open core

Simple XMLHttpRequest with Fetch

2015-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

This week, the new Fetch standard has landed in Chrome Canary (version 42). This is one of the specs I’ve been waiting for. It really simplifies XMLHttpRequests with a cleaner interface, and comes with built-in promises.

So to give you some perspective, here’s how you currently do an XMLHttpRequest:

var req = new XMLHttpRequest();

req.onload = function () {
    console.log(this.responseText);
};

req.open('GET', 'http://someendpoint.com/api/stuff', true);
req.send();

This is a very simple example, and as you know, it can get much more verbose if you start handling error cases.

And now, this is the same request made with window.fetch() but with bonus error handling:

window.fetch('http://someendpoint.com/api/stuff').then(function (response) {
    return reponse.text();
}).then(function (text) {
    console.log(text);
}).catch(function (e) {
    console.log(e);
});

In my opinion this is much simpler. And it’s also customizable:

window.fetch('http://someendpoint.com/api/stuff', {
    method: 'POST',
    headers: {
        'Accept': 'application/json',
        'Content-Type': 'application/json'
    },
    body: JSON.stringify({ someField: 1234, anotherField: 'foobar' })
}).then(function (response) {
    return reponse.text();
}).then(function (text) {
    console.log(text);
}).catch(function (e) {
    console.log(e);
});

Have a look at the spec, there are much more features included.

What about other browsers support?

Github has released a Fetch polyfill that works perfectly well with all browsers (IE 9+ included), just make sure you also install es6-promise polyfill for promise support in older browsers.

Check out Github pull requests

2014-08-01T00:00:00+01:00

This is a quick way to checkout Github pull requests into a local branch so you can test if everything is ok.

Just create this simple function in your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc file:

function checkout-pr() {
    git fetch origin refs/pull/$1/head:PR$1
}

After saving, just reload your shell and the checkout-pr command should be available.

To use it just enter a project’s folder and type:

$ checkout-pr 13

This will access your project’s origin, fetch the content of the pull request with ID 13 and save it in a local branch called PR13.

Now you can checkout the PR13 branch and evaluate the changes made.

Yeoman generator for Ink

2013-12-17T00:00:00+00:00

Probably everybody knows now that SAPO’s Ink framework is an awesome alternative to Bootstrap. And there’s also this great scaffolding tool called Yeoman, that if you don’t know, you should really check it out. The same also applies to Ink.

About two months ago, during my short travel to London to attend the The Great British Node Conf, I developed a Yeoman generator for Ink, called generator-ink.

This generator creates a ready-to-use website layout using Ink. You can even choose from 11 available layouts (more coming soon), and start hacking right away with the basic dependencies already in place.

To install it , just type on your terminal (make sure you already have Yeoman installed first):

$ npm install -g generator-ink

Now create a folder for your project and cd into it:

$ mkdir my_awesome_project && cd my_awesome_project

And now to start generator-ink just run:

$ yo ink

If everything went well, you’ll be greeted with the layout choice menu:

Now it’s just a matter of choosing the layout that most adjusts to your needs, and hack it.

Need more site pages? No problem, there’s a sub-generator for that. Imagine we need to create an article page. Piece of cake! Just type:

$ yo ink:page article-page article.html

You just need to know the name of the layout (you can check all available layouts here), give it a name, and BAM! It’s there!

You can also contribute with your own layouts! Just make a pull request on Github and I’ll be glad to accept it!

Playing RTMP streaming on Mac with VLC and rtmpdump

2013-02-21T00:00:00+00:00

VLC is a great piece of software, but currently lacks RTMP support. The good news is that there might be some RTMP support planned for the 2.1 release.

Meanwhile, to fix this, here’s a simple workaround using rtmpdump.

First make sure you have rtmpdump installed. If not, you can install it using the Homebrew package manager:

brew install rtmpdump

Now make sure you have installed VLC and use the following command to play the RTMP streaming:

rtmpdump -r rtmp://foobar/live/stream --quiet | /Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC -

This will open VLC with a file named fd://0 on the playlist. Just click it and the streaming should be working.

You can create a vlc alias to make the command a lot simpler. Just add this in your .bashrc, .zshrc or .profile (choose with one applies) and restart the terminal:

alias vlc=/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC

If you don’t like to mess around with long terminal commands, here’s a bash function that makes it simpler:

function rtmp_open() {
        rtmpdump -r $1 --quiet | /Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC fd://0 --playlist-autostart
}

Just copy paste this into your .bashrc, .zshrc or .profile (choose which one applies), and restart the terminal.

