If you’re still catching up, hit the archive and listen to an older show to hold you over.

The post No live show this Tuesday appeared first on The Changelog.

Joris Kluivers takes QC-based prototyping for iOS one step further with qc-mobile, which makes it possible to load, display, and interact with .qtz files on iOS.

It’s still early days for the project (as Joris explains in his introductory blog post), but it is functional enough to render Jay Thrash’s iMessage recreation as seen in the demo video below.

Now is a great time to get involved and make significant contributions to the project! qc-mobile is MIT licensed and hosted on GitHub.

The post Prototype your iOS apps with Quartz Composer and qc-mobile appeared first on The Changelog.

My life just got easier thanks to Postgres.app (the easiest way to run #PostgreSQL on Mac) Thanks @craigkerstiens bit.ly/17jRh1a

A week or so back, I was chatting with Craig Kerstiens, a product guy at Heroku, about an issue I was having with my Postgres install (through Homebrew) — he suggested that I use Postgres.app.

There’s an easier way

Just download, install and run the app when you want to run Postgres locally for development. I always found myself fumbling with commands like pg_ctl -D /usr/local/var/postgres start or pg_ctl -D /usr/local/var/postgres stop -s -m fast to start and stop my Postgres server. Running Postgres.app is a much simpler and easier user experience now. Just run the app when you’re hacking, and quit the app when you’re done. Simple.

The classic Postgres elephant icon will hang out in your system tray for easy access.

Heroku and Rails specifics

If you’re hacking on a project and deploying to Heroku with a Postgres database, you’ll need to run heroku addons:add heroku-postgresql:dev to setup Postgres for your app before running something like heroku run rake db:migrate.

For more details on using Postgres on Heroku check out postgres.heroku.com. You should also subscribe to Postgres Weekly – a free, once–weekly e-mail round-up of PostgreSQL news and articles curated by Craig Kerstiens.

The post Postgres.app, an easier way to use PostgreSQL on Mac appeared first on The Changelog.

Listen to this episode on 5by5!

We moved the show to 5by5! You can tune-in LIVE on Tuesday’s at 5pm CST.

The post #93: Sass, Bourbon and Product Design with Phil LaPier appeared first on The Changelog.

Listen to this episode on 5by5!

We moved the show to 5by5! You can tune-in LIVE on Tuesday’s at 5pm CST.

The post #92: Sidekiq, Ruby, and more with Mike Perham appeared first on The Changelog.

Chartkick works with Rails 3.1+ and makes adding beautiful charts to your web app as easy as a one liner. Create a simple line chart like this:

<%= line_chart User.group_by_day(:created_at).count %>

Or one with multiple series of data like this:

<%= line_chart @goals.map { |goal| 
  {
    :name => goal.name, 
    :data => goal.feats.group_by_week(:created_at).count 
  } 
} %>

A pie chart is as easy as:

<%= pie_chart Goal.group("name").count %>

Chartkick is mostly a JavaScript library with Ruby helpers to generate the required markup that the JavaScript turns into charts. It requires either Google Charts or Highcharts to work, but it doesn’t require Ruby! If you want to use the JavaScript bits from another language, check out Chartkick.js instead.

Chartkick is MIT licensed and hosted on GitHub.

The post Create beautiful JavaScript charts with one line of Ruby using Chartkick appeared first on The Changelog.

How can we open-source consumer products? Why should we?

In this essay I want to define what open products are, explain why I think they’re important, and suggest what’s needed in order to make more of them.

I define an open product as “a technology product that happens to be open-source.” The best example is Reddit.com: a major web property, and oh yeah by the way here’s almost all of its source code. Whoa!

Open products like Reddit.com are pretty clearly distinguished from closed products like Google.com or Facebook.com, but they also stand in contrast to open-source projects. An open-source project is designed for me to download and install on my own servers. Sure, a few people run their own instance of Reddit, but that’s not its driving use case.

It’s a fuzzy boundary, the line between open-source projects and open products. To firm it up, we’d look at the number of installations of a given project, and the audience size for each installation. Drupal is an open-source project and not an open product, because there are many, many instances of it. WordPress is fuzzier: how much WordPress traffic is handled by WordPress.com? I don’t know. We can also look at intentions. I’m not sure how many instances of rstat.us there are, but I do know that project leaders want it to be federated, not centralized. Same with Diaspora. I think of an open product as a commons, a single central instance shared by all. Email is federated. Gmail is a product.

Open products are also distinguished from open platforms. I think of operating systems and web browsers as platforms, and apps on those platforms as products. So Firefox (src) is an open platform, as are Ubuntu (src), Fedora, Android (src), etc. (Chrome doesn’t count because it’s closed; Chromium would count if people used it directly.) We’ve got great open platforms for the same reason we’ve got great open-source projects: they’re built by developers for developers.

Not surprisingly, a number of existing open products are web apps used by developers. Prime examples these days would be Travis CI (src), Sentry (src), and ReadTheDocs (src), along with venerable old SourceForge (a.k.a. Allura). There are also examples of developer-focused companies with partially-open products, such as Balanced Payments (src) and Bountysource (src).

