Locomotivation : Comments

Comment on Working from Beijing by iris

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 02:28:33 +0000

hello

Comment on jQuery Parallax Scrolling - Build your own 1980's video game! by Emily.x

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 11:05:58 +0000

Sorry To Say This But I Cant See The Pictures ..? Can AnyOne Help Me Please.

Comment on Smells like a Google Search: Easily grab inbound search terms in Rails using search_sniffer by comparco

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 21:12:53 +0000

can a grab be done on a PPC to your site, or does google swallow it?

Comment on jQuery Parallax Scrolling - Build your own 1980's video game! by Sizilien

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 08:24:31 +0000

Thanks! Great job. I look forward to seeing all the tutorials

Comment on Simple Ruby On Rails Full Text Search Using Xapian by Overbryd

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 15:22:42 +0000

I’ve implemented some “magic” as a proposal to this post: http://blog.projectxtech.com/2008/09/20/xapian-search-acts_as_xapian-tip-ii/

You can find my fork here: http://github.com/Overbryd/acts_as_xapian/tree/master Discussion is here: http://groups.google.com/group/acts_as_xapian/browse_thread/thread/876e6b02389fbca8

Comment on Simple Ruby On Rails Full Text Search Using Xapian by Steven Luscher

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 04:21:50 +0000

By which method, and how often, do you run update_index?

Comment on Updating Comatose to Rails 2.1 by Peter Theill

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 21:07:24 +0000

I fixed the “Comatose::PageVersionsAssociationExtension” by simply commenting out my initial “001_add_comatose_support” migration since it’s defining the Comatose::Page in the top of the migration. It’s the one it’s complaining about.

Comment on iStockPhoto credits: use 'em or lose 'em by ThomasFj

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 19:33:11 +0000

I am steaming mad at istockphoto after seeing that about 50 of my credits just vanished. Looking back at my invoice – which you have to search for – it says they expire one year after purchase. Evidently I didn’t see this during purchase, and they never sent me a notification of impending expiration. I am pissed!

Here’s what I just sent to their customer service- “I just found out that all my credits are gone. Now I find out, after looking at my receipt, that they expire in one year after purchase. Somehow I missed that info when purchasing, didn’t get any notices that credits were expiring and now I’m very upset at that policy. That is CRAZY that my credits – money that I’ve put into this account – have ‘expired’ after one year! I know I’m not a big purchaser of images at this time but I am going to be very reluctant to purchase bulk credits in the future or to purchase images from this site at all. I will recommend against this site to anyone. I sincerely hope that you can remove this ridiculous policy. It just penalizes people who purchase in bulk who are trying to save a little money. Now it has cost me WAY more than purchasing at the highest price. “

Comment on jQuery Parallax Scrolling - Build your own 1980's video game! by Webdesign Meppel

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 17:08:36 +0000

The jQuery parallax plugin is quite cool allthough I’m encountering some problems with it in Safari…

Comment on Simplify ActiveRecord Aggregates And Other Goodies Via named_scope by Thong Kuah

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 23:21:03 +0000

The named_scope for acts_as_xapian is cool! However that approach does not preserve the order of the models. I found myself doing this instead:

def self.find_with_xapian(*args) ActsAsXapian::Search.new([User],args[0],args[1]).results.collect{|x| x[:model]} end

And then I can go

@account.users.find_with_xapian(full_search_term, :limit => 30, :sort_by_prefix => sort_prefix, :sort_by_ascending => sort_ascending)

Looking at the sql it seems that the association proxy is very powerful, it will just insert the account_id into the query. :)

Comment on Working from Beijing by Jacqueline

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 02:13:29 +0000

Hello, I am very interested in learning about the working environment in China, Beijing in particular. I was wondering if you could give me some information on what the work space is like. Are there open office formats or are they more traditional with having private offices for the higher ranking employees.

thanks

Comment on jQuery Parallax Scrolling - Build your own 1980's video game! by insic

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 06:51:58 +0000

Sorry im having difficulty in your comment form. please delete my comment. you tutorial is great!

Comment on jQuery Parallax Scrolling - Build your own 1980's video game! by insic2.0@gmail.com

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 06:50:14 +0000

this article is useful.

Comment on jQuery Parallax Scrolling - Build your own 1980's video game! by www.insicdesigns.info/insic2.0@gmail.com

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 06:49:50 +0000

this article is useful.

Comment on Mulling Over Our Ruby On Rails Full Text Search Options by roberto

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 15:04:38 +0000

I’ve used Sphinx and have been very happy with the results. It’s indexing speed and Unicode capabilities are great. However, I used the MySQL SphinxSE storage engine instead of using a Rails plugin. It made SQL-based searches much easier and did not involve having to merge MySQL results and Sphinx results outside of MySQL and Sphinx.

Comment on jQuery Parallax Scrolling - Build your own 1980's video game! by Tevi

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 22:21:03 +0000

Cool stuff!! How would I be able to make that scroll (ie, change background-position) by clicking and dragging only? And one more thing to add to that – can you add momentum when you release the mouse so it doesn’t just stop moving suddenly?

Comment on Simplify ActiveRecord Aggregates And Other Goodies Via named_scope by Jim

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 22:48:40 +0000

@jake – Thanks for the tip! Very cool indeed!

For some reason our code styling is not appearing correct for comments, so I am reposting Jake’s time shortcut here.

["starts_at ?", (args[0].beginning_of_day..(args[1] || Time.now).end_of_day).to_s(:db)]

Comment on Simplify ActiveRecord Aggregates And Other Goodies Via named_scope by jake

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 20:11:40 +0000

i love named scopes.

Quick tip. I noticed you were doing ["starts_at BETWEEN ? AND ?", args[0].beginning_of_day.to_s(:db), (args[1]||Time.now).end_of_day.to_s(:db)]

for time conditions. You can also do: ["starts_at ?", (args[0].beginning_of_day..(args[1] || Time.now).end_of_day).to_s(:db)]

Time has a cool range operator.

peace

—jake

Comment on Purchasing Another MacBook Pro / What is Dell Doing With Their Ubuntu Line? by Tommy

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 18:15:57 +0000

With my MacBook Pro I’m so used to the multi-touch pad that it is pain to use my Dell(at work) without mouse. So easy to scroll around, go back etc.

Comment on Simplify ActiveRecord Aggregates And Other Goodies Via named_scope by Alex Soulim

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 10:35:22 +0000

Thank you, Jim!

Comment on Mulling Over Our Ruby On Rails Full Text Search Options by Jeremy Goodrich

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 21:06:19 +0000

Thanks for the interesting write up on search in RoR. It’s an issue we’re looking at ourselves (yet again) due to growth issues (2 million uniques now for our site) and the need for real time indexing across 140K objects.

We tossed out ferret a long while ago and then settled on tsearch, built into postgreSQL, I’m relatively ignorant of our setup though, as I’m the “business guy” not one of the programmers. It is restricted of course to postgres, but for the most part works great – however, we’re having some growing pains, again, which is why I’m also looking into what other people are using for search.

Still, I think we’ll have to take a look at Hyperestraier too.

@peter – I’ll have to chase you up & ask about the size of what you’re using hyperestraier for, as one thing with ferret, as an example – it was great when our site was much smaller, but the search just didn’t scale to give us the performance we needed as our site grew.

Comment on Simplify ActiveRecord Aggregates And Other Goodies Via named_scope by Eric

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 20:36:04 +0000

I am in love, and I want the whole world to know. Her name is ‘named_scope’! :)

I concur: easily the best new feature of Rails 2.1

Great examples Jim! I was playing around with named_scope today and this gave me the push I needed, just at the right time.

Comment on Simplify ActiveRecord Aggregates And Other Goodies Via named_scope by Wynn Netherland

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 19:09:38 +0000

Best feature of Rails 2.1 hands down!

Comment on Simple Ruby On Rails Full Text Search Using Xapian by Rikas

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 15:57:53 +0000

I can’t compile it on Leopard!

This is what I get on ‘make’ step:


cc1plus: error: unrecognized command line option "-Wstrict-overflow=5" 
make[2]: *** [api/editdistance.lo] Error 1
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make: *** [all] Error 2

Comment on Simple Ruby On Rails Full Text Search Using Xapian by Michael Hartl

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 20:48:03 +0000

I went to a lot of trouble to switch the Insoshi social networking platform from Ferret over to Sphinx and Ultrasphinx, only to discover that the Cool Kids had switched to Thinking Sphinx the previous week. Alas, Thinking Sphinx choked when indexing our Person model, so the It Just Works™ promise of Thinking Sphinx failed for us.

And now it seems that the Cooler Kids are switching to Xapian anyway. I just found out about Xapian last night from Nick Grandy of Wundrbar while talking with Adam Wiggins of Heroku. It’s so hard to stay up-to-date, since the Coolest Kids seem to switch search engines every couple weeks.

So thanks for the Xapian writeup. Both Insoshi and Heroku have it on their radar screens now. And when you change search engines again tomorrow, I’ll be looking forward to the post. :-)

Comment on Simple Ruby On Rails Full Text Search Using Xapian by Jason Derrett

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 17:37:09 +0000

Nice post! Very helpful.

Comment on Purchasing Another MacBook Pro / What is Dell Doing With Their Ubuntu Line? by NTH

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 06:02:28 +0000

I’ve just checked XPS M1330, Dell is offering $400 off for such Ubuntu machine.

Comment on Mulling Over Our Ruby On Rails Full Text Search Options by tc

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 20:18:39 +0000

“Kicking off a job every 3 minutes just to make sure another job is running did not seem right to me.”

I don’t know what seems not-right about it.

If you’ve ever watched a movie on Unix and had XScreensaver not kick in, it’s using the same method.