I had to use fd://0 instead of - to refer to stdin due to a bug in VLC that ignores the --playlist-autostart when using - as input.

Now to run this handy function just type the name and the URL of the RTMP stream you want to play:

$ rtmp_open rtmp://foobar/live/stream

And that’s it. Enjoy :)

Raspberry Pi fun

2012-08-09T00:00:00+01:00

I got my Raspberry Pi three days ago, and I’ve been so busy “playing” with it, that I’m only writing this post now.

If you’re living under a rock, let me tell you that the Raspberry Pi is an awesome credit-card sized computer that costs $35. But the Raspberry Pi website puts it better:

The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video. We want to see it being used by kids all over the world to learn programming.

Yep, that’s right: kids. And guess what? All the grown ups are loving it :)

It’s mind-blowing the tons of cool things you can do with this little computer. The first thing I did with it was to install Raspbian Wheezy image on the SD card (Debian for the RPi, available in the Downloads section of the RPi website) and put a Node server running on it. The performance is pretty acceptable.

And there’s also the community around the RPi. All kinds of people from experienced programmers to beginners are showing off everyday new things that can be done. It’s a nice way to learn about the lower level stuff that goes on in your computer, and you can use it to control other stuff too, like robots, leds etc.

I’ll be writing here some of my experiences with the RPi as I get to know it better.

Meanwhile, here’s a photo of the unboxing:

And a photo of the RPi running headless and being configured through SSH:

I bought it from InMotion, a portuguese online store. So if you are in Portugal, I highly recommend buying your Rpi from this store. It costs about 42€ and the service is very fast (ordered on a thursday and had it on monday).

So go get one, and feed your inner geek :)

Nodo v0.2.0 released

2012-05-29T00:00:00+01:00

A new version of Nodo is out. Version v0.2.0 has the following features:

New actions star and unstar that makes possible to mark ou unmark a task as important.
UI improvements and some bug fixes.

This new version is now available on NPM. To upgrade use:

npm udpate -g nodo

Please report any issues you find on the github issues page.

Nodo, the simple command line task manager

2012-05-18T00:00:00+01:00

Nodo is a command line task manager, and I love it! Why? Mainly because I developed it, second, it does exactly what I needed from a TODO app: it’s simple, easy and of course, it’s on the command line.

I spend most of the time on the command line (I’m even writing this post on it with Vim) so it comes natural the fact that I needed to find a task management application that has a CLI, avoiding the constant switch from keyboard to mouse and vice-versa. But still, I used Wunderlist, an awesome mac/windows/iphone/android TODO app, that was lacking such interface.

But there are already command line task managers!

Yes it’s true. I’m not going to mention them all, but let’s just say that none of them met my criteria. Some where too simple, some were just too complex (like TODO.txt) with tons of commands and options. Also, none of them supported my current Wunderlist database.

So I developed one task manager that suited my needs.

In Node.js? But I thought that Node.js was only good at X

Well, it turns out that Node is actually pretty good at allot of stuff. Including command line apps. But I have to agree that it’s not the best choice because there are no advantages in having non-blocking IO in this kind of app. But since I’ve been learning allot of Node lately, I really wanted to put in practice all my newly aquired skills. Also, NPM is a great package manager, and it’s ridiculously easy to publish new packages with it, not mentioning that it’s very interesting the fact that it’s entirely written in CouchDB.

Ok, so how does Nodo work?

It’s pretty simple. It has an NPM package, so you can install it with the npm command, just like this:

$ npm install -g nodo

A few seconds later, Nodo will be installed on your machine.

After install, Nodo comes with a default list called “inbox”. This list is where you should put all the tasks that you are not sure in which list to put them. So, to add a task to the inbox list just type the following:

$ nodo add inbox go shopping

Later, you decide to organize your tasks, so let’s create a list called “home” to contain all the home related tasks:

$ nodo add list home

And now, you can move your shopping task to this new list. Assuming that the shopping task has id 3:

$ nodo move 3 home

After you go shopping you can mark this task as done:

$ nodo done 3

This is just the Nodo basics. For the full usage instructions I recommend watching the screencast below, or visiting the Nodo page on Github.

Currently Nodo does not support adding/editing task notes, or setting a task as important, but these are all just features that are coming in the near future. Feel free to suggest features and/or fixes.

On using mac instead of linux ...

