“Chocolatatum meum butyro vecordi tuo contaminavisti!” is how you say “You got your chocolate in my peanut butter!” in latin.

Just thought you should know.

Thanks to @fadeaccompli for the translation and wikipedia for the picture.

If you use any Google services (GMail, GTalk, etc.) and you care even a little bit about the data in that account, then you should turn on 2-step verification.

If you need a story to explain why you need this, the check out this story by James Follow as he recounts how his wife’s account was hacked (This is an article from The Atlantic).

When she looked at her Inbox, and her Archives, and even the Trash and Spam folders in her account, she found—absolutely nothing. Of her allocated 7 gigabytes of storage, 0.0 gigabytes were in use, versus the 4+ gigabytes shown the day before. Six years’ worth of correspondence and everything that went with it were gone. All the notes, interviews, recollections, and attached photos from our years of traveling through China. All the correspondence with and about her father in the last years of his life. The planning for our sons’ weddings; the exchanges she’d had with subjects, editors, and readers of her recent book; the accounting information for her projects; the travel arrangements and appointments she had for tomorrow and next week and next month; much of the incidental-expense data for the income-tax return I was about to file—all of this had been erased. It had not just been put in the “Trash” folder but permanently deleted.

It’s almost like a modern day camp-fire ghost story; it sent shivers up and down my spine.

I regularly backup my GMail account (and copies of my calendar and contacts are stored on my computer, phone, etc.) but having someone going through my emails wouldn’t make me happy.

So go and enable 2-step verification. It’s not perfect but it will lower the odds of you having your own horror story to tell.

Ciao!

Last week, TextMate 2.0 early-alpha was released. This release has been a long-time coming. It includes lots of improvements that people have wanted for a long time.

I am currently a TextMate user. Mainly because I’m an OS X and do Ruby programing and TextMate has lots of things to make this easier. I still love Emacs, though. One of the things I’ve been waiting for has been mark-and-select (a.k.a. control-space in Emacs). I haven’t seen it yet, but then again, I’m only starting to play with TM2.

This is just a post to place all the helpful links, posts, etc. into one place so I can stop leaving open tabs in my browser (and so you can see them too).

• rmate is a way to open textmate from a remote system. Using it securely requires setting up SSH forwarding.
• A new site: TextMate 2 tips
• .tm_properties is the new way to configure projects.
• A Whitespace Bundle that shows invalid white space (think git diff --check).

Ciao!

Unashamedly stolen from a Hints and Kinks blog postg; I added information about the Homebrew solution

If you use ‘git gui’ on the Mac, you may find that it repeatedly pops up a message about spell checking being unavailable. This happens when using the MacPorts or Homebrew versions of git.

The error message will say something like (the language that’s missing might be different):

Spell checking is unavailable: No word lists can be found for the language "en_US"

You can easily fix this in MacPorts with:

$ sudo port install aspell aspell-dict-en

Or in Homebrew with:

$ brew install aspell --lang=en

Ciao!

Microsoft has finally figured out how to make opening a .txt file dangerous…

“This security update resolves a publicly disclosed vulnerability in Microsoft Windows. The vulnerability could allow remote code execution if a user opens a legitimate rich text format file (.rtf), text file (.txt), or Word document (.doc) that is located in the same network directory as a specially crafted dynamic link library (DLL) file.”

Derp!

I just learned this today, while taking a Ruby on Rails class from Jumpstart Lab.

I have, many times, messed up a rails generate command. For example, using singular where plural is needed or the reverse.

Today, I learned that you can undo a generate by using rails destroy with the same arguments you used for the generate command.

Example:

rails generate controller article
# Oops!
rails destroy controller article
rails generate controller articles

Apparently only a few of us in class knew about this during this class.

I’d worked around not knowing this by using git to commit everything and then reverting everything if I messed up.

Why doesn’t a generate command show a message explaining that it can be undone with destroy? It’d be really really helpful.

Ciao!

PS: I also discovered you can “redo” the last migration as well, which is really handy as well for repairing mistakes:

rake db:migrate:redo

Apparently Ruby doesn’t work well (or barely at all) with Lion and X Code 4.1

In fact, it crashes with gusto when compiled with X Code 4.1….UNLESS you know the magic words!

I’m unclear how ruby 1.8.7 crashes and burns, but 1.9.2-p290 crashes with annoying (yet seemingly random) regularity. It looks like, at the minimum, threading is definitely having a problem with LLVM. You can test it out yourself, if you have had the misfortune of installing ruby on Lion before reading this…

# This will make  LLVM compiled OS-X Ruby
# fall down and go boom.
Fiber.new {}.resume

Fortunately, the fix is simple. Put this in your ~/.bashrc or equivalent-shell-startup file:

export CC=/usr/bin/gcc-4.2

That line forces any project to compile using GNU Gcc instead of LLVM’s gcc. Not ideal, but at least Ruby works.