Apache solves this by continuously creating new processes, and only handling a few requests per process before preemptively killing it. I suspect that’s because it has much less (no?) state to share.

It seems like a good policy to anticipate things which can go wrong before they do. The alternative is “force users to hook it up to their monitoring system before they even know what’s up or down”. You’ll have to that anyway, but at least the auto-restart means you’re not totally dead before then.

Comment on Interview with Jesse Cai by Jesse Cai

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 08:01:08 +0000

I’m based in Beijing in China now, when i’m in US or you’re in China, let’s drink together :)

Comment on Interview with Jesse Cai by Jason Seifer

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 17:33:31 +0000

Hey, thanks a lot for the mention. As a side note, I’m always available for beer.

Comment on Sending Emails with Typo and Rails 2.x by Harry Seldon

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 17:06:54 +0000

Thanks a lot for this post. It helped me a lot. I left a trackback here. I do not if it worked as I am a beginner with the trackbacks.

Comment on Interview with Jesse Cai by Geoffrey Grosenbach

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 16:06:36 +0000

Thanks for the mention! I’m glad you have found PeepCode useful.

Comment on MySQL - ORACLE ROWNUM by mglangford@gmail.com

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:45:37 +0000

Just to make one thing clear: I need it to be divided into quarters, but I don’t know how big the table is, and it will keep growing. So I can’t just use limit 0, x because I don’t know what x is: therein lies the challenge!! thanks

Comment on MySQL - ORACLE ROWNUM by mglangford@gmail.com

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:38:58 +0000

Very impressed with your mysql skills so perhaps you can help me with my problem (I found this page while looking for rownum equivalents…)

I have a view called v_points where a list of players each have a number of points. This is a one to one relationship e.g.

Name | Points
Tony | 8
Rich | 5
Fred | 3

etc (ordered by points.)

Now I want to create 4 separate views, which will be like Leagues 1,2,3,4: the first quarter of the players will be in League 1, the second quarter in League 2 etc.

Is this possible keeping it entirely within MySQL, and therefore creating dynamic views?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

many thanks in advance Mike

Comment on Interview with Jesse Cai by rcoder

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:00:10 +0000

You can hardly say ChinaonRails.com is a community. It’s a two persons show. Most time, just one.

Comment on Simple Ruby On Rails Full Text Search Using Xapian by Jason

Sat, 02 Aug 2008 07:27:32 +0000

Yeah acts_as_xapian looks cool. Thanks for the tutorial!

Comment on Simple Ruby On Rails Full Text Search Using Xapian by Nils Jonsson

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 23:13:06 +0000

Thanks for this thorough write-up! Will have to give Xapian a try.

Comment on Working from Beijing by Chris Lee

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 21:37:01 +0000

Stephen – good to know that! It’s really cumbersome when I can’t get to useful tech blogs or follow feedburner redirects.

talker, dave – thanks!

Comment on Working from Beijing by Dave

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 12:17:02 +0000

welcome to beijing on the rails!

Comment on Simple Ruby On Rails Full Text Search Using Xapian by kf4f

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 19:37:48 +0000

I am using acts_as_ferret, but only in development. After reading all the blogs, I am interested trying Xapian before we move to full production. With Xapian, is it possible to define other qualifiers in the sql? eg in the example above we have Lesson:

class Lesson < ActiveRecord::Base acts_as_xapian :texts => [:name, :description] end

Lets say Lesson also includes teacher id and I want to filter the name description on a particular teacher. Is this possible?

Thanks

Comment on Ruby Editors - The Choices For Non-Mac And Non-VI People by jayson Bruhammer

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 19:31:32 +0000

I use Komodo, really efficient, Perl Style on Ruby is great

Comment on Mulling Over Our Ruby On Rails Full Text Search Options by jim

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 14:45:18 +0000

@peter – Thanks for the detailed analysis on your Hyperestraier / acts_as_searchable experience. As I mentioned at the end of this blog post, I had seen it mentioned before but have not heard of anybody using it on a Rails project before.

It is good to know that it is working out very well for you and gives us Ruby / Rails developers another full-text search option.

Comment on Mulling Over Our Ruby On Rails Full Text Search Options by Peter D.B.

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 08:10:37 +0000

I’ve used Ferret in a production environment (yes, with DRB) and it was a nightmare. It wasn’t a bad setup, it wasn’t bad usage, it was just Ferret and DRB, both of them. The problems didn’t start right away, they emerged at the worst possible time: when the app was running in production for a few weeks, holding quite a bit of data. We rebuilt the index, a few weeks later, same problem (newer version of acts_as_ferret and ferret were out and installed by then) and that just kept on going. We were getting frustrated at that time and when two of us had a corrupted index on their development machines (one person interfacing with the index), Ferret was out.

And we are not the only one having those problems btw. A collegue (who actually recommended Ferret to us like some of the previous posters did) started having problems on a production app that had been running fine for over a year. He didn’t want to believe Ferret was the culprit, but after a long and time consuming search he knew he had to switch to something else, he chose acts_as_solr.

Solr was also the first thing thing came to our mind, but we decided to spend a few days trying out the different fulltext indexers before making a final choice.

acts_as_tsearch: although it was tempting having fulltext indexing not as a separate service, but use the one built-in to the database, we didn’t want to force our customers/prospects into postgreSQL (we know some of them will insist on certain databases, so we need to keep Rails’ abstraction intact)
Thinking Sphinx/UltraSphinx: we came to the exact same conclusion as Rein Henrichs mentioned in a previous comment. Sphinx was quite good actually, but our app simply has too much insert/update/delete actions to make Sphinx’ delta index feel right. We also need to index lots of virtual attributes (data that isn’t in the database)
acts_as_solr: first of all, solr isn’t bad, it’s very good in fact. The reason why we didn’t pick it, is because we found something better and because of the memory consumption of the JVM.
acts_as_searchable: although this indexer never got that much coverage on the mailing list and on blog posts, it just blew us away. Hyperestraier is a separate fulltext indexing service, it runs completely independent of your Rails app and can be used with other languages/services too. You can basically have 100 nodes running for all possible apps on your server, completely independent of each other. It’s a pure C++ library, so it’s memory consumption is low. And boy, this baby is fast, and I mean really fast. It’s been running for over a year now in production in different apps and it hasn’t been restarted just once, it’s so rock stable. It does lack some of the features solr has, such as facetting, so if you need those, you’re out of luck, but we didn’t. I can’t emphasize it enough: if you are looking for a fulltext indexer, consider Hyperestraier too, you won’t be disappointed. The existing plugin could use a little bit of care and nourishment, for now we have to implement :after_update hooks on the related table to rebuild the record index if one of the related records is changed in any way. A little bit of a burden, but easily overcome. It could also use a multimodel search in it’s own namespace (just something like MultiModel.search(:models => [...] instead of the weird way of Ferret), but even that is simply building on the existing plugin and has nothing to do with Hyperestraier.

In short, acts_as_searchable (Hyperestraier) should be considered just as much of an option as Solr and Sphinx, it’s great and has been so good to us and our customers.

Comment on Mulling Over Our Ruby On Rails Full Text Search Options by Aaron H.

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 00:40:35 +0000

I have to chime in. Ferret works great and I find FAR more flexible to and easy to configure than Sphinx. If you are running a mongrel cluster or something, you have to use a DRB server as mentioned in the docs (which is also trivial to set up).

It seems that some time in the past the Rails Envy guys tried to move ferret to clustered server without a using DRB and gave ferret a bad name by having high profile blog posts about it’s “instability in production” due to their improper implementation.

I like the RailsEnvy guys, but I find that really unfortunate because it’s a great search solution.

Comment on Mulling Over Our Ruby On Rails Full Text Search Options by John D. Rowell

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 23:06:14 +0000

I have to second Mr. Khan’s comment, I also use Ferret in several production servers and have only good things to say about it. Unfortunately plenty of ppl looking for a quick & easy solution tried deploying Ferret without using DRb (which is just silly and explained in the docs) and got corrupted indexes.

Ferret is very fast and although it’s a bit complex it is also very flexible. Or rather, it’s simple if all you care about is indexing documents, but if you want to have very independent search fields with different indexing strategies and ranking weights, it is flexible enough to do it but will require some work and lots of reading of the API.

Comment on Mulling Over Our Ruby On Rails Full Text Search Options by Matthew Rudy Jacobs

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 01:14:05 +0000

Re: acts_as_solr being discontinued. Quite a few people are working on improving the plugin.

Notably JobsGoPublic http://github.com/jgp/acts_as_solr

and a guy called Look http://github.com/look/acts_as_solr who is trying to combine the best commits from all of the github forks.

We have a Solr server running off our DB machine, and will hopefully move all of our fulltext searching away from Ferret and onto Solr in the next couple of weeks.

Will get back to you if it all goes wrong. But I hope it wont.

Comment on Mulling Over Our Ruby On Rails Full Text Search Options by Mr. Khan

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 14:46:44 +0000

I run ferret on several production servers. It is a bummer you didn’t give it a try.

The one trick is you have to run it as a separate server—if you have more than one instance of your Rails app.

Other than that I find it to be easy to use and integrates very well into Rails. But I haven’t tried anything else in while, Ferret just works.

Comment on Working from Beijing by http://talkr.cn

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 16:28:53 +0000

欢迎使用伟大的防火长城。 ;)

Comment on Simple Ruby On Rails Full Text Search Using Xapian by slainer68

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:58:06 +0000

Hi, thanks for your answers. I have not tested acts_as_xapian yet.

I have tried UltraSphinx et ThinkingSphinx.

In the last days there were some commits in TS to enhance support for STI models but the support is not complete yet.

I'll try acts_as_xapian soon on one of my projects with some STI models and see if it behave well on STI models.