2012-04-20T00:00:00+01:00

This is a very common and constant discussion at my workplace. And don’t get me wrong, I love linux. But Jamie Zawinski says it in way that is very similar to what I feel about it:

I use a Mac instead of Linux on the desktop for a reason: because I think that the design and consistency that Apple’s UI brings is extremely valuable. I don’t buy computers based on how fast they are, I buy them based on how easy it is to get things done with them, and Apple is the hands-down winner on this pretty much across the board. (Oh, also because I want my audio card to work, but that’s neither here nor there.)

This quote is taken from a post in his blog where he talks about why he prefers to use Safari instead of Firefox on his mac, and you can read it entirely here.

Having fun developing useless apps

2012-03-13T00:00:00+00:00

I always thought that the first time I got on the Hacker News and Proggit front-pages would be with some awesome and complex project. I was wrong.

Part I - Like A Boss

On 25th November, while browsing the web, I found a funny project developed by Zach Holman called Fuck Yeah. This was a simple API developed in Node.js that received a piece of text, searched Google Images for that piece of text, and added that text along with a “Fuck Yeah!” to the first image found.

I found the project to be pretty cool, and since I got a little rusty with nodejs, I decided to fork the code and make a new version of the API, this time called Like a Boss. You can pretty much guess what it does. You can check out the code at Github by the way.

Since I had some spare time, I decided to go further and build a website that presented the generated images in a more good looking way. And here’s the result.

I decided to post the “Like a Boss” website to Hacker News. It got upvoted somehow, and BAM! Hacker News front-page. In 2 hours the website had about 2000 pageviews. This was cool, but not without some problems showing up that had to be solved in order to keep the code from crashing the server. Still, Heroku, the cloud application platform I used to host my nodejs app, handled all the traffic pretty well with only one web worker (included with the free plan).

After about 3 hours, the Hacker News post dropped from the front-page, and traffic almost vanished.

Part II - HTTP Cats API

On December 14th, again, while browsing the web, someone posted on Hacker News an awesome Flickr set of cat pictures authored by Tomomi Imura with each cat posing accordingly to a HTTP Status Code. These pictures ended up being a huge success.

I instantly thought about how awesome would be to have those cat images show up when an error occured on a web-server. I fired up vim and hacked some nodejs code to serve those images through a simple API. After some minutes, the HTTP Cats API was born. I pushed it to Heroku, and it was rocking. I sent the link to a couple of friends, we all laughed for a while and I thought that was it.

After a while, I posted the API link to Hacker News and Proggit. The Hacker News post never got voted, the Proggit one got allot of upvotes, and soon I was on Proggit front-page. An avalanche of traffic ensued.

The post got duplicated on Hacker News, and this time it got allot of upvotes (probably a user with more influence). This was when all hell broke loose. Not only it got on the first-page it was also ranked in 2nd place.

The results where: on the first day I got 19.412 unique visitors. The second day, 21.764 unique visitors. The two days together summed up 255.034 pageviews. These values are amazing for a simple app that serves cat images. Actually, while I write this post, which is 2 months later, it still has around 100 unique visitors a day. And I’m not even counting direct API calls, just the index page visits.

So what?

Yeah, I know these web applications are pretty much useless, but I had allot of fun hacking them and watching the traffic hit the sites. And of course, it doesn’t really matter the fact that they are useless, as long as you have fun, learn and make other people smile, that’s what really matters.

Nginx and the HTTP OPTIONS method

2012-01-27T00:00:00+00:00

The current version of Nginx (1.0.x) doesn’t seem to support HTTP OPTIONS requests. It returns 405 "Method Not Allowed" whenever this request is sent.

Here’s an example using curl from the terminal:

$ curl -X OPTIONS busydudes.com

<html>
<head><title>405 Not Allowed</title></head>
<body bgcolor="white">
<center><h1>405 Not Allowed</h1></center>
<hr><center>nginx/1.0.11</center>
</body>
</html>

HTTP OPTIONS requests are essential if you’re doing cross-site HTTP requests and need to obtain the server authorization for the URI where the request originated from.

To solve this problem I found two solutions.