If you’ve already installed a ruby or two or compiled any native extensions using the llvm-gcc, then you’ll have to remove them (replace the version with your version(s)):

$ rvm remove ruby-1.9.2-p290
$ rvm install ruby-1.9.2-p290
$ gem pristine --all          # Rebuilds all natively built gems
                              # ...repeat for all gemsets. *sigh*

I went for the nuclear option since I wasn’t sure what was broken and what okay. Warning: this command will destroy everything in ~/.rvm, including any customizations you’ve set therein.

$ rvm implode
$ bash < <(curl -s https://rvm.beginrescueend.com/install/rvm)

Then I had to reinstall all the rubies I use and reset up any gemsets.

I hope this helps someone.

Ciao!

A quick and easy way to packages up-and-running in Aquamacs is to use Marmalade. Marmalade is a package manager. It’ll fetch an elisp package for you, install it, and make sure it loads up again when you restart emacs.

Marmalade is sort of the next-gen version of ELPA, the Emacs Lisp Package Archive. Even better, it’s the package manager (with some tweaks) used in Emacs 24 (which will become Aquamacs 2.4).

I’m excited to see Emacs improving the user experience. It’s about time it started making life easier for people who want more than a bare-minimum emacs experience.

Getting setup

First download package.el and put it in ~/Library/Preferences/Aquamacs Emacs/:

$ cd ~/Library/Preferences/Aquamacs\ Emacs/
$ wget http://repo.or.cz/w/emacs.git/blob_plain/1a0a666f941c99882093d7bd08ced15033bc3f0c:/lisp/emacs-lisp/package.el

Next edit ~/Library/Preferences/Aquamacs Emacs/Preferences.el and add these lines:

(require 'package)
;; Marmalade
(add-to-list 'package-archives
             '("marmalade" . "http://marmalade-repo.org/packages/"))
;; The original ELPA archive still has some useful
;; stuff.
;; (add-to-list 'package-archives<br />
;;              '("elpa" . "http://tromey.com/elpa/"))
(package-initialize)

Now restart Aquamacs.

Installing Packages

Once you have Aquamacs running, type M-x list-packages

Wait a few seconds and you’ll see a list of packages. You move around the buffer normally. To get help, press h. To mark something for install, press i. To actually execute the install, use x.

After you install a package, you may need to add the appropriate (require 'foo) to Preferences.el. For example, I needed it for “textmate-mode”, “yaml-mode”, and “ecb_snap”, but I didn’t need it for “scss-mode” or “sasl-mode”. I’m not sure if that’s a bug in Marmalade or a “feature”.

Either way, you can use this to install ECB (Use ecb_snap for Aquamacs 2.3a and add (require 'ecb) to the end of your Preferences.el). This is easier than my previous article. Cool!

Closing Notes

If you have any problems, check out the various ELPA resources. Even though it’s a different repository, it still uses the same mechanisms. The only difference is that in the ELPA version of package.el the command to list the packages is package-list-packages, but with the Marmalade version it’s list-packages.

Ciao!

Every so often, I get bored with my theme. I notice usability issues, things I wished I did differently, etc. and I want to play with new technologies like HTML5, CSS3.

I had been using Thematic which is very nice. It has good semantic markup as well as other nice features. But it isn’t HTML5 and I wanted HTML5.

I tried several themes just to play around, and then found a theme that combined boilerplate, html5, compass and sass. Unfortunately, it didn’t really do everything I wanted. I also lost the URL for the github project. sigh.

But I hadn’t seen compass nor sass before (or if I had, it was only in passing). This was really cool stuff. I started playing with and deciding I really wanted to use it.

I like my green color and it is a pain to write the color in everyplace. But compass lets me assign the color to a variable $hero-color, and to then alter it by doing things like darken($hero-color, 30%). It also has a saner form of nesting so I can DRY up my CSS.

In addition, compass has mixins so I don’t have to repeat border-radius multiple times to support different browsers. As well as grid support via blueprint support.

I also took the opportunity to manage my wordpress site via Rake and Capistrano. Normally, I’d blog about how I did it, but capifying my wordpress blog was harder than I would have hoped. You can view my Capfile if you want, but you may need a handful of aspirin.