Will try to remember to post my conclusion :).

Comment on Simple Ruby On Rails Full Text Search Using Xapian by Ryan Bates

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:22:41 +0000

@slainer68, have you tried acts_as_xapian? It looks like it identifies a model by its class name internally, not the name of the table. So I think it would work well with STI.

Comment on Simple Ruby On Rails Full Text Search Using Xapian by Jim

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:08:37 +0000

@Ryan – I believe that Francis based acts_as_xapian very closely on acts_as_solr. A “thinking_xapian” type plugin is probably a great idea being how popular thinking_sphinx has become.

@slainer68 – How are these plugins failing? We have an “Author” model that is an STI to our “User” model and acts_as_xapian worked out of the box.

We simply added the following to our Author model and search worked as it did on our other indexed models.

class Author < User
 # Xapian indexing
  acts_as_xapian :texts => [:email, :first_name, :last_name, :nickname, :id]
end

Comment on Simple Ruby On Rails Full Text Search Using Xapian by slainer68

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 09:56:46 +0000

Hi,

in one big projects we had to evaluate the different full text search engines.

We use a lot of STI models in our projects and every plugin we tried fail to correctly handle this case.

Does someone already use a plugin that correctly works with STI models ?

Thanks, slainer68.

Comment on Working from Beijing by http://www.tangulaluxurytrains.com/Default.aspx

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 06:57:42 +0000

Unique luxury RAILS in China, but also unique on any railway in the world！

Great China, China Great!!

Welcome to China and enjoy Chinese on Rails

Comment on Working from Beijing by Stephen Cronin

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 03:01:45 +0000

I lived in Langfang (a couple of hours out of Beijing) for the last couple of years, until recently.

China’s great! But it’s annoying that websites are blocked. However, it’s easy to get around. If you use FireFox there are several extensions which will help:

- TorButton (you have to download TOR): Good but slow. - FoxyProxy: Works with TOR or your own Proxy server (from memory). - GLadder: Works with several anonymous proxies such as anonymouse.org.

I used a combination of these for 2 years, outside of Beijing (where the restrictions are likely to be tougher) and never had a problem. You’re unlikely to get into trouble!

Comment on Simple Ruby On Rails Full Text Search Using Xapian by Ryan Bates

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 23:10:57 +0000

Xapian looks really cool. I would like to see a variation of acts_as_xapian which has a closer interface to Thinking Sphinx in the way it defines indexes and performs searches.

Full text searching bliss!

Comment on Working from Beijing by Chris Lee

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 22:55:30 +0000

Good advice Bran! I contemplated using some sort of proxy software, but decided against it because I did not want to cause any potential for trouble while working here. If I got my laptop taken away, I’d basically be useless.

But it’s good to know people are able to use that successfully!

Comment on Simple Ruby On Rails Full Text Search Using Xapian by Drogomir

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 22:47:41 +0000

As I see Xapian doesn’t need server running. Is that right?

It means no monitoring and problems with failing requests :)

Comment on Simple Ruby On Rails Full Text Search Using Xapian by Jim

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 21:56:25 +0000

@Kevin – As I mentioned in my previous post we decided against Ultrasphinx due to its configuration system and relative complexity to get it up and running.

Xapian didn’t have any config files to mess with and came with a lot out of the box like spell checking and similar result queries that we were wanting to implement.

With that being said, it is still relatively unknown in the Ruby / Rails circles especially when compared to Sphinx, Ferrett, and Solr. Francis did recently start a acts_as_xapian google group to hopefully help out with questions.

Comment on Working from Beijing by bran

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 20:59:14 +0000

when you’re on vacation out of China, download a copy of a proxy software from wujie.net (all in Chinese thou), which is itself blocked by the wall, and the rest of the world is wide-open next time you’re back to China.

I use it everyday to access blogspot, wordpress, etc.

Comment on Simple Ruby On Rails Full Text Search Using Xapian by Kevin

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 19:58:18 +0000

Can you elaborate? I am prototyping with Sphinx and ThinkingSphinx with an eye to migrating away from Ferret. Xapian sounds interesting, but I haven’t yet run across much information on why it would be better and Sphinx seems to have more development and adoption momentum.

Comment on Smells like a Google Search: Easily grab inbound search terms in Rails using search_sniffer by Wynn Netherland

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 18:25:59 +0000

@remco

The idea is you would take the search terms and pass it to a search engine or an ActiveRecord find and use that to shape the content for your users. Jim has a great write up on using Xapian to do that.

@Jim

Thanks for the Mole tip. Glad to see new ways to use it!

Comment on Smells like a Google Search: Easily grab inbound search terms in Rails using search_sniffer by Jim

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 15:24:53 +0000

Love it! We use The Mole to track user paths through our application(MyTripScrapbook.com). With your search_sniffer we now display the search terms at the beginning of the user path as well. Very nice – thanks for the effort and making it available.

Comment on Updating Comatose to Rails 2.1 by Chris Lee

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 10:38:30 +0000

Dave – We’re on Rails 2.1 as well. I haven’t seen that error before. Did you grab the Uber-Alpha version of Comatose and get rid of all previous Comatose configurations?

Comment on Working from Beijing by Chris Lee

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 10:13:19 +0000

Maybe I’m biased, but learning Mandarin is always a good idea :) I don’t think China will “outrun” the software world in the near future, but because of the abundance of engineering talent and the wage difference, it’s going to be an important factor for sure.

Comment on Working from Beijing by Giancarlo Frison

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 08:22:18 +0000

I’m considering software waves in China like a parallel world, google filters all chinese-arabic languages with different alphabets upstream so I have no idea what’s happen there. I’m afraid for China outrun western world in software technologies, and when it will happen, maybe i’ll must to learn chinese..

Comment on Smells like a Google Search: Easily grab inbound search terms in Rails using search_sniffer by remco

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 07:53:27 +0000

hi,

Great plugin. Newbie question how can i use it to server content based on the search term?

Some examples would be nice!!

Thanks..remco

Comment on Simple Ruby On Rails Full Text Search Using Xapian by Jim

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 02:30:43 +0000

@holyts – We tried sphinx. That is what drove us to Xapian. ;-)

Though to Sphinx’s defense, we did not try ThinkingSphinx which appears to be more in favor over UltraSphinx now a days.

Comment on Updating Comatose to Rails 2.1 by Dave

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 02:13:48 +0000

I removed the dependency on a migration by updating comatose_page.rb with:

acts_as_versioned :table_name=>‘page_versions’, :foreign_key => ‘page_id’, :if_changed => [:title, :slug, :keywords, :body]

Rather than change the database, this simply updates the params for acts_as_versioned.

Unfortunately, I can’t run ANY migrations due to the same Comatose::PageVersionsAssociationExtension issue.

What version of Rails are you using? Edge or straight 2.1.0? I’m using straight 2.1.0.

Comment on Simple Ruby On Rails Full Text Search Using Xapian by holyts

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 02:02:30 +0000

you should try sphinx

Comment on Mulling Over Our Ruby On Rails Full Text Search Options by Walter McGinnis

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 22:31:58 +0000

I’m the original author of the acts_as_zoom plugin which allows use of the ZOOM API for a Z39.50 server like Zebra (http://www.indexdata.com/zebra/).

The Z39.50 standard protocol is popular in the library and museums worlds for providing behind the scenes machine to machine access to search indexes.

We use acts_as_zoom as a part of the Kete open source Rails app. You can find out about Kete and acts_as_zoom here:

http://kete.net.nz/ # software community site http://github.com/kete/ # source for both Kete and acts_as_zoom

Note that there is some newer refactoring of acts_as_zoom in the version included in Kete’s source. We’ll eventually update the plugin (or someone can fork and we’ll pull it) to include those changes.

Cheers, Walter McGinnis Kete Project Lead

P.S. – oh yeah, if you are interested in Ruby ZOOM API support, you’ll probably be interested in ruby-zoom project at http://ruby-zoom.rubyforge.org/

Comment on Working from Beijing by http://chinaonrails.com/topic/view/1925.html

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 02:43:09 +0000

http://chinaonrails.com/topic/view/1925.html

Welcome to Beijing!

More rails lines in BJ now, enjoy Chinese food and travel with rails fans in China.

Comment on Working from Beijing by Wynn Netherland

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 01:58:51 +0000

Awesome, Chris! Nice finally to see some of the photos. I’m glad you’re getting all the web working kinks worked out so I can go over with you next time!

Comment on Updating Comatose to Rails 2.1 by Dave

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 01:44:27 +0000

Thanks for the info. Unfortunately, it’s not working for me. when I run the migrations, I get:

wrong constant name Comatose::PageVersionsAssociationExtension

I don’t see this anywhere. Any idea what this is from?

Comment on Purchasing Another MacBook Pro / What is Dell Doing With Their Ubuntu Line? by Jim

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 13:21:37 +0000

@Björn -

Valid points, so let’s compare the Dell XPS M1330 with Ubuntu with 3 other models.

The regular MacBook with a 13” screen is still a pound more at 5.0 lbs, but comes with a 2.4ghz / 2GB ram / 160GB hard drive for $1214 on Amazon or $584 less than the Dell Ubuntu.

An equivalent MacBook Air (3.0 lbs / 1.6Ghz / 2GB Ram / 80GB HD) is $1719 on Amazon is one pound and $80 less than the Dell Ubuntu.

But here’s the kicker, the exact same Dell XPS M1330 configuration with Windows and a 2.4GHz processor (they don’t have a 2.2GHz option) comes out to be $1623. So I would be paying a $175 premium for a free Ubuntu OS with less power.

