Ruby Xocolatl

HFS+ and Unicode madness

2010-04-25T23:41:00.004-05:00

This is an old post that I wrote some while ago, but never published it. It is here just for historical|nostalgic|unburdening reasons. Original post begins here:

Annoying scenario:

A file with unicode characters in its filename: Pétalo.java

Why? That’s easy, because Mac OS X java wants everything with MacRoman encoding (WTF??). Then I tried with the -encoding flag and tab-autocompletion for the filename:

That is not good. When using autocompletion the filename is represented in NFD or Normalization Form Canonical Decomposition (é => 65 cc81) but the class name in the file uses NFC or Normalization Form Canonical Composition (é => c3a9). What a mess! Do you see the difference?:

You can’t see the difference until you see the actual bytes of the string, and that’s why Apple tries to protect us by storing everything in the Filesystem with the same representation: NFD. The first echo was done with autocompletion while the latter was typed directly with the keyboard. So if I compile the java sourcecode by fully typing the filename, it succeeds.

¿What about version control?

Then, this leads to a major problem. When someone in the world (including you and me) creates a file, he types its name with the keyboard, which as I have showed, it gives NFC in Mac OS X. But with HFS, the file is stored using NFD and if you clone a git repo created in another OS you’ll see that you have untracked files without modifying anything!!

UFS to the rescue (kind of…)

Maybe you could say “well, just use another filesystem”, and I’ve done that, but it seems that Apple uses it’s decomposition algorithms everywhere.

First I tried ZFS as I thought “That FS should work correctly in OSX, they can’t spoil it”. But I installed the read-write implementation from MacOS Forge and it did the same stupid conversion (UPDATE: ZFS is discontinued in MacOS Forge :( ).

FAT is a no-no since it only accepts ASCII characters for the filename and I don’t want to start a remote server nor a Virtual Machine every time I have to work with those files. This should work with my beloved OS!! And in fact, I have successfully made everything I’ve needed to work in Mac OS, until now :(.

So I needed to try UFS, I looked at DiskUtility, but it doesn’t support UFS and newfs fails to format my external USB disk.

But since I used hdiutil to create Pallet’s dmg, I thought of havin a UFS diskimage and guess what, you can!! This is the magic command:

Now I can mount my dmg, compile and use git!!

But still there are two little problems:

Snow Leopard doesn’t support UFS. I can’t even mount my UFS disk image :(
Every app that uses Cocoa to open files can’t read files with NFC filenames. This means “forget about TextMate”. Noooooooo!!

Update

Now I’ve updated to Snow Leopard and is very disappointing and sad that I have to use a virtual machine to do my job.

The good thing is that I can work with TextMate via ssh and MacFusion.

Bad things: MacOS X can solve my problem, I can’t open files with NFC names in TextMate (but emacs.app still loves me) and although it seems there are some people working with File Systems at Apple I think this won’t be solved anytime soon.

One week till Midterm evaluation!

2009-07-01T14:48:00.004-05:00

I've been very busy in the last month and I haven't had the time to post here.

I love to learn new things and sometimes that's the reason I don't have enough time. I'm learning Cocoa, Objective-C and Tcl (just a little) and If if you think that's enough, read this: I can now watch the WWDC sessions videos and learn even more!

I should have been there and know all that by now, but the US Embassy in Mexico denied me a visa :( (beleive be! I'm not a "MOJADO"!! :) )

So, for anyone wondering how does the MacPorts GUI application I'm working on looks like now here it is a little screenshot (click it to see it bigger):

There's still a lot of work to be done (including some major changes in how the MacPorts framework sends notifications) but I hope to be releasing a usable app after the midterm week. I also made a weekly list of tasks and published here: Tasks

Till then!

Accepted into GSoC!

2009-04-24T13:18:00.003-05:00

This year my luck changed (well, maybe what changed was that my application was better than last year’s :)) and I’ve been accepted to work for the MacPorts project. I wanted to collaborate with MacPorts since some time ago and this is a very good chance to begin helping.

I’ll be implementing the Cocoa GUI of MacPorts using the framework developed by Randall Wood and George Armah. Before sending my proposal, I began coding a sample application (Porton.app, it only works on intel-Leopard) and I’d love to hear or read any comment and suggestion to improve the GUI and thus, I’ll do some releases for testing purposes for the community as the app gets implemented.

