August 2010
1 post
GabberTalk
We built GabberTalk. Here’s a demo
June 2010
2 posts
1 tag
Compass with Rails 3 on Heroku
I’ve noticed plenty of posts around the net on how to get this to work, but none of them worked as is for me on a Rails 3 Beta 3 app using Compass and the Compass 960 plugin
Here’s my cobbled together solution - it’s also a little simpler than some, as it doesn’t try and do things different for heroku and local dev - it keeps it the same, and seems to work OK.
1) Make...
Rack::Test with Rails 3 / RSpec
If you want to use Rack::Test with Rails 3 and RSpec, you’ll want to add
to your spec_helper.rb
Once this is done, the tests will run fine. This is useful, because it allows the same tests to be used regardless of the backend - be it Sinatra, Rails 3, or raw rack
May 2010
10 posts
rack-legacy: A rack handler to run PHP/CGI... →
This would be useful if one ever has to do any php. Saves running up a full apache/nginxnstack
nvie.com » Blog Archive » A successful Git... →
Excellent write up on a solid git branching strategy. I prefer the use master as the ‘integration’ branch though.
chef/lib/chef/knife/rackspace_server_create.rb at... →
Good starting point for a bootstrap chef command.
guillaume bort ★ HTML5 Canvas Textile Editor →
Awesome canvas-based textile editor.
Google App Engine XMPP in Play Framework
Google’s documentation for receiving XMPP messages on App Engine involves running the HttpServletRequest through XMPPServiceFactory.parseMessage to extract the details, however on Play you don’t get access to the HttpServletRequest, so you can’t use their message parser. Fortunately the message is really just POSTed form data, so you can easily extract it in a handler bound to...
Cocoa Emacs 23.2 (Final) Build for OS X
Emacs 23.2 has been released, so I’ve created a build for it for OS X, including typesters fullscreen patch. You can download it here: http://bit.ly/bwvZI5. It’s 64bit built on Snow Leopard - I havent tested it anywhere else.
Displaying your Location from Twitter on your Site
I was giving this site a little tweak, and one thing I wanted to add was my current location to my contact details - I move around a lot, and getting calls at stupid hours was begging to get a little annoying.
The catch was, I didn’t want to have to update this information manually all the time - it would get tiresome quickly, and I would end up letting it go stale. I usually geotag tweets...
Sync File Creation Date with EXIF Date on OS X
So I could order my images in the Finder and use Smart Folders based on the created date of the image, I hacked this together to update the file creation date to match the EXIF date. For Mac OS X only.
See http://gist.github.com/310413 for all the code.
Simple node.js based http router
Can be used to do a lookup based on the URL or incoming connection details, and route to the appropriate backend
1 tag
Ubuntu 10.04 Vagrant Base Boxes
I’ve made a pair of base boxes for Ubuntu 10.04 Server (Lucid Lynx), one 32 bit, one 64 bit. They are set up as per the guide, with chef 0.8.10 installed for provisioning. It’s using the packaged ruby, with a custom installed rubygems as /usr/bin/gem. It also has the 3.1.6 additions, and is set up with the normal public SSH keys You can add them by running: # 32 Bit $ vagrant box add...
April 2010
4 posts
Redis tutorial, April 2010 - by Simon Willison →
A great presentation on Redis, with stacks of detail
Piwik - Web analytics - Open source →
Looks like a reasonable, self-hosted google apps alternative.
Vagrant - Welcome →
If you need to do any code testing against target environments, or are developing Chef recipes/experimenting with system dev, you need this.
start [Erlyvideo] →
This is a sweet looking project - I wish I’d had it a few years ago.
November 2009
6 posts
typhoonae - Project Hosting on Google Code →
App for hosting GAE apps on your own gear. Worth keeping an eye on - it eliminates the no. 1 concern with app engine, portability.
JRuby on App Engine: Google App Engine 0.0.5 gems... →
Things are moving along nicely here.
Getting rid of the Spotlight Menu Icon in 10.6
It seems that Snow Leopard has gone back to the 10.4 way of displaying the spotlight menu item, which fortunately makes it easy to disable. This saves precious real estate, and gets rid of something that is pointless - I use launchbar for this. To disable run: sudo chmod 600 /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle/Contents/MacOS/Search
killall SystemUIServer This makes the item only readable...
XPather paths not working
If you’ve ever had to page scrape any crappy sites (i.e you can’t use CSS selectors because there isn’t any) you’ve probably ended up using XPath, and the easiest way to find those XPath expressions is to use the XPather extension for firefox. And once you’ve got to an expression that involves tables, you’ve probably ended up wondering why it didn’t work....
Vim + Transmit Remote Editing
I was having problems getting MacVim to work with Transmit’s remote editing feature - when I saved the file, it wasn’t uploaded. Turns out by default Vim can create it’s backup files by renaming the original as well as creating a copy - when it decides to rename, Transmit is left looking at the old file so never detects the updates. The solution is simple: add set backupcopy=yes...
Bulk deleting tumblr posts
Because tumblr doesn’t let you change the default blog, I wanted to clear out the old original blog I had to re-use for this site. Which brought me to the other problem - tumblr provide no way to batch delete posts, and will over 1,000 items in there I wasn’t going to sit around and delete each one by hand. So here’s a quick script I wrote, I hope it’s useful to someone.
October 2009
5 posts
Installing hgsubversion with Macports Python
Being reasonably new to python I had a few issues particulary with this error:
*** failed to import extension hgsubversion from /Users/lstoll/sw/ hgext/hgsubversion/hgsubversion: No module named svn
Which didn’t help me that much. So here’s how I installed it with Macports in case the same happens to you
sudo port install subversion-python26bindings
mkdir -p ~/sw/hgext &&...
64-bit Darwin Streaming Server package for Ubuntu
You can find it here: http://cloud.github.com/downloads/lstoll/dss/DarwinStreamingSrvr6.0.3-L2-Linux-x64.deb.gz. It’s had minimal testing, so please test it well before using it anywhere important. If you find any issues please report them at http://github.com/lstoll/dss/issues
Quick, easy-to-understand tips for using Mercurial... →
Awesome site with some nifty tips - if you use hg, you should definitely check this out!
Deploying to heroku when you don't use git
I personally prefer Mercurial, however I still like heroku for the convenience. The solution? A simple rake task that syncs your files into a git repo, and sends it to heroku. Problem solved.
MacRuby 0.5 beta 1 →
After several months of development we are very glad to announce the first beta release of MacRuby 0.5. As this release has very ambitious goals we will go through a few intermediate releases before…