Solution 1 (not recommended)

If you’re using another web server behind Nginx and want the request to be handled by that web server, you can trick Nginx into believing that the HTTP status 405 is actually a 200 OK status, so it will just delegate the request to your webserver using the proxy_pass directive. Just keep in mind that this is an ugly fix. Edit your nginx.conf file and add the following:

error_page 405 =200 @405;
location @405 {
    root /;
    proxy_pass http://localhost:8080;
}

Solution 2

If you’re just using Nginx as your main server, or just want to obtain the authorization response for the origin domain, then this is definitely the best solution. Edit your nginx.conf file and add the following:

location / {
    if ($request_method = OPTIONS ) {
        add_header Access-Control-Allow-Origin "http://example.com";
        add_header Access-Control-Allow-Methods "GET, OPTIONS";
        add_header Access-Control-Allow-Headers "Authorization";
        add_header Access-Control-Allow-Credentials "true";
        add_header Content-Length 0;
        add_header Content-Type text/plain;
        return 200;
    }
}

You should edit the http://example.com to match the origin URI you want to allow. If you want to allow any origin just use the * wildcard.

Fixing libdlna formula in Homebrew

2011-12-06T00:00:00+00:00

Update: This fix has now been added to the Homebrew package.

Recently I got an XBox 360 for xmas, and started looking for ways to stream the music in my Macbook Air to it. I found some interesting commercial software to do it, but stumbled upon an open-source linux tool called uShare that was also available through the Homebrew package manager.

Doing a brew install ushare immediately stopped due to a make install error of the libdlna package, a dependency of uShare, that is required for compatibility with Playstation 3. Here’s the error I got:

profiles.c: In function 'av_profile_get_codecs':
profiles.c:208: error: 'CODEC_TYPE_AUDIO' undeclared (first use in this function)
profiles.c:208: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
profiles.c:208: error: for each function it appears in.)
profiles.c:214: error: 'CODEC_TYPE_VIDEO' undeclared (first use in this function)
make[1]: *** [profiles.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** Waiting for unfinished jobs....
make: *** [install] Error 2

This error happens for newer versions of the libavformat that no longer have the symbols CODEC_TYPE_AUDIO and CODEC_TYPE_VIDEO.

So, in order to fix the formula you need to apply this patch to the source code of libdlna. You can find the content of this patch in a github gist. But to successfully install the Homebrew formula you have to edit the formula file and include this patch in the patches method:

$ brew edit libdnla

Then find the patches method (on line 10) and change the code inside to the following:

def patches
  [
    # fixes ffmpeg locations
    "https://gist.github.com/raw/356431/fbddfeee80d9224f6c67886b119fbd813f3c0ffa/libdlna.patch",
    # fixes missing symbols for newer versions of libavformat
    "https://gist.github.com/raw/1434147/293ec631536bc34a6e2dd49bb0f30c86f02b1107/libdlna023_fix_symbols.patch"
  ]
end

Basically, instead of returning just the patch that was already in the formula as a string, I’m now returning an array with that patch, and my patch.

Now just save the file and:

$ brew install libdlna

And then resume the ushare formula install:

$ brew install ushare

That’s it. It should now install without a hassle.

I submitted this change to the Homebrew project with a pull request, so anytime soon you won’t be needing this workaround :)

Hacker News Stack

2011-05-15T00:00:00+01:00

Hacker News Stack is a Chrome extension that improves the readability of the items in the Hacker News website, removing the items that were clicked (read).

This extension is a page action, that acts on the website. As the user clicks on an item link, the item ID is parsed and stored in the HTML5 storage database (localStorage). Automatically this item will be moved to the bottom of the website (marked as read).

This was a frustrating extension to build because of the fact that the HTML source in the Hacker News website is a total mess. Parsing it turned out to be an unreliable task, not only because the site layout is done with tables, but also because of the lack of semantics in the markup.

Anyway, it seems to be working fine (with some minor bugs being taken care off). I’m currently using it and it’s making a big difference making me focus only on the news that I didn’t clicked yet.

You can install it from the Chrome Webstore or check out the source code at Github.

hashr 1.0 for Firefox

2011-04-11T00:00:00+01:00

The hashr Firefox extension has reached version 1.0 with the launch of Firefox 4.

This new version brings some UI improvements. Some users were complaining about the interface being clunky, it turns out that this was specially true in Firefox for Windows and Linux. I was only testing it on the Mac version, where it looked allot better. So I gave it a slightly better UI and made it consistent between all operating systems where Firefox runs.

There’s also a new toolbar button that is added by default on installation. It does the same thing as the addon-bar (aka old status-bar), it shows/hides the hashr toolbar. It makes hashr more visible to new users after instalation, but it can be removed if you only wish to use the addon-bar button.

