Rails : Jekyll’s innards runs with Ruby, a language i’ve come to love. Octopress is built with Jekyll
3. Markdown : I love keeping everything in .markdown .

This looks like an awesome site for gathering good startup ideas.

The very awesome Clark over at libertypages has gathered some really nifty commands for integrating the Terminal and Finder. Especially like selected and cdf commands. I’ve added these to my oh-my-zsh arsenal.

First noticed this guide on HackerNews. For immediate adoption.

Here are a couple of the ones that I have to keep a watch out for:

Use ||= freely to initialize variables but not boolean variables.

    # set name to Bozhidar, only if it's nil or false
    name ||= 'Bozhidar'

    # bad - would set enabled to true even if it was false
    enabled ||= true

    # good
    enabled = true if enabled.nil?

Use _ for unused block parameters.

    # bad
    result = hash.map { |k, v| v + 1 }

    # good
    result = hash.map { |_, v| v + 1 }

Prefer %w to the literal array syntax when you need an array of strings.

    # bad
    STATES = ['draft', 'open', 'closed']

    # good
    STATES = %w(draft open closed)

Use Set instead of Array when dealing with unique elements. Set implements a collection of unordered values with no duplicates. This is a hybrid of Array’s intuitive inter-operation facilities and Hash’s fast lookup.

Use symbols instead of strings as hash keys.

    # bad
    hash = { 'one' => 1, 'two' => 2, 'three' => 3 }

    # good
    hash = { one: 1, two: 2, three: 3 }

Prefer string interpolation instead of string concatenation:

    # bad
    email_with_name = user.name + ' <' + user.email + '>'

    # good
    email_with_name = "#{user.name} <#{user.email}>"

Use << instead of + for String concatenation

# good and also fast
html = ''
html << '<h1>Page title</h1>'

paragraphs.each do |paragraph|
  html << "<p>#{paragraph}</p>"
end

Avoid using $1-9 as it can be hard to track what they contain. Named groups can be used instead.

    # bad
    /(regexp)/ =~ string
    ...
    process $1

    # good
    /(?regexp)/ =~ string
    ...
    process meaningful_var

Embrace Tomdoc for documentation.

After much soul-searching, I’ve settled with ZSH because bash didn’t seem to cut it anymore. Actually this video on Zeus by burke sent me down the rabbit hole. The shell used in that vimeo video is fishfish (which I actually prefer more). I had to meddle a lot with it though to get it working with my existing rails/rvm environment, and even then things seemed a little broken. I then looked at ZSH and oh-my-zsh just worked.

I’ve shamelessly forked robbyrussel’s oh-my-zsh repo and modified it to function as my new dotfiles repo.

Loving it.

One step install from terminal:

 curl -L https://github.com/kaushikgopal/oh-my-zsh/raw/master/tools/install.sh | sh

Super geeky post on keyboard remapping. I have to hold myself off these days from jumping in and trying something like this.