The open products I’m most interested in, however, are top-level, consumer-facing web and mobile products that stand on their own as consumer products first, and—almost as an afterthought—happen to be almost fully open-source to boot. We know that openness is the best model for building developer tools and platforms. That’s old news. The question today is, how much else can we bring under the banner of openness? Besides Reddit, the two best examples of consumer-facing open products I’ve found are NewsBlur (src) and Trovebox (src). My own entry is Gittip (src). If we include older desktop apps, then we’ve also got things like Audacity (src), GIMP (src), and VLC (src).

> Open products respect the hacker ethic, without forcing it on others.

For me, openness is not an absolute good, not an end in itself. Rather, it helps maximize personal freedom and autonomy amidst ginormous social systems. I value the luxuries of modern society, and I value the freedom to explore and tinker with society as I see fit, to feel like I’m helping run it, and not being run over by it. I doubt that more than a few percent of Reddit users know or would care that it is open-source, but to me that’s the beauty of it: this deeply respects the hacker ethic, without ideologically forcing it on others.

Open Product Business Models

The truth is that open-source consumer software sucks compared to proprietary competitors: GIMP vs. Photoshop. Audacity vs. Pro Tools. Trovebox vs. Instagram. Why? Money. Free software altruism isn’t enough to fully offset economic necessity, therefore the best of our collective energy goes into proprietary software, since that’s where the money is right now. How do we start to shift this?

Whereas open-source projects get funded as a side-effect of other business models, an open product needs its own business model. As with proprietary software, the two basic options are:

• advertising–selling users’ attention to others

• fees–requiring money from users

How to fund open products parallels the conversation about funding digital content, where creators like Amanda Palmer, Hank Green and even The Changelog are pointing to a third way: asking users for money. Companies like Kickstarter, Flattr, CentUp, and Patreon, as well as my own company, Gittip, are building platforms to enable new business models to emerge based on what we might call “soft fees”—something between paywalls and traditional charitable donations:

• soft fees–asking users for money

Open products use a mix of these models. SourceForge sells ads. Reddit sells ads and subscriptions. Travis sells ads and asks for money. Sentry sells subscriptions, along with Newsblur and Trovebox. Gittip charges fees and asks for money. ReadTheDocs asks for money, as do Audacity, GIMP, and VLC.

My hunch is that soft fees are the best fit for open products, but it remains to be seen whether soft-fee models can scale as well as the advertising models of Google and Facebook, or the hard-fee models of Microsoft, Apple, and Adobe. One potential approach is Jeff Lindsay’s “autosustainable services,” where the product makes more or less urgent requests for money based on real-time operating costs:

The above screenshot is a mockup of autosustainable services, from a talk by Jeff Lindsay (@progrium).

The challenge that soft-fee business models face is cultural: we’re not used to asking each other for money–and, conversely, we’re not used to giving our money away–except as “charity.” We’re accustomed to thinking of charities as optional extras in an economy where the real work gets done in hard-fee and advertising-based businesses. I prefer “soft fee” to “donation,” because I want to stake out a new territory where giving money is more normal. This isn’t charity. This is a new kind of business.

How money flows into a company building open products is one challenge. How it flows out is another. The bulk of most budgets is people, and when a product is closed it’s easy to route the money it brings in to the people who built it. They’re the company’s owners, employees, contractors and suppliers. What happens when half the labor that goes into a product comes from a loose community of so-called volunteers? Surely they should get their share of the money. They have to, if we’re going to make it economically rational to work on open products. As with soft fees, I think we need a redefinition, because “volunteer,” like “donation,” carries a stigma: volunteers are nice, but they don’t do real work. Perhaps we can say “open workers,” or just “contributors”? More important than a shift in terminology is a shift in practice. We need innovation in how we structure our companies to account for open workers as well as employees. (With Gittip, for example, we’re experimenting with bringing contributors on as independent contractors, and then voting on how money is split.)

Open products and companies need to compete with closed products and companies for both customers and talent. If we can find business models for open products that equal and exceed the productivity of current closed models, then we can quietly spread the hacker ethic and make our society more open and humane.

Share your comments on Hacker News →

Thanks to The Changelog for the invitation to write this essay, and to those that responded to my request for examples of open products.

To share your Opinion on The Changelog — get in touch with Adam.

The post Open Products appeared first on The Changelog.

Its author, lifthrasiir, has ported it to Rust.

This is really cool for a few reasons:

1. It’s possibly one of the bigger Rust codebases that exists today, klocing in at just over 6,000 lines of code.
2. Some useful utility bits will be sent back upstream into Rust’s standard library.
3. Lifthrasiir is writing a detailed guide to how it was made, and “hope[s] it to be a starting point to the advanced programming in Rust.”
4. Games are fun.

You can check out more in its repo.

The post angolmois: a music game ported to Rust appeared first on The Changelog.

What does this mean? Well, from the Kernel Programming Guide,

Modules are pieces of code that can be loaded and unloaded into the kernel upon demand. They extend the functionality of the kernel without the need to reboot the system. For example, one type of module is the device driver, which allows the kernel to access hardware connected to the system.