I also made my theme compatible with mobile devices. Previously I used WPTouch. I wasn’t very fond of it because it looked completely different from my site and I don’t think it actually added anything. But my previous theme looked horrible on mobile devices.

I’d love to hear any feedback. And of course, I’ll answer any questions you might have.

Ciao!

So I decided to try to install virtualenvwrapper
(and virtualenv) on my Mac Book Pro. Virtualenv was explained to me as being python’s version of Wayne E. Seguin’s RVM (Ruby Version Manager).

I’ve tried installing virtualenv/wrapper twice before and failed miserably. But this time I decided to actually do it.

Some quick background: I’ve been a very active python programmer up to and including 2.5 series. I’ve implemented large python-based systems at several of the companies I’ve worked for; including two very successful web applications. I’ve implemented two ORMs in python and even grokked meta-programming in python.

But that was several years ago. I’ve not really done much programming in python since 2007 or so. Except for some smaller utilities. I’ve since started working with Ruby, heavily in the last year, and am really liking it. It took me a while to understand what the underlying philosophy was about but I get it now. Other than some ugly warts (threading in 1.9 acts differently on different OSes and a lot of base classes/types are privileged and don’t deal well with being overridden) Ruby is pretty spiffy.

Since I’ve last done serious programming in python, it has gotten easy_install (it existed, but was beta), pip, and the .egg package format. All big improvements.

Anyway, back to virtualenv/wrapper.

The biggest hurdle the first times I tried installing (and this time too) was that I didn’t understand what virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper are.

For those who don’t know:

Virtualenv does not install new python versions. You need the versions installed some other way (such as a package manager or compiling them yourself). It is a way to manage python packages and libraries. If you’re familiar with RVM, then it’s basically a way to do rvm gemset for python.

However, virtualenv is clunky to use… allegedly, I’ve not played with it.

Fortunately, we have virtualenvwrapper to make life easier! This is similar to RVM in the way it is designed – it’s a bunch of shell functions you source into your shell. You then get commands like:

mkvirtualenv

Creates a new virtual environment (a python gemset, if you will).

rmvirtualenv

Three guesses and the first two don’t count.

workon <env>

Sets which environment to work on. If you don’t specify one, then it’ll list them all. Sort of like rvm use.

deactivate

Deactivate your python environments. Sort of the equivalent of rvm use system.

The instructions

So here’s how I installed virtualenv/wrapper on OS-X:

Install X Code

X Code is the developer tools for Mac OS X. It includes the classic tools like gcc, make, etc. as well as some spiffy Apple designed tools. It’s only $4.99 and worth the price if you’re going to do any development on your Mac.

Warning: The download is huge.

Install homebrew

I installed homebrew. Actually, I’ve had it for while, but if you’re following this on a new Mac, you might want to know that I had installed it. The instructions are straightforward so I won’t repeat them here.

Install python 2.7

This is optional, I suspect. I didn’t play with installing virtualenv/wrapper on the system’s python. I try to leave the system stuff alone, if possible. It saves me headaches later. Especially if I mess something and need to try again.

brew install readline sqlite gdbm
brew install python --universal

I do this in two steps because:

1. I wanted to ensure the dependencies for python are installed before python. Homebrew is getting better with dependencies but it isn’t perfect. If they aren’t installed before, then you would have to uninstall and re-install python to get python notice them.
2. I want to make python –universal so I can build 32bit and 64bit versions.

Install pip

So this was something that confused me greatly, but I eventually figured it out.

You need to run easy_install, but I couldn’t figure out where easy_install was in Homebrew. I looked all over and didn’t find it.

Fortunately, I got frustrated and tried uninstalling and re-installing python and sow this message at the end of the python install:

A "distutils.cfg" has been written, specifing the install-scripts folder as:
  /usr/local/share/python

If you install Python packages via "python setup.py install", easy_install, pip,
any provided scripts will go into the install-scripts folder above, so you may
want to add it to your PATH.

Distribute has been installed, so easy_install is available.
To update distribute itself outside of Homebrew:
    /usr/local/share/python/easy_install pip
    /usr/local/share/python/pip install --upgrade distribute

Yay! Now I know where easy_install…and hey, those are the instructions for installing pip!

/usr/local/share/python/easy_install pip

Install virtualenvwrapper

This also installs virtualenv as well.

/usr/local/share/python/pip install virtualenvwrapper
mkdir ~/.virtualenvs

I’m not sure the mkdir is needed, but I kept seeing it in various instructions.

Configure your shell

I use excellent zsh as my command line shell. Even though I write shell scripts in bash (because it’s more common).