Comment on Purchasing Another MacBook Pro / What is Dell Doing With Their Ubuntu Line? by Björn

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 11:42:37 +0000

True, I am sorry – I didn’t mean to insult, so please consider that a purely rhetoric remark exclusively aimed at the argument, not the author personally.

Comment on Purchasing Another MacBook Pro / What is Dell Doing With Their Ubuntu Line? by Chris Lee

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 08:09:48 +0000

Bjorn, you make some valid points. But they would be equally valid without the first paragraph.

Comment on Purchasing Another MacBook Pro / What is Dell Doing With Their Ubuntu Line? by Björn

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 07:57:04 +0000

Sorry, but that is just dumb. You are acting like the typical clueless consumer who only looks at the features list without understanding anything.

Look at the weights and screen sizes:

5.78 lbs | 5.4 lbs | 3.97 lbs

And 15.4 | 15.4 | 13-inch LED

I haven’t looked at Dell’s page, but it seems obvious what is going on: the Ubuntu machine is a completely different form factor. It is more expensive because it is much more optimized and integrated for less weight to carry around. Think further: an iPhone costs 800$ or so – you can get a Computer with 3d graphics and so on for that money, but you wouldn’t say that it is better than the iPhone. The iPhone is expensive because it is small.

Or look at MacBook vs Mac Air – the MacBook probably has the better specifications for cluesless people. But to me there is no doubt that the Air is the better machine by a wide margin and it’s higher price is more than justified.

Anybody can build a Quadcore noisy 6 pounds “notebook” brick, it is in the small and elegant notebooks that the true art of design enters the equation.

Comment on jQuery Parallax Scrolling - Build your own 1980's video game! by artuc

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 06:17:25 +0000

not worked on ie7 / maxthon. but works fine on firefox.

Comment on Purchasing Another MacBook Pro / What is Dell Doing With Their Ubuntu Line? by Bradley Joyce

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 03:58:06 +0000

Hm, don’t most computer manufacturers all use pretty much the same chinese/taiwan/korean parts?

I hate sales tax… I grew up in Oregon (no sales tax) so I always felt like I was getting punished whenever I bought something after I moved to California, then Washington and now Texas.

For myself, I am generally too impatient to buy online. Give it to me now! :-P

Comment on Ruby Editors - The Choices For Non-Mac And Non-VI People by Thomas Ingram

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 02:29:35 +0000

I would like to second Geany. It has a great syntax highlighter. I also love the built-in terminal, but even better would be two (or three)! Also nice is the built-in diff tool.

Comment on Easily switch between Rails development sites with Phusion Passenger by Wynn Netherland

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 01:58:43 +0000

@Alexis, where did you install your rails apps. Can you paste your vhost entries from your httpd.conf?

Comment on Easily switch between Rails development sites with Phusion Passenger by Alexis N. Mueller

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 00:02:50 +0000

Installed Passenger just fine on Leopard with default Apache2 and gem installed Ruby on Rails. Only one problem:

Once I have all of it set up my default non-rails /Users/myusername/Sites site no longer works.

I get the following error: No route matches “myusername” with {:method=>:get}

I assume this means that it’s assuming that there’s a rails app in /Users/myusername/Sites/ when in fact there is not.

Anyone know of a fix or for something I should look out for?

Comment on Purchasing Another MacBook Pro / What is Dell Doing With Their Ubuntu Line? by Chris Lee

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:20:53 +0000

I definitely don’t want to turn this into a mac vs dell flamewar, but I’m curious how Macs are notorious for bad quality design? I thought it was actually the opposite.

I’ve owned 5 Thinkpads (from T20 to T61) and 2 Macs (a Powerbook and a MBP) and both brands seems pretty good. I never had any major issues with either brand.

Comment on Mulling Over Our Ruby On Rails Full Text Search Options by Francis Irving

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 02:20:38 +0000

Thanks for the nice writeup Jim!

Chris – if you have multiple app instances, say on different front end servers, then you can get Xapian’s remote backend working http://xapian.org/docs/remote.html i.e. it has a daemon if you really need it.

Richard/Chris – with Xapian you can update and search simultaneously, and updates are immediate. However, only one thread can update a Xapian database at the same time. Since I wanted offline indexing anyway (as my index operation is risky, complex and slow, involving parsing Word documents, PDFs etc.), I didn’t try to find a solution that causes a second thread in the web application to, say, wait for the database lock. So acts_as_xapian currently only supports offline indexing.

Comment on Purchasing Another MacBook Pro / What is Dell Doing With Their Ubuntu Line? by jeremysmithdallas@gmail.com

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 19:20:52 +0000

Shop http://outlet.dell.com for the best deals…you might get the XPS 1330 for the price you want with the hardware that you want.

Mac’s are notorious for bad quality designs…that’s why OS X on Dell would be a big win for everyone.

Comment on Purchasing Another MacBook Pro / What is Dell Doing With Their Ubuntu Line? by Wynn Netherland

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 12:31:08 +0000

And if it’s on Amazon Prime, you can save shipping (and maybe sales tax)...

Comment on Smells like a Google Search: Easily grab inbound search terms in Rails using search_sniffer by Thomas

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 09:04:57 +0000

I hope you didn’t look at the similar Wordpress-Plugin cuz that’s reacting on referers from Google Reader too which always looks funny stupid.

Comment on Smells like a Google Search: Easily grab inbound search terms in Rails using search_sniffer by Darrin Wortlehock

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 18:54:50 +0000

What a neat, effective way to improve the user experience for your users. I love it.

Comment on iStockPhoto credits: use 'em or lose 'em by Candace

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 09:16:24 +0000

The same thing happened to me – I purchased a bulk of credits in advance and lost over $50 because they expired. I don’t see any reason whatsoever why credits should expire, and I agree with you that it’s an awful lot like stealing!

Needless to say, I won’t be using their service again.

Comment on Mulling Over Our Ruby On Rails Full Text Search Options by Jim

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 04:04:34 +0000

Busy week for search blog posts.

Rein Henrichs just posted about moving from UltraSphinx to ThinkingSphinx, and Mike Hartl just moved from Ferret to UltraSphinx.

Comment on Mulling Over Our Ruby On Rails Full Text Search Options by Richard Heycock

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 09:46:06 +0000

Nice article. I’m using ferret fairly heavily at the moment and while it hasn’t caused me any problems so far I quite keen to replace it with something else.

I’ve had my eye on Xapian for a while so it’s good to hear that others have has success with it.

Chris: Unless I misunderstand your comments I don’t think either of the points about xapian are true. From the web site:

Allows simultaneous update and searching. New documents become searchable right away.

And from the API docs:

For efficiency reasons, when performing multiple updates to a database it is best (indeed, almost essential) to make as many modifications as memory will permit in a single pass through the database. To ensure this, Xapian batches up modifications

Comment on Mulling Over Our Ruby On Rails Full Text Search Options by David Welton

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 09:03:40 +0000

I use acts_as_tsearch with Postgresql’s tsearch2. It’s not very portable, and I don’t know if I’d use it in a big production system, but for my needs, it works pretty well.

Comment on Mulling Over Our Ruby On Rails Full Text Search Options by Michael

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 08:46:38 +0000

re solr: just saw this: http://groups.google.com/group/acts_as_solr/browse_thread/thread/7568ba90be8ce0d5#

Comment on Mulling Over Our Ruby On Rails Full Text Search Options by Chris Heald

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 07:52:40 +0000

As a response to the whole Ultrasphinx cron issue, I’d recommend monit or equivalent to make sure your daemond don’t die. It’s also handy for keeping your mongrels/thin instances in line. It works quite decently for me.

I found Ultrasphinx’s config prohibitive, so I use the thinking-sphinx plugin. It’s a fantastic piece of work, and coming from ferret, “just works” beautifully.

Xapian seems to have the same issue that Sphinx does, though – offline indexing and only one client at a time writing to the index – except that Sphinx does bridge it with delta indexes for realtime index updates, and thinking-sphinx’s daemon effectively proxies between Sphinx itself and multiple app instances – a step that a Xapian implementation would seem to need as well.

The “you may also like” sounds really cool, though.

Comment on Generate Rails Migrations With Columns by Hodinky

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 08:44:09 +0000

I just would like to say thanks, I used this code yesterday, and its awsome, thank you!

Comment on It's Double Coupon Days! Generate and redeem coupons with the acts_as_redeemable Rails plugin by Jason

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 23:32:50 +0000

Not a problem!

Comment on It's Double Coupon Days! Generate and redeem coupons with the acts_as_redeemable Rails plugin by Wynn Netherland

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 15:07:52 +0000

Thanks, Jason! I’ll merge it straightaway!

Comment on It's Double Coupon Days! Generate and redeem coupons with the acts_as_redeemable Rails plugin by Jason

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 03:13:01 +0000

I’ve fixed the bug and sent a pull request via github.

Jason

Comment on It's Double Coupon Days! Generate and redeem coupons with the acts_as_redeemable Rails plugin by Jason

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 03:01:31 +0000

Bug alert!