Neat, eh? So basically, ‘extend your operating system with Rust.’

I’m excited to see this flurry of ultra-low-level activity from the Rust community. I’m sure there’s more neat stuff to come!

The post rust.ko: a minimal Linux kernel module for Rust appeared first on The Changelog.

Listen to this episode on 5by5!

We moved the show to 5by5! You can tune-in LIVE on Tuesday’s at 5pm CST.

The post #91: Discover Meteor.js with Sacha Greif appeared first on The Changelog.

Thank you @nex3 for adding namespaces to Sass!

Namespace support has been long-requested by those writing CSS the Sass way. The feature is still in development and should hit a Sass version near you soon enough, but it looks to be a very simple and consistent way of dealing with the vast number of use cases for namespaces.

For a deeper take on the history, read this issue and this comment which summarizes the solution and some of the rejected alternative solutions.

Here’s an example use case shared by Chris Eppstein:

@function current-module() {
  @return nth(&, 1);
}

mymodule {
  @at-root {
    .#{current-module()}-header { ... }
    .#{current-module()}-footer { ... }
    .#{current-module()}-body   {
      a          { ... } 
      span       { ... } 
      p          { ... }
      form       {
        button.#{current-module()}-button { ... } }
    }
  }
}

And this would generate CSS like:

.mymodule-header { ... }
.mymodule-footer { ... }
.mymodule-body a { ... }
.mymodule-body span { ... }
.mymodule-body p { ... }
.mymodule-body form button.mymodule-button { ... }

Check out this Gist and this comment to learn more.

The post Namespace support is being added to Sass appeared first on The Changelog.

I created Markdown Here when I realized that I was having much more fun writing README files in Markdown than I was writing email — especially if the email contained any significant structure or code snippets.

Current Browsers that support markdown here can be seen on the Get it! page:

• Chrome/Chromium
• Firefox/Pale moon
• Safari (as of May 19, 2013)
• Thunderbird, Postbox, Icedove (email clients)

You can view the project website or view the source on GitHub.

The post Write emails in Markdown and render them with Markdown Here! appeared first on The Changelog.

It is, of course, incredibly fully featured:

Ha! But, more seriously, this program that writes the screen red is written in Rust, and, in theory, will run on 32 bit commodity PC hardware.

Is something with no features actually a kernel? In the hobbyist OS community, this still counts. Way back in the day, there were applications that were written that also needed to boot the computer, and while an OS that only runs one program may not be what you conventionally think of, I’d say it fits. But really, I don’t care: even if it isn’t a full kernel, it’s a neat hack that would provide a great starting place for someone interested in operating systems and Rust to pick up and run with it.

The post rustboot: a tine 32 bit kernel written in Rust appeared first on The Changelog.

What does that mean? Well, normally, a runtime defines all of the basic features a language supports. For example, the garbage collector. You need this to be compiled in with your program for the program to work properly.

What zero.rs does is provides small stubs for everything that is absolutely necessary for a given Rust program. The only thing that zero.rs depends on is 5 C functions, which are usually provided by libc.

What does that mean? Well:

Garbage collection, tasks, and failure will not work. All the other language features, including unique pointers, references, and closures do work, so programs such as sprocketnes that do not use garbage collection should be fine.

The Rust standard library cannot be used in this mode, but splitting out the Rust standard library into a portion that can be used in freestanding mode would be an interesting and valuable project (IMO).

Why is this useful? Well, you could use Rust to write the Rust runtime. Or you could write a Linux kernel module, since it doesn’t depend on the rest of Rust. Or you could write an operating system in Rust. Or write the Rust garbage collector in Rust. Reducing dependencies means that it’s much easier to use Rust in a large number of places.

The post zero.rs: write Rust without a runtime appeared first on The Changelog.

gif.js is a JavaScript GIF encoder from Johan Nordberg that runs in your browser. It uses typed arrays and web workers to render each frame in the background, it’s really fast!

Checkout the demo to see gif.js in action and the source on GitHub.

The post gif.js, a full-featured JavaScript GIF encoder that runs in your browser appeared first on The Changelog.

Listen to this episode on 5by5!

We moved the show to 5by5! You can tune-in LIVE on Tuesday’s at 5pm CST.

The post #90: Pair programming and Ruby with Avdi Grimm appeared first on The Changelog.

A community-maintained resource to encourage and facilitate diverse pair-programming. Help eagerly welcomed!

Put out your pair-programming welcome mat. Pair today! If you’re new to the scene there’s TONS of resources to help you get started.

Listen to episode #90 with Avdi Grimm too! We talk at length about this with #pairwithme creator Avdi Grimm.

The post Pair with me! appeared first on The Changelog.

I like the approach to managing a site taken by Jekyll. A lot.

I don’t like Ruby, and I don’t like strict logic-less templates. Jekyll is Ruby with Liquid as the templating engine.

Heckle is JavaScript with Mold (programmable template extravaganza) as the templating engine.

If you feel how Marijn feels and you don’t like Ruby, or strict logic-less templates — you should checkout Heckle. Marijn also asks that you not use Heckle at this point IF you want something stable and finished. It’s a work in progress.