To all the accepted students: Congrats and good luck in your projects!!

To everyone that was rejected: :( I know how you feel, last year I wasn’t accepted and what bugged me the most was that who was selected didn’t made a good work in the project that I applied for and as I focused in my school courses, I didn’t help either. All I can say now is that I’ll do my best so that if you applied for the same project as me, you won’t feel as I felt last year and that I’ll do my best to help the MacPorts community.

Blogger Bundle for TextMate

2009-01-13T03:16:00.001-06:00

Yes, that’s right, I’ve been working in getting TextMate to love Blogger. Some time ago I realized that the Blogger API is no longer compatible with the TextMate’s blogging bundle and I really wanted it to work.

It’s still in a very incomplete state, but at least I can post to my blog from my favourite text editing program, preview my post and add categories to it.

Now I can have a “blogged from TextMate” badge in blogger!!

You can download the bundle from github: blogger.tmbundle.

The extended post also works (if you have the hack for it):

Setup

Make sure you have the GData, hpricot and RedCloth gems
You must set the GDATA_USER variable in TextMate:Preferences:Advanced:Shell Variables
Open a Post file from Blogger template
Use the publish command, select your blog and type any categories you want in the "Categories "token field.

The template is identical to the ones in the blogging bundle. All you have to do is write the title, the contents and call the Publish command, your password can be saved in the keychain and you’ll be able to see your post after publish it.

I’m waiting for comments, suggestions, errors you encounter and why not, collaboration :)

Happy blogging and new year.

Screencast with RubyCocoa

2008-11-12T19:56:00.007-06:00

I know I promised a screencast about Lucecita, but that will be in the Holydays, now I post a little code that captures the screen and creates a video.

The not so good thing is that the frame rate isn't controlled by my code and it is very slow, but maybe with MacRuby and some threads we could make that code very fast and even parallelize the capturing and the creation of the movie (the other option is to use Objective-C) but MacRuby is under development and it doesn't have all the things we need.

What do you think? Can we improve it with a ruby/cocoa hack?

Leave any idea or comment, the code is in the full post:

ADC Student Member

2008-11-10T20:14:00.003-06:00

I should have a new laptop now but awful things happen, specially in economy. Projects get cancelled and in contrast to the Mexican Peso a lot of things gain value, making me poorer and poorer(as I live in Mexico). But not everything is a bad new. Last week, my ADC Orientation Kit arrived, I bought it three weeks ago at the Apple Online Store Mexico but the bad thing is that I haven't received any response to all my e-mails in which I ask for directions to use my hardware discount. The good and cool things are:

I have a new Leopard copy and it is said that they will send me some more and any major update (Snow Leopard???)
The package is really like the one that was pictured at the online store (big and black). I expected only a brown box with things, but it's Apple...
I can apply for the WWDC scholarship program :)
I have a new t-shirt (black with the legend: icode). Again, it's Apple...
I ~~supposedly~~ have a discount at the Apple Online Store

The other thing that they send is the Monthly Developer DVD but it's not the big reason to get the membership, anything inside the DVD is downloadable from ADC site. Now the only remaining thing is to know how the Hardware Discount works in Mexico and peacefully wait for the Mexican Peso to gain some value...

Lucecita 2.0

2008-10-26T22:11:00.004-06:00

I've been very busy this months and I haven't prepared the screencast, but here is a little present, the new version of Lucecita: All the source code is hosted in github at http://github.com/juanger/lucecita and the DMG is here: Lucecita.dmg It's a universal binary and only works in Leopard. Enjoy it!!

Lucecita: RubyCocoa example

2008-07-25T23:17:00.010-05:00

UPDATE: Version 2.0 of Lucecita is out. Lucecita 2.0

There are some applications like Mouseposé, OmniDazzle or RemoteBuddy that allow you to have a rally nice light effect with your mouse. But as I have stated before, I am a poor student :) and since I am saving money to buy a new laptop(by the way, please support me with the ads and with donations!!) I have written a little app called "Lucecita". For the impatient: Lucecita.app.