A new version of the website is being (slowly) developed, and also a new version of the Google Chrome extension.

This new version is already available on the Mozilla Addons website.

Codebits 2010 Project - Chatstorm

2010-11-16T00:00:00+00:00

Still recovering from Codebits 2010. Congratulations to Sapo for putting up another awesome edition of this event. Three exausting days of coding, talks, and all kinds of crazy events (yes I’m looking at you Nuclear Tacos)!

Just like last year, this year, along with my teammates, I had a mission. To create a project and get it ready by the end of the 48 hour hackathon (actually we spent the first 24 hours attending some talks, playing some video-games and trying to decide what to do).

Once more this mission was accomplished. The project is called “Chatstorm”.

Chatstorm is an online brainstorming web application that uses a real-time chat to share ideas and automatically fetch and suggest web-content related with those ideas. Technically speaking it was developed in Node.js (Server-side Javascript) and WebSockets (Client-side). It was allot of fun to work with these new technologies and to watch the final result.

Unfortunately, Chatstorm won’t be available online for now due to it’s very immature state regarding security, but I’ll leave you some screenshots:

{.post-image}

Currently Chatstorm uses Sapo Fotos, Sapo Vídeos and Twitter as sources of information suggestion. But more sources can be easily added just like plugins.

In the end, we didn’t managed to get into the top 10 projects, but we got much more positive feedback than last year. Still it was worth it. Mission accomplished and now back to real life, counting the days to Codebits 2011.

Check my Codebits 2010 photos at Flickr: Gallery or Slideshow.

PHP mcrypt in Snow Leopard with Homebrew

2010-08-16T00:00:00+01:00

Update: This also works on OS X Lion as it is. But just for the sake of correctness you can replace every occurrence of 10.6 to 10.7 in MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET.

If you are using Homebrew as your OSX package manager, chances are that you are using the default PHP that comes with Snow Leopard. This PHP installation does not have the mcrypt extension, so if you are trying to use something like PHPMyAdmin, you’ll get an error message saying that mcrypt is not enabled in php.ini.

I googled the answer and found little info about it. I found this post that it’s pretty complete but it compiles mcrypt manually, which is not Homebrew way of doing it. So the purpose of this post is to gather the info for those who are using Homebrew and the default PHP.

First you have to install mcrypt with Homebrew, but the current Formula for mcrypt is not suitable for those on Snow Leopard, so let’s change it. Open the Formula in your favorite code editor:

$ sudo vim /usr/local/Library/Formula/mcrypt.rb

Note that you only need the sudo if you did not chown your /usr/local directory.

Now lets change the install method to this:

def install
  system "MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.6 CFLAGS='-O3 -fno-common -arch i386 -arch x86_64' LDFLAGS='-O3 -arch i386 -arch x86_64' CXXFLAGS='-O3 -fno-common -arch i386 -arch x86_64' ./configure --disable-dependency-tracking --prefix=#{prefix} --mandir=#{man}"
  system "make -j6"
  system "make install"
end

Save and run it:

$ brew install mcrypt

Just wait some seconds and you’re done with this step. After this you might want to undo the changes in the Formula file to avoid git conflicts when updating Homebrew.

Second, you have to download the PHP 5.3 source to compile the mcrypt PHP extension and install it. You can download the source from this link.

Extract the tarball to a directory of your choice, it can be ~/Desktop and then:

$ cd ~/Desktop/php-5.3.0/ext/mcrypt

And type:

$ phpize

Again wait some seconds and when its complete type:

$ MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.6 CFLAGS='-O3 -fno-common -arch i386 -arch x86_64' LDFLAGS='-O3 -arch i386 -arch x86_64' CXXFLAGS='-O3 -fno-common -arch i386 -arch x86_64' ./configure --with-php-config=/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/usr/bin/php-config; make -j6;sudo make install

Allot will happen and hopefully you won’t see any errors.

Now finally you just need to edit the /etc/php.ini file to enable the extension you just compiled and installed. If you don’t have a /etc/php.ini file you need to copy the default config file:

$ sudo cp /etc/php.ini.default /etc/php.ini

And let’s edit it:

$ sudo vim /etc/php.ini

Find the enable_dl setting and remove the ; in front of the line (if any) and change it to On. It should look like this:

enable_dl = On

Now find the Dynamic Extensions section of the file and add this line at the end of that section:

extension=mcrypt.so

Restart the Apache server and you’re done. Happy coding!