Check out the source, or learn more about Heckle’s origins.

The post Heckle, the Jekyll clone in node.js appeared first on The Changelog.

Someone joked about storing files on Flickr since they now offer 1TB, and I thought it was hilarious enough to try github.com/meltingice/fli…

— Ryan LeFevre (@MeltingIce) May 21, 2013

From the readme:

Store arbitrary data with your 1TB Flickr cloud drive by encoding any file as a PNG. This is mostly a proof of concept right now. Don’t do anything beyond tinkering with it yet.

Check out the project on GitHub!

Thanks to Sam Soffes for the tip!

The post flickr-store, store arbitrary data with your 1TB Flickr cloud appeared first on The Changelog.

When aiming for transparency with developers (something Twitter has struggled with over the past few years), something as simple as publishing your Terms of Service on GitHub goes a long way to show TRUE transparency.

From the readme:

The App.net terms of service documents live here. To facilitate transparent discussion, we encourage users to create issues and/or submit pull requests with your feedback. Our general process is to incorporate user feedback on a roughly quarterly basis based on review with our legal team, but in the early stages this may occur significantly more often.

What I love most is that transparency in changes to App.net’s terms of service are not only collaborative, but they are also just a diff away. In fact, if you wanted to get all Git about it, you could git-blame the actual person who committed the change.

Kudos to Dalton and the choice’s they are making at App.net for being transparent and developer centric!

If you don’t have an App.net account, use this link to get a free account: join.app.net/from/adamstac

The post App.net terms of service (TOS) appeared first on The Changelog.

Boris is cooler than my little plugin because it works outside of WordPress and runs directly in your terminal. Check it out in action:

You can install Boris via Packagist or use it directly by cloning the repo:

git clone git://github.com/d11wtq/boris.git
cd boris
./bin/boris

This and much more information about the REPL is available in the README. Boris is MIT licensed and hosted on GitHub.

The post Meet Boris, a tiny REPL for PHP appeared first on The Changelog.

If you want to try it out, download it here.

Gmail Notifr was originally written in RubyCocoa, then MacRuby, and recently Objective-C.

The post Gmail Notifr, an open source Gmail notifier for OS X appeared first on The Changelog.

Listen to this episode on 5by5!

We moved the show to 5by5! You can tune-in LIVE on Tuesday’s at 5pm CST.

The post #89: Doing incredible things with linux containers and Docker with Solomon Hykes appeared first on The Changelog.

To save some trouble for those of you who want to switch but haven’t yet, here’s what to look out for on the conversion.

#1: Sidekiq is too darn fast

It sounds ridiculous, but Sidekiq is so fast that it can run your worker before your model even finishes saving. There’s one easy solution for this: don’t use after_create or after_save, but instead use after_commit to make sure that model is done with the database.

after_commit :run_expensive_hello_world, :on => :create

This will solve 99% of your use-cases, but if you use something like state_machine, you won’t be able to use any of state_machine’s transitions to push out a worker. Instead, we solved it by creating an instance variable that the after_commit callback uses.

attr_accessor :just_moved

after_commit :tell_neighbors_hi, :if => :just_moved

state_machine :status, :initial => :sitting do
  # ...
  after_transition any => :moved do |i|
    i.just_moved = true
  end
end

#2: You can’t see failed jobs. Well, sort of.

Sidekiq is different from Resque in that it doesn’t keep a permanent record of your failed jobs, so you won’t always be able to go back later and run it again after it’s fixed.

The reasoning behind this design decision is that Sidekiq, unlike Resque, will retry your job at increasing intervals automatically up until about 20 days, along with giving you the ability to manually retry it — plenty of time to see the error, assign the bug and fix it. After that, you can say sayonara to that record. Sidekiq has some nice docs of how to handle errors, though, including saying one last goodbye to the error, so it’s not too hard to set up some safeguards against losing data.

If you don’t want to take the time to set all that up, there’s always sidekiq-failures.

#3: Sidekiq’s perform is not Resque’s self.perform

Mike Perham has done a good job of making the terminology fairly similar when switching from Resque to Sidekiq. However, make note that Sidekiq’s perform method is an instance-level method, whereas Resque’s is class-level.

The main takeaway from this is that in Resque, it’s not uncommon to throw the perform method on whatever object you want to use for the worker. In Sidekiq, you’ve got to watch out for initializing that new object. You might be able to get away with it if your initialize method has no arguments, but you’re better off creating a new class just for the worker.

After getting accustomed to some of the differences between Resque and Sidekiq, it’s pretty easy to see that Sidekiq can shave time and money off your server and is definitely worth the switch.

The post Earn a Sidekiq blackbelt by breaking a few boards appeared first on The Changelog.

Listen to episode #88 on 5by5!

If you’re just catching up, we’ve move the podcast to 5by5. Tune in LIVE on Tuesday’s at 5pm CST.

The post #88: Vagrant, HashiCorp and beyond with Mitchell Hashimoto appeared first on The Changelog.