I added this to my zsh startup scripts:

# Setting up the VirtualEnv
export WORKON_HOME=$HOME/.virtualenvs
export VIRTUALENVWRAPPER_PYTHON=/usr/local/bin/python2.7
export VIRTUALENVWRAPPER_VIRTUALENV_ARGS='--no-site-packages'
export PIP_VIRTUALENV_BASE=$WORKON_HOME
export PIP_RESPECT_VIRTUALENV=true

if [[ -r /usr/local/share/python/virtualenvwrapper.sh ]]; then
    source /usr/local/share/python/virtualenvwrapper.sh
else
    echo "WARNING: Can't find virtualenvwrapper.sh"
fi

This does a couple of things:

1. It sets the home for virtual envs.
2. Uses python2.7 by default.
3. Tells it not to install site-packages. I don’t plan on installing any into homebrew’s python, but just in case.
4. Tells pip to honor the virtualenv stuff.

The last bit was the part I banged my head on the most, even though I didn’t know it. I was following some instructions on installing virtualenvwrappers and they left that part out. Commands like mkvirtualenv are shell functions. virtualenvwrapper.sh contains those functions. I kept looking for shell scripts or programs or something.

I put a conditional and a warning around it incase I change homebrew or uninstall something.

Conclusion

So hopefully someone finds this useful. If not, I’ll refer back to it at some point in the future when I need to redo all this for some reason. I’ll have forgotten it all by then.

Ciao!

I’ve been on vacation in Bar Harbor, Maine and have enlarged my portable toy collection somewhat. I usually carry a knife with me at all times, plus I usually have a multi-tool at hand someplace nearby (bag, backpack, etc.)

I used to carry around a Leatherman (AKA the Pocket Survival Tool) but I eventually stopped. One reason is because it would become too easy or too hard to open and shut. The version I have (not all do) has knobs for changing the tightness but I could never get it to be the right firmness for opening. I wanted it hard enough to open that it doesn’t flop open randomly if I put it down or drop it in a pocket but easy enough to open that I don’t have drop everything and use both hands to open or shut it. Or worse, needing so much force to open and shut that it became a hazard.

In addition, it had no locks for the blades. I scared myself silly a bunch of times trying to use the knife and it would lurch half shut. Fortunately, the other half of the handle prevented it from shutting completely and I didn’t have anything valuable in the way. The Leatherman was an attractive idea, but a lousy product. I’ve long since stopped carrying it.

Now Victorinox has the awesome SwissTool Spirit Plus Ratchet, which is what the Leatherman should have been to begin with. It has locks for the blades and other tools. You don’t have to open the pliers to get at the tools. And it has a detent for the blades so they don’t flop open and once they are open, they move easily. I can open most (not all) of the tools with one hand and shut them too (though I can’t do that fast).

The kit I got, the “plus” model with ratchet, has a small ratchet socket wrench with it and some bits. As I work on computers all the time, this is awesome. I also have a Cybertool 34 but I can rarely use the socket wrench because it won’t fit inside any computers I use. And using it on the outside is a pain because you have to twist the tool around even though it’s lopsided.

I heartily recommend this tool. It’s pretty darn nice.

I also got a new pocket knife. The Tanto Blade BK-1 from Benchmade. This is an excellent knife and I think it’s my new favorite. The blade is amazingly sharp and I like the Tantō-style. The pocket clip is on the correct (in my opinion) side so that the tip opens down. The lock the “AXIS” lock and is excellent. It is a spring locked slide on the back of the knife.

My old favorite knife is a Kershaw Leek 1660cktx. I switched the clip on it (again so the blade opens down) and carried it for a couple years, but last month the safety broke off when I dropped it. I have the phone number to Kershaw and I’ve been told that I just have to call to get a replacement part. My wife has one too and her safety broke as well. Other than that, I do like them. Though the 1660 is a little shorter in my hand than I’d like.

Finally, we bought a pair of Pentax 8×40 PCF WP II Binoculars because we forgot our el-cheapo pair at home (we used to carry them in the car all the time, but apparently we didn’t move them into the new car). I’m not a binoculars nuts, so I’m not very qualified, but they seem very nice. Good field of view, easy controls, and they are waterproof to 1meter. I’ve seen binoculars gets messed up by moisture, so I thought this was a great idea. We used them to watch lounging seals and flying birds.

I bought my new toys at “Jekyll & Hyde” in Bar Harbor, Maine. The gentleman who helped me was knowledgable and was willing to let me drool my way through his whole stock (I’m only admitting to doing that once). And the prices are were actually as good or better than Amazon, which I thought was great.