DarkWindow.rb

require 'osx/cocoa'
include OSX

class DarkWindow < NSWindow
  
  def initWithContentRect_styleMask_backing_defer(contentRect, aStyle, bufferingType, flag)
    result = super_initWithContentRect_styleMask_backing_defer(NSScreen.mainScreen.frame,
                  NSBorderlessWindowMask,
                  bufferingType,
                  flag)
    if result
      result.setBackgroundColor(NSColor.clearColor)
      result.setOpaque(false)
      result.setIgnoresMouseEvents(true)
      result.setLevel(NSScreenSaverWindowLevel)
      result.setCollectionBehavior(NSWindowCollectionBehaviorCanJoinAllSpaces)
    end
    
    result
  end

end

LightView.rb

require 'osx/cocoa'
include OSX

class LuzView <  OSX::NSView

  attr_accessor :center, :rect, :radius, :transparency, :enabled

  def initialize
    @radius = 50
    @transparency = 0.5
    @enabled = false
  end

  def initWithFrame(frame)
    self.setNeedsDisplay true
    return self
  end

  def drawRect(rect)
    if @enabled
    NSGraphicsContext.currentContext.setCompositingOperation NSCompositeSourceOut
    context = NSGraphicsContext.currentContext.graphicsPort
    @center = NSEvent.mouseLocation
    CGContextSetRGBFillColor(context, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, @transparency)
    CGContextFillRect(context, rect)
    
    drawLight
    end
  end
  
  def drawLight
    context = NSGraphicsContext.currentContext.graphicsPort
    NSColor.colorWithCalibratedRed_green_blue_alpha(1.0,1.0,1.0,0.0).set
    
    CGContextSetGrayStrokeColor(context, 0, 1)
    CGContextSetLineWidth(context, 0)

    @rect = NSRect.new(@center.x - @radius, @center.y - @radius, @radius*2, @radius*2)
    CGContextAddEllipseInRect(context, @rect)
    CGContextDrawPath(context, KCGPathFill)
  end

end

LightController.rb

require 'osx/cocoa'

class LuzController < OSX::NSObject
  
  ib_outlets :luz_view
  ib_outlets :menu, :size, :size_lbl, :alpha, :alpha_lbl, :enabled
  
  def awakeFromNib
    activateStatusMenu()
    @callback = lambda { |p,t,e,r|
      if (t == KCGEventOtherMouseDown &&
        CGEventGetFlags(e) & KCGEventFlagMaskControl == KCGEventFlagMaskControl)
        toggle(self)
        return
      end
      if @luz_view.enabled
        @luz_view.center = CGEventGetLocation(e)
        @luz_view.setNeedsDisplayInRect NSInsetRect(@luz_view.rect, -30, -30)
      end
      e 
    }
    start_tapping()
  end
  
  ib_action :change_alpha do |sender|
    @luz_view.transparency = @alpha.floatValue
    @alpha_lbl.setStringValue "#{(@alpha.floatValue*100).to_i}%"
    @luz_view.setNeedsDisplay true
  end
  
  ib_action :change_size do |sender|
    @luz_view.radius = @size.floatValue
    @size_lbl.setStringValue "#{(@size.intValue)}px"
    @luz_view.setNeedsDisplay true
  end
  
  ib_action :toggle do |sender|
    @luz_view.enabled = !@luz_view.enabled
    @enabled.setState(@luz_view.enabled ? 1 : 0)
    @luz_view.setNeedsDisplay true
  end
  
  def activateStatusMenu()
      statusItem = NSStatusBar.systemStatusBar.statusItemWithLength(NSVariableStatusItemLength)
      statusItem.retain
      icon = NSImage.alloc.initWithContentsOfFile("#{NSBundle.mainBundle.resourcePath}/Lucecita.png")
      statusItem.setImage icon
      statusItem.setHighlightMode true
      statusItem.setMenu @menu
  end
  
  def start_tapping
    eventMask = 167772384 # Magic Number: LeftMouseDragged MouseMoved RightMouseDragged OtherMouseDragged OtherMouseDown
    eventTap = CGEventTapCreate(KCGSessionEventTap, KCGHeadInsertEventTap,
                                0, eventMask, @callback, nil)
    eventSrc = CFMachPortCreateRunLoopSource(nil, eventTap, 0)
    CFRelease(eventTap)
    CFRunLoopAddSource(CFRunLoopGetCurrent(),  eventSrc, KCFRunLoopCommonModes)
    CFRelease(eventSrc)
  end

  def applicationShouldTerminate
    CFRunLoopRemoveSource(CFRunLoopGetCurrent(), mEventSrc, KCFRunLoopCommonModes)
  end
  
end

And the application is here: Lucecita.app

You can activate it with the menu or with ctrl-Button3Click or ctrl-Button4Click if you have a three button mouse or a Mighty Mouse.