----------
Rob Warner (@hoop33) (258)  You
I'm working on PM support for Wry this weekend :-) #wry
ID: 5557218 -- 2013-05-11T12:04:10Z
----------

Wry is a command-line tool for Mac OS X 10.7+ that solves that problem by bringing App.net to the command line. Installing Wry couldn’t be easier especially if you’re using homebrew.

First run this to make sure everything is up to date.

$ brew doctor

Next, simply type:

$ brew install wry

In seconds you’ll have Wry installed and can add authorization

$ wry authorize

Copy and paste your authorization code from the App.net website and you’re done. Yes, it’s that simple. You can also download and install the zip file yourself.

Once it’s installed, type wry to see a list of supported commands.

The wry commands are:
   authorize   Authorize with App.net
   block       Block a user
   commands    List available commands
   delete      Delete a post
   download    Download a file
   find        Finds users
   follow      Follow a user
   followers   List the users following a user
   following   List the users a user is following
   global      Display the global stream
   help        Display help
   ls          Get a file listing
   mentions    Display the mentions for a user
   mute        Mute a user
   muted       List the users that a user has muted
   post        Create a post
   posts       Display a user's posts
   read        Read a post
   replies     Display the replies to a post
   reply       Reply to a post
   repost      Repost a post
   search      Search for hashtag
   star        Star a post
   stream      Display the current user's stream
   unblock     Unblock a user
   unfollow    Unfollow a user
   unified     Display the current user's unified stream
   unmute      Unmute a user
   upload      Upload a file
   user        Display information about a user
   users       Manage the users you've authorized on this computer
   version     Display version information

The list of commands supported by Wry is impressive. After reaching out to Rob, to let him know how much I enjoyed using it, he told me that private messaging and patter room support was released with version 1.5. Just an added bonus to an already great tool.

Check out Wry on github and follow author Rob Warner (@hoop33) on App.net or Twitter.

Special thanks to Dennis Keefe, writer of The Common Geek, for pointing it out.

The post Wry brings App.net to the command line appeared first on The Changelog.

Pretty much since we first launched the podcast Dan Benjamin (founder of 5by5) has wanted The Changelog to join the ranks of 5by5. The only reason we didn’t make the move back then was because of how we choose to number our podcast episodes. Rather than having episode #86, we had episode 0.8.6. For Dan, that was a big problem for 5by5′s CMS.

Needless to say, we never made the move. Over the years, we’ve even taken slack for not following SemVer so we figured improperly versioning the podcast for the sake of being more true to the hacker way wasn’t working. So we’re ditching the version numbers as episode numbers, and making our way to 5by5 with normal episode numbers like a good podcast should.

Let me just say that we are STOKED to be joining forces with Dan and 5by5! If you don’t already, follow @TheChangelog on Twitter for blog updates and new show announcements so you don’t miss a beat!

What’s changing?

Nothing, for the most part.

Since the re-launch, we made a commitment to you to bring the podcast back — we now broadcast the show live every Tuesday at 5pm CST. No change there.

We also opened up the IRC chat room on Freenode for realtime chat during the show. Moving to 5by5 has no effect on this plan. In fact, it only helps us to better execute this plan.

The only change is where you go to listen to the show live and subscribe.

Nothing, and I repeat nothing is changing with the blog. In fact, we’re growing. More on that later.

Listening live

The show will be LIVE at 5by5.tv/live every Tuesday at 5pm CST.

5by5 also has their 5by5 Radio app for iOS ($2.99) which lets you listen live on the go. You can also opt-in to push notifications when the show goes live so you never miss another show. If you have the app already, head to the settings and enable push notifications for The Changelog. You might as well enable push notifications for Founders Talk too while you’re there.

Listening to the show archive

The entire show archive and future recorded shows will now be served by the 5by5 CMS and distributed across the globe by Cachefly’s CDN. So no matter where you are in the world, you’ll get super fast access to the show.

We’re also pretty excited about the new artwork Jory is making us! Keep an eye out on his Dribbble for a sneak peek.

Subscribing to the show

For those who subscribe via RSS — update your feed to use http://feeds.5by5.tv/changelog, or click here feeds.5by5.tv/changelog.

For those who subscribe via iTunes — No change is required! We did update the feed that iTunes consumes though, so you MAY see older shows get re-downloaded. Sadly, we can’t prevent this. Subscribe via iTunes here.

The post The Changelog podcast is moving to 5by5! appeared first on The Changelog.

Tune in LIVE every Tuesday at 3pm PT / 6pm ET.

• We’re live every Tuesday! thechangelog.com/live
• Hack in style with your very own Changelog tee!
• We are now member supported!
• We’re joined by Chad Whitacre of gittip.com
• gittip.com allows you to send recurring gifts to people you want to support
• Chad is running gittip.com as an open company
• Pledgie is a way to raise funds online
• The MacArthur Genius Grant is a program that supports awesome people doing awesome things
• Balanced Payments is the payment provider behind gittip
• Stripe is another payment provider
• Watsi is crowd funding for changing the world for good
• Balanced has open sourced their dashboard
• A BDFL is a Benevolent Dictator for Life
• The Lean Startup is a book by Eric Ries
• Heroku gives on gittip.
• MaxCDN gives on gittip.
• Reddit is an open source project and is on github
• Share projects and links with us on our subreddit
• You can sign up for the gittip newsletter
• Medium is a new writing platform
• Kenneth loves this tweet from Chad on Twitter

The post Episode 0.8.7 – Sustaining open source and building an open company with Chad Whitacre appeared first on The Changelog.