New Toys:

• SwissTool™ Spirit Plus Ratchet
• Benchmade Tanto Blade BK-1
• Pentax 8×40 PCF WP II Binoculars

We have recently started using Jenkins at work and it is awesome.

Jenkins describes itself as a continuous integration software, but it really is more. You can use Jenkins to build, test, and do cron jobs, etc. It’s very powerful and really useful.

Not only is very useful, it is being developed and improved quickly. Bugs get fixed rapidly by a very motivated team of developers. Combined with its extensive list of plugins, Jenkins becomes amazingly useful in a variety of situations.

Jenkins’ main unit of work is a ‘job’. While it obviously has a preference for Maven jobs, it works very well with so-called “free-style” jobs; jobs that use arbitrary commands.

Jobs can be triggered on SCM changes, cron specifications, a file being created, a url changing, or anything a plugin might add. For example, we trigger builds for some jobs based on Gerrit changes allowing us to test changes before they enter git’s master branch.

The support for kinds of activities that can be performed is amazing: Unix shell, Windows cmd, jPython, jRuby … just to name a few.

I’m seriously contemplating replacing my cron jobs with automan on Gerf.Org just because it is so much handier to be able to look at logs, re-trigger a cron job, etc. Not to mention that I can use it for continuos integration of IATed and any other projects I want.

Jenkins has great support for slave nodes. Out of the box it supports unix slave nodes via SSH; it will automatically connect to the slave and setup the correct JDKs, etc. all on its own. Even setting up a windows slave is relatively easy: Install a JVM, go to the Jenkins page for that slave node and web-launch the slave software; it does the rest. To make the slave permanent across re-boot, use the menu option in the slave program to install it as a service. Not as easy as with Unix, but still very easy.

If you want to try it out, you can get it running really quickly by running java -jar jenkins.war… it has a built in servlet container server. You can even try it out via Java Web Start: . It’ll save everything in ~/.jenkins.

Overall, I give Jenkins two thumbs up.

Ciao!

One of the more obvious problems is the lack of administration functionality. For example, there is no administration interface for deleting or renaming a project.

However, I needed to rename a project and here is how I did it.

WARNING: This was done against schema_version 47. I make no promises it works for other versions.

This is a SQL script. Replace the words NEW and OLD with your new and old project names. Since I did it for multiple projects, I used Perl to programmatically replace the values.

BEGIN;
UPDATE account_project_watches
   SET project_name = 'NEW'
 WHERE project_name = 'OLD';

UPDATE projects
   SET name = 'NEW'
 WHERE name = 'OLD';

UPDATE ref_rights
   SET project_name = 'NEW'
 WHERE project_name = 'OLD';

UPDATE changes
   SET dest_project_name = 'NEW'
 WHERE dest_project_name = 'OLD';

COMMIT;

This is enough to hold me over until issue 560 is finished.

Ciao!

I just uploaded It’s All Text! 1.5 to AMO. [edit: It's out!]

Assuming I made no mistakes, then it should appear shortly.

The big changes are that it supports Firefox 4.0b7. In addition to that, I have fixed some of the problems with OS-X. In part because the ability to launch applications in Firefox is becoming more annoying with each release.

But not to worry! I’m working hard on IAT2.0. The next version will be broken into two parts: An editor server and the actual plugin.

Why do it that way? Well, it provides better control over the editor application. It also allows me to port it to Chrome (and possibly other browsers, like Safari).

The downside is that after installing IAT2.0, you’ll have to download an application and have it running.

I’d love to hear feedback on whether that is too evil or too much work. Or if it’s just fine and dandy. I’m working hard to try to make sure the editor server is easy to install and use, so hopefully I’ll minimize any problems.

Ciao!

PS: Don’t forget to send me beer money to encourage me!

Ever wanted to make an empty branch (with no history in it) in git? It’s not hard…

Why would you want to do this? Well, for example, I have a new project in github. I’m trying to implement it in several ways, jRuby, Java, Qt, etc. Having separate branches is really handy.

Another reason you might want to do this is for upstream tracking. I used this to cold-start a branch where I commit all the changes of an upstream project and then merge them into my customized branch. Git makes tracking an upstream project much easier.

Anyway, enough of that. Here’s how to do it:

# WARNING: Make sure you've committed all your work...
#
# Point git at a new branch:
git symbolic-ref HEAD refs/heads/yournewbranch
# Remove the index file so it doesn't know about the files
# that are already checked out:
rm .git/index
# Clean up all the files that were checked out before:
git clean -xfd
# Done!