When generating a coupon, the following text is put inside the migration file (partial file & without the bolding):

def self.up
  create_table :coupons do |t|
    t.column :user_id, :integer
    t.column :code, :string
end

t.column :created_at, :datetime
  t.column :redeemed_at, :datetime
  t.column :redeemed_by_id, :integer
  t.column :expires_on => :datetime
end

That => should be a comma (,). rake db:migrate returns:

* Invoke db:migrate (first_time) * Invoke environment (first_time) * Execute environment * Execute db:migrate 20080712025606 CreateCoupons: migrating ================================== —create_table(:coupons) rake aborted! wrong number of arguments (1 for 2) ./db/migrate//20080712025606_create_coupons.rb:12:in `column’ ./db/migrate//20080712025606_create_coupons.rb:12:in `up_without_benchmarks’ /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.1.0/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/abstract/schema_statements.rb:98:in `create_table’ /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.1.0/lib/active_record/migration.rb:330:in `send’ /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.1.0/lib/active_record/migration.rb:330:in `method_missing’ /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.1.0/lib/active_record/migration.rb:310:in `say_with_time’ /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/benchmark.rb:293:in `measure’ /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.1.0/lib/active_record/migration.rb:310:in `say_with_time’ /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.1.0/lib/active_record/migration.rb:326:in `method_missing’ ./db/migrate//20080712025606_create_coupons.rb:3:in `up_without_benchmarks’ /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.1.0/lib/active_record/migration.rb:264:in `send’ /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.1.0/lib/active_record/migration.rb:264:in `migrate’ /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/benchmark.rb:293:in `measure’ /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.1.0/lib/active_record/migration.rb:264:in `migrate’ /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.1.0/lib/active_record/migration.rb:430:in `migrate’ /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.1.0/lib/active_record/migration.rb:420:in `each’ /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.1.0/lib/active_record/migration.rb:420:in `migrate’ /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.1.0/lib/active_record/migration.rb:357:in `up’ /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.1.0/lib/active_record/migration.rb:340:in `migrate’ /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rails-2.1.0/lib/tasks/databases.rake:99 /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.1/lib/rake.rb:546:in `call’ /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.1/lib/rake.rb:546:in `execute’ /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.1/lib/rake.rb:541:in `each’ /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.1/lib/rake.rb:541:in `execute’ /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.1/lib/rake.rb:508:in `invoke_with_call_chain’ /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.1/lib/rake.rb:501:in `synchronize’ /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.1/lib/rake.rb:501:in `invoke_with_call_chain’ /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.1/lib/rake.rb:494:in `invoke’ /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.1/lib/rake.rb:1931:in `invoke_task’ /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.1/lib/rake.rb:1909:in `top_level’ /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.1/lib/rake.rb:1909:in `each’ /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.1/lib/rake.rb:1909:in `top_level’ /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.1/lib/rake.rb:1948:in `standard_exception_handling’ /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.1/lib/rake.rb:1903:in `top_level’ /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.1/lib/rake.rb:1881:in `run’ /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.1/lib/rake.rb:1948:in `standard_exception_handling’ /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.1/lib/rake.rb:1878:in `run’ /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.1/bin/rake:31 /usr/bin/rake:19:in `load’ /usr/bin/rake:19

Changing that line to a comma causes rake db:migrate to succeed.

Jason

Comment on It's Double Coupon Days! Generate and redeem coupons with the acts_as_redeemable Rails plugin by Seznam

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 13:27:52 +0000

I’ve just tried it, and its very usefull, thanks for it.

Comment on Redesign your site in place using Rails custom mime types by Wynn Netherland

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 21:03:41 +0000

@Paul, You caught me! After you comment, I tested and it appears that it only works if your html templates are still .rhtml (as ours still are).

Sorry for that. I’ll update the article. Thanks!

Comment on Redesign your site in place using Rails custom mime types by Paul Canavese

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 20:38:23 +0000

You say, “You don’t have to do every view in the site because Rails will fall back to .html.erb for any views without a .beta.erb version.” I am using Rails 2.1 and I am not seeing this behavior. I get a “Template is missing” error if a template does not exist for the specified format.

I’m using register_alias in my mime_types.rb, and I see that getting picked up.

What Rails version are you using?

Comment on Sending Emails with Typo and Rails 2.x by Wynn Netherland

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 21:46:46 +0000

So did our GMail smtp server work out of the box, or did you have to use the smtp_tls.lib workaround, too?

Comment on Easily switch between Rails development sites with Phusion Passenger by Chuck

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:56:07 +0000

Super easy on Leopard w/ default Apache2 install. That Passenger prefpane is nice, too. Thanks for this!

Comment on Ruby Editors - The Choices For Non-Mac And Non-VI People by Rupak Ganguly

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 14:47:07 +0000

A similar post I did for IDEs for Windows at http://rupakg.wordpress.com/2007/12/05/rails-ide-on-windows

Comment on MacBook Pro Versus Dell Ubuntu by rick

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 01:09:55 +0000

How is NetBeans for rails development? I’ll be using Ubuntu also (on my mac book pro).

Comment on Ruby Editors - The Choices For Non-Mac And Non-VI People by JFred

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 08:21:48 +0000

Yes, E-Texteditor is very functional and efficient even on my smallest machine. Worth it even though not free.

http://www.e-texteditor.com/index.html

Netbeans has more features, and is free, but needs a more powerful development machine than you otherwise need for RoR. Get a quad-core with 8 gigabytes and run Netbeans. Or use E on a small laptop and develop anywhere.

Is the root cause of Netbeans trouble it’s big Java base?

I’m an old Emacs hand, and tried the RoR setup for Emacs a year or so ago and it was too much trouble. I’ve lost patience with Emacs and anything that takes more than 20 minutes to set up gets tossed out. Emacs can take days and days to tweak right.

Comment on Ruby Editors - The Choices For Non-Mac And Non-VI People by Brian Takita

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 06:48:07 +0000

I recommend IntelliJ Idea. The fullness of its hotkeys is unsurpassed in any editor I’ve tried (I used a bunch). One thing thats nice is that you can go directly to the side panes using Alt+number. I have not seen any other editor do this.

Its search integration is also very nice. You can jump through project-wide search results with a hotkey and selectively apply replace operations from the list.

It also has source integration. One thing thats nice is it allows you to jump to places where you have edited the file since the last commit. Changes are represented on the side of the editor. You can also rollback individual changes.

There are some other handy hotkeys, like Ctrl+w, which expands your selection every time ‘w’ is pressed. This is very useful for selecting parts of camelcase or _ case names and sentences.

Theres split pane views, a console view, and a ruby plugin. Definitely worth a look. They got a lot of power user interaction concepts correct, which is very rare.

I only wish for it to be open source and for it to have a smaller footprint. Hopefully an open source editor will prove more effective.

Comment on Ruby Editors - The Choices For Non-Mac And Non-VI People by Chris

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 05:05:40 +0000

I’ve had a lot of success with notepad++, its free and works just great. Windows only though.

Comment on Ruby Editors - The Choices For Non-Mac And Non-VI People by Dan Mayer

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 21:51:47 +0000

Thanks for the link (I’m from Devver). The editor space in Ruby is very interesting, a ton of options. I have gone through most of the larger ones. I am currently in the process of leaving Netbeans as it has been getting slower and slower and killing my machine.

I don’t think I will go back to radrails and almost everything I do is in the command line now so I think I am headed to Emacs, as I have used it a bunch in the past.

Comment on Ruby Editors - The Choices For Non-Mac And Non-VI People by Jim

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 19:24:25 +0000

@Person – Thanks for the heads up about Komodo Edit. I had not seen that before.

@Mike and @Stephanie – I’m not a Windows guy anymore, so I have not tried TextPad or E-Text Editor.

I have heard good things about E-Text Editor. I wish they would port it to Linux. They have been talking about it for almost a year now:

http://e-texteditor.com/blog/2007/e_v10_released

Comment on Ruby Editors - The Choices For Non-Mac And Non-VI People by grigio

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 19:15:18 +0000

@Jim: It simply says to get Gedit-Rails from Github and run “install.sh” to have all the Gedit customizations with one command.

Here are the plugins installed by the script: http://github.com/grigio/gedit-rails/tree/master/plugins

Comment on Ruby Editors - The Choices For Non-Mac And Non-VI People by Jim

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 18:52:21 +0000

Grigio,

Very nice!

Your blog post describing the plugin is not in English.

http://grigio.org/gedit_rails_grigio_edition

Can you translate what it does? :-)

Comment on Ruby Editors - The Choices For Non-Mac And Non-VI People by Stephanie

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 18:51:15 +0000

I’m fairly new to RoR, but I was searching for something that would suffice in place of Textmate, since I am on Windows, and I came across E-TextEditor. It’s in beta, but it’s supposed to be the equivalent of Textmate for Windows users.

I’ve had nothing but a great experience with it so far. They look almost identical. As for functionality, I don’t know if Textmate is any better…I haven’t tried it.

You can download a 30-day trial version, and then it costs 34.95 after that. I purchased it at the end of the trial. Check it out if you haven’t heard of it.

Comment on Ruby Editors - The Choices For Non-Mac And Non-VI People by grigio

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 18:19:50 +0000

There also Gedit-Rails https://github.com/grigio/gedit-rails/tree

Comment on Ruby Editors - The Choices For Non-Mac And Non-VI People by Mike Berrow

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 16:44:01 +0000

I’ve been using Textpad for years. Still love it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textpad

I use it with the clip library and syntax highlighting extensions for ruby.

Comment on Ruby Editors - The Choices For Non-Mac And Non-VI People by A Person

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 16:37:35 +0000

There’s a free version of Komodo, called Komodo Edit, they just released a new version in fact last week :D

Comment on Easily switch between Rails development sites with Phusion Passenger by Darrin Wortlehock

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 13:36:39 +0000

Nicely done Wynn.

I’ve switched some of our smaller sites to Passenger and its going really well in production. I’m keen to try this for development, especially for our designers.

Comment on Easily switch between Rails development sites with Phusion Passenger by Wynn Netherland

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 19:10:33 +0000

@sander, Thanks for the tip! Nice blog, too. Subscrib’d

Comment on jQuery Parallax Scrolling - Build your own 1980's video game! by Wynn Netherland

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 19:07:04 +0000

@demo, if you are on Firefox or Safari, refresh this page and watch the header…

Comment on Easily switch between Rails development sites with Phusion Passenger by Sander Heilbron

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 18:25:18 +0000

Fingertips developed a Passenger preference pane for Leopard, so you can create virtual hosts without the use of Headdress.