So, needless to say, it’s a big deal for Dave Shea to move the codebase to GitHub and follow suit with what we now think is a norm, which is open projects and social coding.

If you’d like to add a modern CSS Zen Garden design to the mix, fork, branch and submit a pull request! If you’re new to Git and GitHub, and you’re not sure what to do – either learn git (do this!) or use the traditional submission form at mezzoblue.com/zengarden/submit.

Sadly my submission from WAY BACK IN THE DAY was never added as an official design, but can be seen (un-styled) here. I still have the CSS for that so maybe one day I can work it out with Dave to update the CSS src URL for my submission.

Check out the source and fork it on GitHub. Or head to csszengarden.com to see the original design and learn more.

The post CSS Zen Garden turns 10 and the source is now open on GitHub appeared first on The Changelog.

Gitcrypt is inspired by this document written by Ning Shang, which was in turn inspired by this post. Without these two documents, by people much smarter than me, git-encrypt would not exist.

There is some controversy over using this technique, so do your research and understand the implications of using this tool before you go crazy with it.

Check out the project on GitHub.

The post Gitcrypt, transparent Git encryption appeared first on The Changelog.

For many web developers, accessibility is complex and somewhat difficult. The Accessibility Project understands that and we want to help to make web accessibility easier for front end developers to implement.

Dive into the archives, web accessibility checklist and resources to get up to speed on how to implement best practices for web accessibility in your project.

If you’ve got something you’d like to share, fork the project! The site is built with Jekyll & Bootstrap collaboratively on Github.

The post The Accessibility Project, a community-driven effort to make web accessibility easier appeared first on The Changelog.

This project is an attempt to re-implement this feature and to figure out how the animations are done. I don’t support this project in a way to completely implement all features of ChatHeads. It should only illustrate how parts of ChatHeads are done.

Yours truly even has a commit. Sure, it’s just a spelling change, but that’s all it takes.

Check out the source on GitHub.

ht/ @Soffes

The post An implementation of Facebook’s ChatHeads on iOS appeared first on The Changelog.

Stringer is Matt Swanson’s entry into the RSS ecosystem. Matt describes Stringer like so:

Stringer has no external dependencies, no social recommendations/sharing, and no fancy machine learning algorithms. But it does have keyboard shortcuts and was made with love! When BIG_FREE_READER shuts down, your instance of Stringer will still be kicking.

Here’s a screenshot of it in action. (Bonus points for featuring a Changelog post!)

Stringer is written in Ruby and built on Sinatra with a PostgreSQL datastore. It deploys easily to Heroku and is a self-professed work-in-progress. One thing the web app currently lacks is a solid mobile offering, so please get involved if you have mobile ideas and/or chops!

The project is MIT licensed and hosted on GitHub.

The post Stringer: a self-hosted, anti-social RSS reader appeared first on The Changelog.

<script type='text/ruby'>
  window.onload do
    introduction = document.create_element('p')
    introduction.inner_text = 'Hello, world!'
    document.body.append_child(introduction)
  end
</script>

It only works on the Mac right now, and there are a few other gotcha’s to keep in mind:

• In Ruby, methods and attributes are specified in underscore_case instead of camelCase.
• The window variable is accessible from only the top-most scope. Elsewhere you can use the global $window.
• Ruby accepts Procs and blocks as callbacks and listeners. View an example.

You can go to the project homepage, get the latest release or view the source on GitHub.

The post Run Ruby in the browser with Decaf, a fork of WebKit. appeared first on The Changelog.

I gave it a test drive on one of the student apps and it took 5 minutes, at most, to get up and running.

Just drop this in your Gemfile:

group :development do
  gem 'xray-rails'
end

Bundle and delete the cached assets:

$ bundle && rm -rf tmp/cache/assets

Restart your app, visit it in your browser, and press cmd+shift+x

By far the best feature in Xray is the fact that it allows you to actually click on the overlay and go straight to the file or partial being rendered. It defaults to Sublime, which is easy for new users, but is simple enough to customize to another tool for seasoned pros.

Xray is great for:

• Helping new Rails developers while pairing to get clearer understanding of views
• Gaining quick insight into complex views
• Debugging templates, partials, and backbone views

See Xray in action

Right now Xray is a tool for the Rails framework but there are plans to expand and make it available for any framework. You can check it out on Github.

The post Xray-rails reveals which files are being rendered in your view appeared first on The Changelog.

Tune in LIVE every Tuesday at 3pm PT / 6pm ET.