Test Driven Development with PHP

2010-07-18T00:00:00+01:00

This week I had the oportunity to give an introduction talk about Test Driven Development with PHP at DRI Code Sessions. I’m no TDD expert, but I’ve been using this methodology on some of my personal projects, and this was a great way to consolidate what I’ve been learning and also share and discuss it with other programmers.

The slides are very concise, as they had the sole purpose of guiding my speech. But I believe that they give, along with the code examples, a good notion of what TDD is about.

You can find the code examples on Github and also the slides in PDF and ODP formats.

Moved from Wordpress to Jekyll

2010-06-27T00:00:00+01:00

I’ve been wanting to leave the Wordpress platform for a while now, and last week I finally managed to start rebuilding this blog with Jekyll - a blog-aware, static site generator in Ruby.

Don’t get me wrong, I still think that Wordpress is a great blogging/CMS platform. But for me and the purpose of this blog, it has become a little overkill.

Jekyll is my ideal way to maintain a blog. I get to use my favorite daily work tools (Git and Textmate) and in terms of performance, static files are just great, no need to spend precious VPS resources. Oh, did I mention that this blog is now running on a VPS? That’s right, prgmr.com powered. I’m gradually moving all content in the Dreamhost account to the VPS.

Regarding the migration, it went almost perfect except for the feed. Feed subscribers may notice some weird behavior, like sudden unread posts showing up that aren’t new at all and stuff like that. Things will get stable with new posts.

The blog design has also changed from a modified Wordpress template to something built from scratch. This new design keeps things simple and readable, just the way I like. So no fancy stuff, just plain focus on content. And it’s still being improved along with the markup, so there will be some changes in the next few days.

Update: I’m now using the Google Webfonts API to serve the some beautiful fonts. The header title font is Lobster, the body font is Droid Sans and the code font is Droid Sans Mono. If your browser does not support Webfonts the CSS will fallback to Georgia, the original font of this blog.

Using Things with Dropbox

2010-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

Things is probably one of the best task management applications for Mac that I've come across. And the only that I didn't completely forgot after 2-3 days. The iPhone/iPod app is just the cherry on top of the cake. You can sync with your Mac app and all.

The one feature Things is missing (besides being Mac only), is sync between different computers. I constantly use 2 Macs (personal and work) so this was a major turn off. But that's where Dropbox kicks in and saves the day.

Although not very explicit, Things has the option to select the location of your tasks database. So it's pretty much obvious: save the database in a Dropbox folder, configure all your Things apps to use the new database location and you're done.

This is where you're Things database is stored:

~/Library/Application Support/Cultured Code/

Just copy the Things/ folder that lives in the path above to your Dropbox and then open the Things app pressing simultaneously the option key (alt). A popup will show up asking you to choose the library (database) location:

Now choose the Things folder in your Dropbox and that's it. Repeat this step for every application that you use on a different Mac, and you're ready to kick some serious ass at Getting Things Done.

You can find this info about selecting Things library/database on the Cultured Code wiki.

Update: One thing I forgot to mention is that this approach I described does not work with multiple Things applications running at the same time in different computers. Because Things only reloads the database.xml file on startup, if you don't close the application, it won't be aware of the new changes made to the database, and will eventually save the current state over the changes you've made in other instances of the application.

hashr for Google Chrome

2010-01-19T00:00:00+00:00

Yesterday I've released hashr extension for Google Chrome. This is the first version, and it was just to try out the extensions platform for Google's browser.

So basically this extension does the same as the Firefox addon, and the website, but in Chrome. Here's a screenshot of it in action:

You can find more screenshots, info and install it at the Extension Gallery page. Or you can just check out the source at GitHub.

Tinyscrobbler

2010-01-17T00:00:00+00:00

On my spare time I've been learning the Ruby language. And Tinyscrobbler is the first result.

Tinyscrobbler is a lightweight Last.fm scrobbler library. It can be used to implement the track scrobbling feature in a ruby player app.

You can find the source (GitHub) here and install the ruby gem from Gemcutter.

If you opt to install from Gemcutter, you need to add it to your gem sources. Just type the following in your terminal (depending on your system you might need to execute these commands with sudo):

$ gem sources -a http://gemcutter.org

This will add gemcutter to your gem sources. Finally to install the gem just type:

$ gem install tinyscrobbler

Tinyscrobbler contains a helper class to read the audio files metadata, but for now it only supports .mp3 files. I'll be working on extending the support to other file formats like .ogg, .mp4a and .wma.