Comment on jQuery Parallax Scrolling - Build your own 1980's video game! by demo

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:38:20 +0000

where is the link for the demo .. i want to see what happens

Comment on Easily switch between Rails development sites with Phusion Passenger by Rupak Ganguly

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:02:56 +0000

Nice writeup. I need to try it out on my Ubuntu machine, although I must confess, I use my Windows machine for development.

Comment on Easily switch between Rails development sites with Phusion Passenger by Jim

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:30:28 +0000

Nice write up, Wynn.

I’ve been using this set-up on my Ubuntu machine for a few weeks and it has worked out great. I need to go add it to my Mac, now.

Comment on Ubuntu and Mac OS X Living in Harmony by Wynn Netherland

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 14:05:40 +0000

Thanks, Jim! I’m going to get QuickSynergy set up on my Hardy box today.

Comment on Redesign your site in place using Rails custom mime types by Ryan Heneise

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:53:58 +0000

The only thing is that eventually you’re going to want to go through and rename all those *.beta.erb files to *.html.erb.

Comment on Redesign your site in place using Rails custom mime types by fibonacci

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 19:55:49 +0000

wow, thanks for this. very cool

Comment on jQuery Parallax Scrolling - Build your own 1980's video game! by Daniel

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 08:41:12 +0000

Good old frogger-style :-) very smart!

Comment on jQuery Parallax Scrolling - Build your own 1980's video game! by Wynn Netherland

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 17:29:54 +0000

Yup, I should have stated the caveat about IE6…

Comment on jQuery Parallax Scrolling - Build your own 1980's video game! by IE6Yan

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 21:29:32 +0000

It’s aint working in IE6 )c: it’s running slow and png’s are way off.. but it looks nice in FF ..

Comment on jQuery Parallax Scrolling - Build your own 1980's video game! by ToS

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 12:14:20 +0000

I’m amused (often astounded) by the number of techniques ppl keep solving trough CSS and JS, thus skipping the Flash and GIF and their downsides. Really nice work.

Comment on jQuery Parallax Scrolling - Build your own 1980's video game! by paul@miamiphp.org

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 01:57:11 +0000

Great stuff!

Comment on jQuery Parallax Scrolling - Build your own 1980's video game! by Damon Clinkscales

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 16:39:30 +0000

Very nice, Wynn. That’s cool!

Comment on jQuery Parallax Scrolling - Build your own 1980's video game! by zoel

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 23:45:24 +0000

rock n roll, jquery is power! ;-)

Comment on Updating Comatose to Rails 2.1 by Rupak Ganguly

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 15:29:40 +0000

Nice post, Chris. I hope I had seen it when I was doing the upgrade. Well, it is not documented for others. Comatose is cool. I love it.

Comment on jQuery Parallax Scrolling - Build your own 1980's video game! by Rupak Ganguly

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 21:22:41 +0000

Sweet! Crisp and hot – or should I say cool. A car racing game based on this technology might be fun…

Comment on jQuery Parallax Scrolling - Build your own 1980's video game! by trif3cta

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 19:18:17 +0000

This is so cool! Very clever technique, I gotta try this out. The animation is enough to be interesting, but subtle enough not to be a bother.

Let me apologize to your server for all the refreshing I’ve been doing.

Reminds me of Ninja Gaiden.

Comment on jQuery Parallax Scrolling - Build your own 1980's video game! by Jim

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 15:48:31 +0000

Nicely done! Very cool technology!

Comment on Updating Comatose to Rails 2.1 by Wynn Netherland

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 12:00:19 +0000

Excellent, Chris!

Comatose rocks! I love it.

Comment on Visualize Redmine Models by Chris Lee

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 18:56:59 +0000

Rupak,

Unfortunately, I only have my Mac nowadays, but thanks for the link to the Windows version of Graphviz. Just a note that the “dot -T” switch tells it what format to output in, so I think you can try this:

$ railroad -Mal | dot -Tpng > models.png

Glad you found this helpful, it’s helped me out a lot!

Comment on Visualize Redmine Models by Rupak Ganguly

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 17:49:45 +0000

Cannot edit my earlier comment, but I wanted to add that for some reason the pdf format did not work for me in case of the model example. But, the png format worked. Here is the error message with acceptable formats: railroad -Mal | dot -Tpdf > models.png Renderer type: “pdf” not recognized. Use one of: canon cmap cmapx cmapx_np dia d ot fig gd gd2 gif hpgl imap imap_np ismap jpeg jpg mif mp pcl pic plain plain-ex t png ps ps2 svg svgz vml vmlz vrml vtx wbmp xdot

Comment on Visualize Redmine Models by Rupak Ganguly

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 17:46:09 +0000

Great article. I was a little upset as I saw your instructions were only for OSX, and the blog post mentioning Graphviz for OSX only. But, a quick search later, I found the Windows install for Graphviz (http://www.graphviz.org/Download_windows.php) and your install instructions were same for Windows. So, I am alll set with model and controller diagrams in Windows.

Comment on No cancel button: The gym membership business model by Wynn Netherland

Fri, 28 Sep 2007 19:55:15 +0000

Well since you’re the second person that’s asked: dumb and dumber.

Comment on Heat up your Campfire with Tinder by Chris Lee

Fri, 28 Sep 2007 19:49:09 +0000

Tinder can also be used to heckle and give status:

room.listen |m| do room.speak “wuteva!” if m[:person] == ‘Wynn’ room.speak Time.now if m[:message] =~ /^time/ end

I love simple, powerful things like Tinder…the possibilities are enormous!

Comment on No cancel button: The gym membership business model by Chris Lee

Fri, 28 Sep 2007 19:20:23 +0000

Hear hear! Are we outing names here? I’ve had many bad experiences as well. The web usually makes everything easier, but when things go wrong, there’s very little recourse. Has anyone ever tried to contact Yahoo or Google customer support? Do they even have customer support depts?

Wynn, are you going to share with us the names of the companies? Only then can we bear down on them with the full wrath of the blogsphere (or at least the 3 readers we have) :)

Comment on MacBook Pro Versus Dell Ubuntu by Chris

Fri, 28 Sep 2007 16:25:48 +0000

Some experience here to share … I’ve tried 4 combinations so far (in order)...

Sep 06 …. Ubuntu/gEdit/Acer T180 desktop – Mostly ok. No real complaints other than it’s a bit cranky here and there and I had to argue with the xorg.conf to get the display adaptor to run at 1280×1024. Works ok after that and is reliable. gEdit is quite productive but it still feels wrong.

Dec 06 …. OSX 10.4/MacBook/TextMate – one dead MacBook later… need we say any more. It failed while I was on the road in a service station which caused me no end of trouble. Not only that, Apple are turning on their users with the iPhone etc, which suggests they are interested in controlling their users too much. Not to mention iWork fucks up every word document you put near it and I’m not paying for office X which runs in PPC Rosetta emulation mode (slowly!)

May 07 …. Vista/Acer T180 desktop/e-TextEditor – Vista is totally unusable. It’s slow, broken and churns my hard disk keeping me awake all night. It keeps redoing my file associations and doesn’t play nice with apache. Binned

Aug 07 …. XP Pro/Acer T180 desktop/e-TextEditor – this is the most productive and reliable environment i’ve worked in. I’ve basically turned everything off so it’s like windows 2000. Never gets in the way. It’s had 5 years of stabilisation after all. Chuck AVG, Rails, Apache, e-TextEditor Fireworks and OpenOffice on it and it’s sorted.

Comment on Migrating Our Rails Apps to Nginx by Chris Lee

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 19:36:06 +0000

Nice write up Jim! Just a heads up that on OS X, nginx is installed a in a slightly different directory, so to start nginx, you’d need to:

$ sudo /usr/local/nginx/sbin/nginx

Comment on Why I made the switch by Wynn Netherland

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 20:42:31 +0000

Excellent list, Chris! I think that sums up the reasons we started Praexis in the first place. I think you may be a little smarter in picking up on #7 faster than the rest of us… ;-)

Comment on Capistrano: Deploying with Subversion Tags by Wynn Netherland

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 20:58:28 +0000

That is too cool! It’s the simple things that make happy!

Comment on Amazon FPS Payment Service With Ruby SDK! by Micah

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 20:34:56 +0000

And to think, I thought Amazon sold books.

With AWS and now this, it’s like Wal-Mart building power plants.

Not that I’m complaining. I’m already using S3 to do things that would have been a total PITA otherwise.

Thanks for the write-up!

Comment on MacBook Pro Versus Dell Ubuntu by Andrea

Fri, 10 Aug 2007 10:00:13 +0000

This is the reason why I’m keeping my Acer laptop with Gentoo Linux on top for development and (tryingtoget)a Mac Pro for graphic design, web thingies and music.

Yeah, big struggling with making things work on the laptop but I’ve made my choice and Gentoo is priceless at most of the things. I currently develop with Qt/C++ and PHP using Eclipse as my IDE – foreverandever – and I have to say one thing: the web development environment is set up on the laptop which I use for remote development from my (nowbroken)Windows PC. I mean: that acts like the webserver of my dreams and it costed me 950€ (let alone the mobo replaced due to a lightning)! :)

I mean: the Mac is a great platform to work on with ITS well-tested tools. I’ve never considered using MySQL or Apache on it just because it doesn’t make any sense: you’d need to have a server-geared OS which Linux is. I definitely will use on the Mac, Photoshop, blender, Audition and all the other stuff I’ve used on Windows since yesterday.