• We’re live every Tuesday! thechangelog.com/live
• Hack in style with your very own Changelog tee!
• We are now member supported!
• We’re joined by Jeff Atwood, from codinghorror.com and stackexchange.com
• Stack Overflow is a community Q&A platform.
• Discourse is an open source discussion platform.
• WordPress is an open source CMS in PHP.
• Shapado is a Q&A platform in ruby.
• OSQA is an open source Q&A system.
• Reddit is an online community where users vote on content.
• Steve Yegge’s tour de babel is a language roundup from 2006.
• Why Ruby? is a blog post by Jeff about why he did Discourse in ruby.
• mono is an open source .NET development framework.
• Discourse as Your First Rails App is a blog post about setting up the Discourse development environment.
• ember is a JavaScript framework for ambitious web applications.

The post Episode 0.8.6 – Discourse, Ruby and more with Jeff Atwood (aka Coding Horror) appeared first on The Changelog.

What makes this testing framework stand out from the rest? Look no further than the README’s comparison matrix to find out.

Want to get started with Intern? There’s also a community-driven examples repo to show you the ropes!

Intern is BSD licensed and hosted on GitHub.

The post Just make the Intern do the (JavaScript) testing appeared first on The Changelog.

From the guide:

The usefuless of this setup guide will vary based on your personal preferences for how your text editor should function, but it should help with the initial setup of Sublime Text.

If Drew were on Gittip you could give him a gift.

The post A guide to setting up Sublime Text 2 from Drew Barontini appeared first on The Changelog.

Tune in LIVE every Tuesday at 3pm PT / 6pm ET.

• We’re live every Tuesday! thechangelog.com/live
• Hack in style with your very own Changelog tee!
• We are now member supported!
• Groovy on Grails is a Groovy Open Source web app framework for the JVM.
• Rust is a new open source language from Mozilla.
• pairprogramwith.me encourages diverse pair-programming.
• gittip is a way to give small weekly cash gifts to people you love and are inspired by.
• requests is HTTP for Humans in python.
• Postgres had a big security release not too long ago.
• Servo is a browser rendering engine written in Rust.
• Rust for Rubyists is a great book about Rust, by Steve Klabnik.
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Python! aims to be a guide for learning Python, by Kenneth Reitz.
• Git Gutter keeps your editor up to date with Git.
• Premailer is Pre-flight for HTML email in Ruby.
• docker is the Linux container runtime.
• juju helps you build entire environments in the cloud.
• discourse is a new Open Source discussion platform from Jeff Atwood.
• blackbox is a tool to help archive the internet.
• Philosophy in a time of software is a Google Group about Philosophy/Software.

The post Episode 0.8.5 – We’re back and we’re LIVE! appeared first on The Changelog.

Ack has historically made its value proposition by being “better than grep”, but that has also changed with the new release. Andy Lester (ack’s author) replied to a comment on Hacker News asking how ack 2.0′s speed compares to the recently released (and changelog’d) Silver Searcher tool by saying:

It’s OK to have two similar tools in your toolbox. When you need the –output option, for example, you use ack. When you want crazy speed, you use ag. You don’t have to choose one over the other. That’s why I changed the name from “betterthangrep.com” to “beyondgrep.com”. There’s no need to have a ranking of “I use this over that.”

Ack requires Perl 5.8.8+ and that’s it. There are plenty of ways to install it on different systems and there is even a single-file version which can simply be dropped in your PATH and made executable.

Want to get invovled? Ack is developed on GitHub!

The post Ack hits 2.0, moves beyond Grep appeared first on The Changelog.

We are printing our first batch of tees on a super-comfy black American Apparel tri-blend short sleeve track shirt. This initial batch is open for pre-order now and will begin shipping on May 17th, 2013.

If you’re a member, sign-in and save 20%!

Pre-order today!

Special thanks to Jack Moore and jQuery Zoom for making it too easy to add the “hover to zoom” feature.

The post Pre-order your Changelog t-shirt today! appeared first on The Changelog.

@tkenny seems you missed his point. He’s not advocating hacks. @csswizardry is advocating a best practice for handling them.

Harry Roberts (aka CSS Wizardry) isn’t advocating writing “hacky” CSS, he’s advocating a best practice for handling them.

From his post on the subject:

The idea of shame.css is that you have a totally new stylesheet reserved just for your hacky code. The code you have to write to get the release out on time, but the code that makes you ashamed.

As Harry mentioned in his article, putting your CSS hacks and quick-fixes in their own file called shame.css you do a few things:

1. You make them stick out like a sore thumb
2. You keep your ‘main’ codebase clean
3. You make developers aware that their hacks are made very visible
4. You make them easier to isolate and fix.
5. $ git blame shame.css

I don’t know about you, but Harry had me at git blame.

The post shame.css — a best practice for handling CSS hacks appeared first on The Changelog.

Highlight.js has numerous themes to choose from (we’re using Tomorrow Night) and is a cinch to integrate. It automatically: finds blocks of code, detects the language, and highlights it.

Here are a few samples.

Ruby:

# Output "I LOVE RUBY"
say = "I love Ruby"
puts say.upcase

JavaScript:

function helloWorld () {
  // Log out to console
  console.log("Hello world!");  
}

helloWorld();

CSS:

.for-1 {
  width: 61px;
}

.for-2 {
  width: 62px;
}

.for-3 {
  width: 63px;
}

.for-4 {
  width: 64px;
}

No highlight:

$ gem install rails
$ rails new app
$ cd app
$ subl .