I am preparing a screencast to show yo how I coded it but that will be later, until then you can see inside the app package and check the ruby code.

New features in RoRGate 3.0 beta

2008-07-15T06:15:00.005-05:00

These are three new features in RoRGate 3.0:

Pictures as icons:

Now you can use png and jpeg files as icons

Web Inspector:

The WebKit inspector can be accessed through a contextual menu.

Preferences:

Now you can change the name, port and icon of an existing app.

Server Output in RoRGate

2008-07-10T19:28:00.006-05:00

I've added a developer menu to the resulting apps in RoRGate, if you download the 0.3 beta version you will see the change: With that, you as developer can use it to see your app in action, see the server output and edit it in TextMate. The only thing is that the server output works strange with 2.x rails apps, I don't know why, but only the error output is displayed in such rails apps. I use the NSTask class with an NSPipe for both the standart output and error but with rails 2.x it behaves strangely. Also I've embedded RubyCococa, but I can't make it work in both Leopard and Tiger because of libffi.dylib. Leopard's RubyCocoa has it installed in /usr/lib and I don't know where it is in Tiger. Maybe the solution is to create a Tiger version and a Leopard version, but I'm very lazy and I'd rather have only one. Lastly, I need a new laptop (many of my friends will agree) and because of that, I've added a donations pledgie badge for RoRGate and some ads here in my blog. I'm a student and I own an iBook G3 which has been giving me a lot of trouble lately, so as I'm most of the time at school (school's computers ain't good either) deploying to or developing for a lot of platforms I need a new one, one in which running a single unit test doesn't seem to last forever and I hope some of you(friends or not) could help me. My-new-laptop blogthon :) has begun.

RoRGate

2008-07-04T18:53:00.008-05:00

A few days ago, Jason Crystal wrote in his blog a way to package rails applications in a Mac OS X one and I commented that I've been developing an application called RoRGate to automate that with another process.

I'll be posting more news about it as I improve my implementation. Today I added the posibility to manage multiple windows in a Gate(the resulting OS X app). Also, the RoRGate-dev.dmg will be the unsable version with all the latest changes, so if want to try the newest features you'll have to download it and not the versioned one.

The DMGs will be hosted (by now) in:

http://code.google.com/p/rorgate/

The source code in:

http://github.com/juanger/rorgate/tree/master

I'd appreciate if you can send me any errors or comments to improve it.

FreeBSD startup script with ruby

2008-05-26T01:16:00.004-05:00

Since some days ago I've been using FreeBSD in a Rails deployment server configuring it to use Capistrano, nginx and mongrel but then I wanted my mongrel instances to be run at startup and what I found was this message:

Put your .sh script at /usr/local/etc/rc.d

And since I like ruby, I began to code my script with it and the problems came:

env: ruby: No such file or directory

custom_require.rb:27: command not found: mongrel_rails

First, here is my final code that was inspired by Tim Morgan's:

#!/usr/local/bin/ruby
 
puts ENV["PATH"] += ":/usr/local/bin"
app_dir = '/usr/local/www'

apps = [
  scielo_index = { :name => "ScieloIndex",
                   :path => 'index.scielo.unam.mx/current',
                   :config => "config/mongrel_cluster.yml",
                   :cluster => true },
                   
  redmine = { :name => "Redmine",
              :path => 'dev.scielo.unam.mx/Redmine',
              :config => "config/mongrel_8000.yml",
              :pid => "log/mongrel.pid" }
  ]
 
if ['stop', 'restart'].include? ARGV.first
  apps.each do |app|
    path = File.join app_dir, app[:path]
    puts "Stopping #{app[:name]}..."
    if app[:cluster]
      `mongrel_rails cluster::stop -C #{path}/#{app[:config]}`
    else
      `mongrel_rails stop -c #{path} -P #{app[:pid]}`
    end
  end
end
 