Comment on MacBook Pro Versus Dell Ubuntu by tzs

Fri, 10 Aug 2007 06:04:47 +0000

One thing I don’t think you considered, which is a big factor in laptop prices, is weight and thickness. The MacBook Pro is, according to your chart, 0.6 pound lighter, and based on the specs I see at Dell and Apple, the Dell is 1.42” thick, compared to 1.0” for the MacBook Pro. That doesn’t sound like much, but it can be surprising how much of a difference it can make.

Comment on redMine - Rails Based Open Source Project Management Application by Benjamin Kudria

Thu, 09 Aug 2007 17:45:37 +0000

Jim,

I understand your concerns, I had them too for a while, but then i decided to download and try it. The latest version available is OSS, and it will never go away. Give it a try, it isn’t difficult to install at all, just your basic PHP/MySQL app (It does need PHP 5, though).

Comment on redMine - Rails Based Open Source Project Management Application by Jim Mulholland

Thu, 09 Aug 2007 17:38:57 +0000

Benjamin, I have briefly looked at the ActiveCollab website in the past. I was a little concerned about how they are in a state of flux going from OpenSource to a free / paid model, so I never downloaded it to investigate thoroughly.

Comment on redMine - Rails Based Open Source Project Management Application by Benjamin Kudria

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 19:23:37 +0000

Have you looked at activeCollab (http://www.activecollab.com) ? It’s supposed to be a Basecamp clone in PHP that you can host on your own server. The current version is open source, the next version will have a free and for-pay component.

Thanks for the pointer to redMine. Looks interesting – it’s got a great list of features!

Comment on iStockPhoto credits: use 'em or lose 'em by Tom

Fri, 03 Aug 2007 05:25:46 +0000

I agree 100%. After using their service for many years and always being a satisfied customer, just last week I received an email from them telling me that if I don’t spend 40 of my credits then I will lose them to the great void of bad marketing. What am I to do? Spend it on stock photography that I don’t want? Try to sell them at a steep discount? Throw my hands up in the air and let them expire?

Bad business, all around, and I am a professional in the industry who freely share my opinions with others. Wake up, iStockPhoto! BAD BUSINESS!!!

Comment on MacBook Pro Versus Dell Ubuntu by Jim Mulholland

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 14:54:39 +0000

Very cool! So desktop extension should work out of the box with this Dell. I posted on the Business of Rails user group last night that I assumed it would not. Thanks for the tip!

Comment on MacBook Pro Versus Dell Ubuntu by Mike Vincent

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 10:56:26 +0000

Jim,

Yes, if you select ‘X Server Display Configuration’ from the menu then there is a ‘Detect Dislpays’ button on the bottom right you can click if you don’t already see the external display in the layout box.

In the layout, click the box representing the external display then the configure button below the layout. the TwinView option will extend the screen. You can adjust the resolution and orientation and then click the Apply button.

There is also a button to save the changes to the config, too.

This of course is only for nvidia hardware. I would recommend flat out avoiding ATI altogether.

Comment on MacBook Pro Versus Dell Ubuntu by Jim Mulholland

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 04:08:43 +0000

Mike, that is good to know. Does the nvidia-settings allow you to extend you desktop to an external monitor without touching the config or just go back and forth between the two?

Comment on MacBook Pro Versus Dell Ubuntu by Mike Vincent

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 03:10:50 +0000

FWIW, on my hp nw9440 running feisty nvidia-settings has proven to be pretty good at seeing external displays, what they’re capable of and getting them configured without my ever needing to touch the actual config.

Comment on redMine - Rails Based Open Source Project Management Application by Nick Read

Sat, 28 Jul 2007 00:08:40 +0000

Rupak #3:

There is nothing to stop you hosting it somewhere with RoR expertise, like engineyard.com for example.

Comment on MacBook Pro Versus Dell Ubuntu by Jim Mulholland

Fri, 27 Jul 2007 19:24:03 +0000

Spacemonkey—First off, I am VERY impressed that you got your wife to use an Ubuntu desktop! It is still Windows or nothing for my wife. She literally thinks that Ubuntu eats the innards of any computer it is installed on and renders it useless within months. (I just so happened to have installed Ubuntu on 2 or 3 PCs that were already dying over the past 18 months as a last ditch effort to get a little extra life out of them. As expected, they all dyed anyway.)

As for Ubuntu vs Mac, I have the best of both worlds now that my Mac is back from the shop. My Ubuntu desktop shares my keyboard and mouse with my MacBook laptop via Synergy (which is one of the best applications ever). So now I can do all of my web browsing via FF on Linux and coding via TextMate on my Mac.

With that being said, I am still going to have to think long and hard before purchasing a MacBook Pro as my next machine. I really enjoy using Ubuntu. And short of issues with “support of multiple displays, multiple resolutions”, I have had few if any driver issues with Ubuntu’s Feisty release.

Comment on MacBook Pro Versus Dell Ubuntu by Spacemonkey

Fri, 27 Jul 2007 18:45:37 +0000

I was in the exact same position as you about sixteen months ago. My ubuntu-powered Acer died and my hand was hovering over the “Buy Now!” button on a ThinkPad, and suddenly it dawned on me.

You don’t pay $700 extra for the privilege of using TextMate, you pay it to know that no matter what, simple laptop things like these will function as expected:

suspend
resume
sleep
wlan driver
audio driver
easy support of multiple displays, multiple resolutions

One year later, the Powerbook G4 is a little long in the tooth, out of disk, and in need of some serious maintenance. How convenient then for our ancient ubuntu desktop to finally bite the dust, requiring a replacement system for my wife.

Wife, meet the Powerbook G4. Spacemonkey, meet the new MacBook Pro :-D

Got the G4 erased and thanks to getting the AppleCare she’s still got 2 years of support left. I have a shiny new machine with a faster proc and bigger disk.

And of course being able to make funny faces with your kids thanks to the built in iSight on the MacBook Pro is a bonus ;-)

Comment on redMine - Rails Based Open Source Project Management Application by Jim Mulholland

Fri, 27 Jul 2007 17:41:10 +0000

Rupak, I thought you were using Ubuntu on an old Compaq computer.

What kind of opinions are you looking for? Like a full Ubuntu review?

Comment on redMine - Rails Based Open Source Project Management Application by Jim Mulholland

Fri, 27 Jul 2007 17:40:38 +0000

Wes, you are correct in that we are getting very close to a tool that could fit all of our needs! ;) All the better if it is open source.

Comment on redMine - Rails Based Open Source Project Management Application by Rupak Ganguly

Fri, 27 Jul 2007 17:03:43 +0000

One of you planning to do a post on Ubuntu? Your experiences coming from a Windows world. Honest opinions will help.

Comment on redMine - Rails Based Open Source Project Management Application by Rupak Ganguly

Fri, 27 Jul 2007 17:00:44 +0000

Very informative post. I was discussing with just yesterday. But, I feel that Unfuddle/Basecamp solutions work good for people like me who do not have a rackspace. But, for you guys who have a rackspace, the possibilities are endless. Till, we have a hosted solution for redMine, I am sticking to Unfuddle.

Comment on redMine - Rails Based Open Source Project Management Application by Wes Gamble

Fri, 27 Jul 2007 16:46:53 +0000

This:

“Subversion integration (including the ability to reference and close tickets based on SVN comments)”

sounds like the new Unfuddle feature that Wynn mentioned a few days ago.

You guys are so close to getting what you want (privacy of data + per-project wikis ;)). Good luck.

Comment on redMine - Rails Based Open Source Project Management Application by Wynn Netherland

Fri, 27 Jul 2007 16:30:07 +0000

Whoa! That’s a lot of features. I’m blown away by the number and quality of tools out there to support a business like ours that just weren’t affordable/available five years ago.

Comment on MacBook Pro Versus Dell Ubuntu by Chris McCroskey

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 15:07:37 +0000

Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water brother!

Comment on MySQL gem install issue on OS X [SOLVED] by Jim Mulholland

Mon, 23 Jul 2007 23:33:03 +0000

Wynn, I couldn’t really follow the post you referenced, but I was able to solve the same issue based on advice from comment #8 in this blog post:

http://weblog.rubyonrails.com/2005/10/30/get-10-15-more-performance-with-mysql-rails/

After my “sudo gem install mysql” failed, I did the following to correct the issue.

$ cd /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.7 $ sudo ruby extconf.rb—with-mysql-dir=/usr/local/mysql $ sudo make $ sudo make install

...and, voila!, all is well with MySQL again.

Comment on MacBook Pro Versus Dell Ubuntu by Jim Mulholland

Mon, 23 Jul 2007 18:36:05 +0000

Hi Rupak. Funny that you mention Vista. We are having all sort of issues with my wife’s new HP DV9000 with Vista.

She loses her wireless signal about once every hour or 2 and has to reboot to get it back. Then, this morning, she got the blue screen of death. I didn’t know the blue screen of death still existed!!!

I had to reboot in safe mode, remove the apps that were installed on the box yesterday (Java Runtime, Flickr, Yahoo Messenger), and was then able to boot up as normal. No idea what the culprit was, but at least it is working again. Needless to say, now she is clamoring to get XP back.

Who would have thought that the release of Vista would actually INCREASE XP sales?!

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,134908-page,1/article.html

Comment on MacBook Pro Versus Dell Ubuntu by Rupak Ganguly

Mon, 23 Jul 2007 18:09:01 +0000

great write up, Jimbo. I would stick to my Vista machine. And, that is because I am still a MS boy. Although, I have been lately running Ubuntu on my old Compaq laptop, and I am pleasantly surprised…

Comment on MacBook Pro Versus Dell Ubuntu by Mike Hagedorn

Mon, 23 Jul 2007 18:03:36 +0000

hmmm that brings up a good point though… Is the source of QS available? Theoretically one could get it run under OpenStep or GNUStep.. whatever its being called these days….

