Alejandro Riera Mainar

MBP Trackpad, right click (two-finger tap) not working on Mac OS X Lion

2011-12-11T00:00:00-08:00

MBP Trackpad, right click (two-finger tap) not working on Mac OS X Lion

11 December 2011 - Madrid

Don't know why but my MacBook Pro (early 2008 ~ MBP 4,1) won't enable the two-finger tap through the trackpad preferences panel o_O?

Solution, from your console:

defaults -currentHost write -g com.apple.trackpad.enableSecondaryClick -bool YES

Then log out and log in again.

src: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3189975?start=0&tstart=0

Configuring Git after formatting

2011-12-11T00:00:00-08:00

Configuring Git after formatting

11 December 2011 - Madrid

Simply copy&paste this in your console:

#Author
git config --global user.name "Alejandro Riera"
git config --global user.email ariera@whatever.com

# Abbreviations
git config --global alias.st status
git config --global alias.co checkout
git config --global alias.ci commit
git config --global alias.br branch

##
# Pimp-out log:
# From: http://www.jukie.net/bart/blog/pimping-out-git-log
git config --global alias.lg "log --graph --pretty=format:'%Cred%h%Creset -%C(yellow)%d%Creset %s %Cgreen(%cr) %C(bold blue)<%an>%Creset' --abbrev-commit --date=relative"

src: http://superuser.com/questions/169695/what-are-your-favorite-git-aliases

GET request with params in Titanium to a Rails backend

2011-08-30T00:00:00-07:00

GET request with params in Titanium to a Rails backend

30 Agaust 2011 - Madrid

I'm currently developing an iPhone app with Appcelerator's Titanium that communicates with a Rails backend. Doing so I found a few problems and here is how I solved them. This is the first time I work with Titanium, so don't expect something fancy ; )

Ajax GET request with params:

We'll use Titanium.Network.HTTPClient, if you have never used it I suggest that you take a look a this awesome example in the Titanium wiki that perfectly covers the basics.

Say our rails app is a blog at the domain: http://www.railsblog.com, and we want to get the all posts that are written in Spanish by the author ariera. My first attempt to do so looked like this:

    var postsReq = Titanium.Network.createHTTPClient();
    postsReq.open("GET", "http://www.railsblog.com/posts");
    var params = {
        language: "spanish",
        author: "ariera"
    };
    postsReq.send(params);

It took me some time to understand why, but that code doesn't work as you would expect it to work. Although we clearly specified that we wanted to do a GET request it will do it as a POST. The reason why this happens is that when you pass any parameter to the send method it automatically converts the request into POST.

My solution was to manually construct the url with parameters using encondeURI:

    var url = "http://www.railsblog.com/posts";
    var params = "?language=spanish&author=ariera";
    var encodedURI = encodeURI(url + params);
    
    var postsReq = Titanium.Network.createHTTPClient();
    postsReq.open("GET", encodedURI);
    postsReq.send();

And that finally worked. But was that all? Of course not ;-P

Titanium enable your Rails app:

When testing the iPhone app with my local copy of this railsblog I got the most weird succinct not-descriptive error Rails ever gave me:

Started GET "/posts?language=spanish&author=ariera" for 127.0.0.1
  Processing by PostController#index as 
Completed 500 Internal Server Error in 1ms

NoMethodError (undefined method `ref' for nil:NilClass):
  

Rendered .../gems/actionpack-3.1.0.rc4/lib/action_dispatch/middleware/templates/
    rescues/_trace.erb (1.1ms)
Rendered .../gems/actionpack-3.1.0.rc4/lib/action_dispatch/middleware/templates/
    rescues/_request_and_response.erb (0.9ms)
Rendered .../gems/actionpack-3.1.0.rc4/lib/action_dispatch/middleware/templates/
    rescues/diagnostics.erb within rescues/layout (4.8ms)

that NoMethodError (undefined method 'ref' for nil:NilClass) error drove me crazy for a while. Apparently this is due to a mix of user agent and Mime Types handled incorrectly by Rails. Following this stackoverflow answer I did this:

    # config/initializers/mime_types.rb
    Mime::Type.register_alias "text/html", :titanium

    # app/controllers/application_controller.rb
    before_filter :handle_titanium
    
    def titanium_user_agent?
      @mobile_user_agent ||= ( request.env["HTTP_USER_AGENT"] && 
        request.env["HTTP_USER_AGENT"][/Titanium/] )
    end
    
    def handle_titanium
      request.format = :titanium if titanium_user_agent?
    end

A keyboard shortcut to run tests with watchr

2011-08-13T00:00:00-07:00

A keyboard shortcut to run tests with watchr

13 Agaust 2011 - Madrid

When developing in rails I use watchr to run the tests each time a file is saved, but lots of times I find my self adding a whitespace or a newline and saving just to trigger watchr and run the tests.

I wanted to have is a simple keyboard shortcut (like F15) to tell watchr to run the last spec, and mpartel (thx! : ) gave me an idea on how to do it, so here it is.

The rest of the entry is in this gist: https://gist.github.com/1139285

Nestable, sortable and dragable categories for a Rails project

2011-08-07T00:00:00-07:00

Nestable, sortable and dragable categories for a Rails project

07 Agaust 2011 - Madrid

In the project I'm working on we wanted to have a Category model which we wanted to be nestable. But we also liked the user to have a draggable interface to manage and rearrange the order of his categories. So we chose awesome_nested_set for the model and jQuery.nestedSortable for the UI.

It took me some time to arrange things to work properly so I wanted to share my work in case it helps anybody.

The rest of the entry is in this gist: https://gist.github.com/1130504

diMLOrb, my first gem

2011-07-17T00:00:00-07:00

diMLOrb, my first gem

17 July 2011 - Madrid

Metro Ligero Oeste (MLO) is the tramway line I have to take every day. Knowing its timetables is extremely important, especially on weekends when you may have to wait 20 minutes if you miss one. They have recently made a web page which is not awesome but does the job. Nevertheless I wanted more, I wanted a single-click web-app for my iphone that gives me only the information of the trams I take every day, the result: diMLOya

For that purpose I decided to create my first gem ever, you can check it out in its repo: https://github.com/ariera/diMLOrb

Shortcuts (⌘→ & ⌘←) with Textmate and Snow Leopard

2010-06-08T00:00:00-07:00

Shortcuts (⌘→ & ⌘←) with Textmate and Snow Leopard

08 June 2010 - Madrid

Don’t know why these two shortcuts (aswell as home and end buttons) stoped working in textmate after I upgraded to SL.

The solution (based on this post of the textmate blog) is simple: create and edit the DefaultKeyBinding.dic file:

    mkdir ~/Library/KeyBindings
    cd ~/Library/KeyBindings
    touch DefaultKeyBinding.dict
    open -a TextMate DefaultKeyBinding.dict

Paste these bindings:

{
    /* home */
    "\UF729"  = "moveToBeginningOfLine:"; /* home */
    "@\UF702"  = "moveToBeginningOfLine:"; /* command + left arrow*/
    "$\UF729" = "moveToBeginningOfLineAndModifySelection:";
    "$@\UF702" = "moveToBeginningOfLineAndModifySelection:";

    /* end */
    "\UF72B"  = "moveToEndOfLine:";
    "@\UF703"  = "moveToEndOfLine:";
    "$\UF72B" = "moveToEndOfLineAndModifySelection:";
    "$@\UF703" = "moveToEndOfLineAndModifySelection:";

    /* page up/down */
    "\UF72C"  = "pageUp:";
    "\UF72D"  = "pageDown:";
}

Restart Textmate & enjoy : )