I’m still holding out for Sass/SCSS support — there’s this issue.

Check out the source on GitHub, the demo, or the developer docs if you want to add support for your favorite languages.

The post Syntax highlighting now done with highlight.js appeared first on The Changelog.

Pretty rad, huh? If you’re wondering how it all works, you’re in luck! There is an entire section of the README dedicated to the topic.

The app depends on Python 2.7+, OpenCV 2.4+, and OpenMDAO 0.5.5+, so it might take some work to get up and running. From the looks of it, it’d be totally worth the effort.

View the project on GitHub.

The post Detect and highlight your heart-rate using just a webcam and this Python app appeared first on The Changelog.

Need we say more?

The post Fergulator — NES Emulator Written in Go appeared first on The Changelog.

• http://thechangelog.com/live
• http://thechangelog.com/irc
• #thechangelog on freenode

The show will be myself, Adam Stacoviak, Steve Klabnik, Kenneth Reitz and Jerod Santo. We will be discussing the relaunch, news and much more as it relates to Open Source!

That’s enough advertising, now on to the real purpose of the post!

While preparing for the new Podcast, I decided to dig around and look for the best (open source) note taking application I could find. I have heard about Notational Velocity, by Zachary Schneirov. Obviously, by the looks of it, development has ceased on the project   the code hasn’t been updated in 2 years.

However, a fork of the project, which I heard Merlin Mann discuss on another podcast I listen to, has continued to improve. The fork is nvALT by Brett Terpstra and it is what I will be using today while recording the new podcast!

Brett has written a great summary of what Notational Velocity is, what nvALT is, and the features that this application has. If you are interested in contributing to a growing, fun Mac App, this is a great place to start!

As usual, you can view the source on GitHub or visit the project’s homepage.

The post Note taking made simple with Notational Velocity – and nvALT! appeared first on The Changelog.

It runs in the browser or Node.js, supports many languages, has a great API, and has saved this Changelogger countless hours over the years. Here are a few example uses from the project’s homepage:

moment().startOf('day').fromNow();
moment().add('days', 10).calendar();
moment().format("MMM Do YY");

The library weighs in at just 5.5kb and recently reached version 2.0, so if you haven’t looked at it in awhile now’s the time to check it out once again!

The post Moment.js is a Swiss Army Knife for dealing with Time in JavaScript appeared first on The Changelog.

It’s a Chrome extension which lets you see your server side logs right in the browser. There are currently libraries for:

• Python
• Ruby
• PHP
• Express

Is your server side language/environment of choice not on that list? Don’t worry, Chrome Logger uses an open and published protocol so you can easily write client libraries of your own!

See the project’s home page for more info or check under the hood if you’re curious about how it all works.

The post Bring your server side debug logging into the browser with Chrome Logger appeared first on The Changelog.

Sexy charts can really make a good data driven UI that much better. One thing that designers struggle with is creating sexy charts and graphs that their developer counterparts can actually implement without having to write it all from scratch.

Chart.js, from Nick Browne, makes it easy to visualize your data using HTML’s <canvas> tag and create great looking charts that are fully customizable. With 6 charts to choose from — you’re able to visualise your data with various animated charts that look great on retina displays too.

Check out the source and the docs to get up to speed. There’s a node port too.

The post Chart.js — Beautiful client side graphs to visualise your data using HTML5 canvas appeared first on The Changelog.

Basically, hyperresource is intended to be a general hypermedia client. What’s that mean? It can work with any API that happens to use one of the media types it supports. Right now, that’s just HAL+JSON, but more will be added in the future.

What’s that mean in terms of code? Well, here’s an example from the README:

api = HyperResource.new(root: 'https://api.example.com')
# => #<HyperResource:0xABCD1234 @root="https://api.example.com" @href="" @namespace=nil ... >
root = api.get
# => #<HyperResource:0xABCD1234 @root="https://api.example.com" @href="" @namespace=nil ... >
root.response_body
# => { 'message' => 'Welcome to the Example.com API',
#      'version' => 1,
#      '_links' => {
#        'self' => {'href' => '/'},
#        'users' => {'href' => '/users{?email,last_name}', 'templated' => true},
#        'forums' => {'href' => '/forums{?title}', 'templated' => true}
#      }
#    }
jdoe_user = api.users.where(email: "jdoe@example.com").first
# => #<HyperResource:0x12312312 ...>

How does it know how to look up those users? Well, there’s a users link relation on in the response, and it has a templated URI as its href attribute. This lets the client reflect and know how to look up users by their email or last name.

The power of this generic tooling is that we no longer have to think about how to parse HAL, how to interpret the response… we have this one library which works with any HAL-powered API.

The biggest drawback of hyperresource is that it’s read-only at the moment, nothing but GET. But it shows a lot of promise, and I’m excited to see this kind of stuff pop up in the wild. Everything I see points to 2013 as the year of example code for hypermedia services.

Check it out on GitHub.

The post Hyperresource: a hypermedia API client for Ruby appeared first on The Changelog.