if ['start', 'restart'].include? ARGV.first
  apps.each do |app|
    path = File.join app_dir, app[:path]
    puts "Starting #{app[:name]}..."
    if app[:cluster]
      `mongrel_rails cluster::start -C #{path}/#{app[:config]}`
    else
      `mongrel_rails start -C #{path}/#{app[:config]}`
    end
  end
end
 
unless ['start', 'stop', 'restart'].include? ARGV.first
    puts "Usage: mongrel {start|stop|restart}"
    exit
end

The key part is the ENV["PATH"] setup, that line is needed as FreeBSD's PATH at startup is "/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin" and this also leads us to change the interpreter path from something like "#!/usr/bin/env ruby" to "#!/usr/local/bin/ruby", i.e. its full path. That's all, now our ruby script really runs at startup time without complaining.

TextMate, SSH and github

2008-05-20T14:39:00.005-05:00

TextMate is a flexible Mac OS X text editor, it has everything i need, but some days ago I found that it can't prompt me for my password when needed(like when I want to push my changes to github) and that's not cool. Fortunately, github uses ssh keys and with SSHKeychain installed you can forget about passwords and it helps TextMate to pull and push to github(or any other server) without pubkey authentication errors. Now that's cool.

RTranscoder: jpeg to mpeg

2008-05-15T18:50:00.008-05:00

Some days ago I made some tests using mencoder to create a mpeg4 video with some jpeg images. Then I tried to use RTranscoder to achieve the same result with ruby but it's kind of tricky to get it running correctly, because you can get an "error parsing command line" error if you don't give RTranscoder the correct information. After a lot of attempts, my code got like this:

 MEncoder.encode do |mencoder|
   mencoder.input = "mf://*.jpg"
   mencoder.mf.fps = 25
   mencoder.mf.type = "jpg"
   mencoder.output_video_codec = :lavc
   mencoder.lavc.vcodec = "mpeg4"
   mencoder.lavc.mbd = 2
   mencoder.lavc.trell = true
   mencoder.output_audio_codec = 'copy'
  
   mencoder.output = 'output.avi'
 end

As you can see, instead of doing something like mencoder.mf = "fps=25:type=jpg" (my error) you have to do it with mencoder.mf.fps and mencoder.mf.type respectively, the same with lavc and everytime you need to pass an argument with suboptions separated by ":". Here is the page of Rtranscoder.

MacRuby

2008-03-08T10:36:00.017-06:00

Some days ago I found the MacRuby project and it seems it will bring a lot of new things to ruby+cocoa programming. And as I've been reading and writing some RubyCocoa apps in the last months I want to share the joy it gave me.

First of all, it will use the new YARV interpreter that was released with the 1.9 version of ruby last christmas which is faster than the so called MRV(the "M" is for Matz), also, it doesn't use the ruby garbage collector, but the cocoa one. This allows the programs to not stop while the garbage collector is running cause the cocoa garbage collector runs in another thread.

Speaking of threads, another feature of the new ruby 1.9 is that it allows users to use POSIX threads(cool!).

Another cool feature are named parameters are also useful when calling methods, the message style when calling an object's "method" of Objective-C looks like:

NSAlert *alert = [NSAlert alertWithMessageText: @"What?",
   defaultButton: @"OK",
   alternateButton: @"Cancel",
   otherButton: nil,
   informativeTextWithFormat: @"I am an alert!"];

And the MacRuby counterpart:

alert = NSAlert.alertWithMessageText("What?",
  defaultButton: "OK",
  alternateButton: "Cancel",
  otherButton: nil,
  informativeTextWithFormat: "I am an alert!")

Isn't that sexy?? No more big method names:

alertWithMessageText_defaultButton_alternateButton_otherButton_informativeTextWithFormat

The last beautiful thing I am going to comment about are ruby hashes inheriting from NSDictionary. That's cool because you can pass a ruby hash to methods that need an NSDictionary instead of constructing one in the cocoa way.

The bad things: MacRuby is under development, it needs Leopard and only runs on Intel Macs. But looks promising.