Comment on MacBook Pro Versus Dell Ubuntu by Jim Mulholland

Mon, 23 Jul 2007 17:41:11 +0000

Mike, QS is another app in addition to TextMate that would be difficult to lose. I installed Katapult on this Ubuntu box. It is a decent substitute, but nothing close to QS.

Comment on MacBook Pro Versus Dell Ubuntu by Jim Mulholland

Mon, 23 Jul 2007 17:37:33 +0000

Actually, I have tremendous luck with drivers so far. My monitor, printer, and even iPod have all worked out of the box. Ironically, I have a Samsung Laser printer at my haircut shop which worked out of the box with Ubuntu but I had to hunt down the driver for my Mac.

There are some Mac features in addition to Textmate that would be lost such as iChat. But I would also gain OpenOffice (which is superior to NeoOffice on a Mac) and the ability to test IE via Wine which is not an option with a Mac unless you purchase Parellels for $80 and have an extra Windows CD / license floating around.

As for aesthetics (size, power brick, magnet, etc), a Mac is definitely far superior to any PC.

Comment on MacBook Pro Versus Dell Ubuntu by Mike Hagedorn

Mon, 23 Jul 2007 17:12:31 +0000

Jim, yeah I guess you have some valid points, but as a mac switcher of over 7 years now, there are some workflow things that just dont replicate very well.. at least not for me. A really good example of that is QuickSilver. Yes I know that there are other launchers.. but QS is just so darned elegant. And at this point it feels like I have like a jillion things hooked into QS to make life easier. Man switching for me would be a royal pain.

I feel your pain on the macbook thing though. I had an ibook a few years back… same problems you are seeing. All the pain went away when I upgraded to its big brother :)

Comment on MacBook Pro Versus Dell Ubuntu by Wynn Netherland

Mon, 23 Jul 2007 16:52:51 +0000

I think you’re making some big assumptions here. First, I’m not convinced you’d have smooth sailing with all your drivers even on a configure-to-order Dell machine. As a Linux user for nearly ten years, experience tells me you’d spend some time hunting down drivers.

Second, I bet you’d miss the other Mac features: iChat, hardward buttons that actually do what they should without futzing with Gnome or window manager settings, not having a 10lb. power brick, and of course the ac adapter magnet!

But if you’re set in your ways, I can dig it. I’ll be glad to get you a $600 Dell and take the savings for me a new MacBook Pro and iPhone!

Comment on Plugin: validates_constancy by Matt Sanders

Wed, 18 Jul 2007 20:42:09 +0000

Nice, I was just looking at this a couple of days ago.

Great plugin Nils, nice writeup, Wynn.

Comment on Plugin: validates_constancy by Nils Jonsson

Wed, 18 Jul 2007 13:17:12 +0000

Thanks for the write-up, Wynn!

Comment on Migrating Our Rails Apps to Nginx by Jim Mulholland

Mon, 16 Jul 2007 13:19:06 +0000

That is funny, Nils.

A new laptop is being delivered to my wife today. I could not be more thrilled because that means I get to load Ubuntu on her old Windows desktop to give me another local environment to hack around in addition to my Mac! ;-)

Working within Windows again is not even a consideration.

Comment on Migrating Our Rails Apps to Nginx by Nils Jonsson

Mon, 16 Jul 2007 00:08:38 +0000

The comment about being a command-line guy reminded me of this recent Philip Toland post: http://tumbl.fiatdev.com/post/3679959.

Comment on Google Maps: New drag-n-drop sweetness! by Chris McCroskey

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 02:12:51 +0000

from my new iPhone!

Comment on Migrating Our Rails Apps to Nginx by Wynn Netherland

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 00:48:28 +0000

Ha ha, I guess so!

These are really one-time tasks in setting up a server. Also I find the command line MUCH quicker than hunting for the right menu in the GUI. Even on the Mac, where there are an abundance of GUI tools for most tasks, I find myself staying in the terminal most of the day.

One of the biggest surprises in moving away from Windows has been the package managers on both Linux and Mac—especially with Ruby on Rails. The ability to install (or upgrade or freeze) to a gem, plugin, or OS package with one command is much faster than downloading, unzipping, double clicking, agreeing, next-next-next-next-next-finishing…

Comment on Migrating Our Rails Apps to Nginx by Rupak Ganguly

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 00:18:52 +0000

wow. wynn, you have truely metamorphasized into a “command-line” guy. This is way too much commands I would like to remember. I cannot stare at a black window that long, I need my windows… great post though. Why can’t you just find a host that will do the dirty jobs for you?

Comment on Migrating Our Rails Apps to Nginx by Wynn Netherland

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 20:52:58 +0000

That is super slick! Apache is a sledgehammer-to-a-thumbtack approach to proxying rails anyway in my opinion.

And thanks for the pronunciation heads up of “engine-x” as opposed to my “nah-gin-icks”

Comment on 15 Reasons I use Rails instead of .NET by Nils Jonsson

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 18:10:35 +0000

All good reasons. I couldn’t agree more.

Loving the weblog, guys. Keep it coming.

Comment on Google Maps: New drag-n-drop sweetness! by Wynn Netherland

Mon, 09 Jul 2007 14:54:11 +0000

True story on the Yahoo flash interface. I love its responsiveness but it makes my MacBook sound like it’s going to take flight.

Comment on Google Maps: New drag-n-drop sweetness! by Jim Mulholland

Mon, 09 Jul 2007 03:58:47 +0000

This is too cool!

I actually stumbled across the drag-n-drop routing feature when I was playing around with a map last week. I was wondering how long it had been around. I was thinking it had been there for a while and I was oblivious to it.

What is even a bigger deal for me is the “ -> directions from here” feature! It was due to the lack of this feature that I had been using Yahoo Maps for the past 12 months or so.

The issue with Yahoo Maps is that their Flash interface seems to be a memory hog for me. Now I can stick to Google and their Ajax bliss!

Comment on Syntax highlighting blog posts by Wynn Netherland

Fri, 06 Jul 2007 20:19:23 +0000

Good point, I’ll update the CSS

Comment on Syntax highlighting blog posts by Rupak Ganguly

Mon, 02 Jul 2007 15:18:59 +0000

Good post. Small comment – do not use green or the light blue in the code block. The green has been established as the link color and light blue as the title color. Just confusing.

Comment on Syntax highlighting blog posts by Jim Mulholland

Sat, 30 Jun 2007 03:28:28 +0000

Yes, the code highlighting is a HUGE improvement over the job I did separating out my code with

tags and bolding my SQL key words. Much, much easier to read now!

Very impressive job, Wynn, on whipping out a MySql code extension to Dan Webb’s CodeHighlighter in only a few short hours. Excellent work!

Comment on MySQL - ORACLE ROWNUM by Wynn Netherland

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 21:27:28 +0000

Very, very slick! And to think I had suggested an in-memory temp table with an auto increment column…

Comment on iStockPhoto credits: use 'em or lose 'em by Rupak Ganguly

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 17:46:02 +0000

well that is bad business. i would be mad too. well, shame on you istockphoto. you know what i will be telling my friends… paula, good tip on the $100 limit. will keep that in mind. well, wynn – i guess you got to cheer up soon enough. one bad apple cannot spoil your day…

Comment on Versions - Mac Subversion Client by Jim

Mon, 25 Jun 2007 02:13:42 +0000

A full featured Mac SVN client is very long overdue. With that being said, it would have to be a very impressive piece of software for me justify paying hard earned cash for it. svnX + svn command line work fine for me.

Moreover, online tools like Unfuddle make it pretty simple for average users to view histories and diff’s without a client on their personal system.

Comment on OSX: What does this button do? by Jim

Mon, 25 Jun 2007 02:01:40 +0000

Very cool! I had no idea!

I love it when an annoying issue has a simple fix!

Comment on iStockPhoto credits: use 'em or lose 'em by Wynn Netherland

Sat, 23 Jun 2007 22:55:46 +0000

Sounds like iStock is taking a page out of the Dell business model and sitting on a lot of cash earning interest ahead providing any service or payout.

Comment on iStockPhoto credits: use 'em or lose 'em by paula

Sat, 23 Jun 2007 22:52:24 +0000

One thing you forgot to mention…if you are a photo/image contributor to istock, you can’t “cash” in on your royalties until you hit the $100 mark. Just think of all the money they’re raking in on interest off all their providers who are under the $100 limit. I’m sure we’d be surprised what that adds up to as well. On their side, I can understand needing to set a minimum royalty check limit, but doesn’t $100 seem a little high?

Comment on iStockPhoto credits: use 'em or lose 'em by Wynn Netherland

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 03:25:26 +0000

Well said! Moral of the story, buyer beware!

Comment on iStockPhoto credits: use 'em or lose 'em by Chris McCroskey

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 03:22:04 +0000

It’s the same terrible business practice that some big retailers use with giftcards. They are a little more sly by taking a percentage or service charge monthly after a certain period of time. The end result is the same. You give them money and they steal it from you if you don’t pick up your pre-paid merchandise. Can anyone tell me why a company would be so greedy as to piss off their customers who gave them money in advance? It’s not like they lose money. In fact they are probably making a boatload on interest. Now some smarty pants brainwashed corporate suit will probably tell you it’s because they use accrual accounting versus cash accounting and they can’t mark the liability of the pre-paid sale off the books until the card is redeemed. I say that’s hogwash. Use a third party rebate type company if you have to, but for goodness sakes don’t hack off the people who give you money in good faith.

Comment on iStockPhoto credits: use 'em or lose 'em by Jim

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 03:09:21 +0000

That is just like retail stores offering gift cards with expiration dates and/or maintenance fees tied to them.

It shines such a negative light on a company. I cannot understand how the few bucks in “earnings” is worth that.