I got tired of the old theme on this blog. So, rather than write an interesting post I upgraded my version of Wordpress and added a new theme: Typographic. I like how it’s simple: monochromatic, no images, etc.
Animoto is dependant on Google
Google (apps, search, analytics, etc.) was down for an hour, and this hosed us. We use Google Apps for email and chat, which was only a minor nuisance. But we use Google Analytics, and its outage cause all of our pages to time out. Yikes.
back up
My hosting service screwed up a data migration and I didn’t notice until recently. Well, it’s fixed.
Bit by a Monkey
Bad Monkey Patch.
A gem we are trying out (Blackbook) decided to override a common string method:
class String alias :blank? :empty? end
Um, this method is used everywhere in rails and has a much different definition:
class String #:nodoc:
def blank?
self !~ /\S/
end
end
Bad monkey
Installing giternal
I read great things about giternal here.
I ran into problems trying to install it based on the README, though. I installed the gem from RubyForge but wasn’t able to find the giternal executable. And trying to run the sake tasks gave errors like:
/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/RubyInline-3.6.7/lib/inline.rb:732:in `initialize': Permission denied - /Users/jolma/.ruby_inline/Inline_ParseTree_fa12.c (Errno::EACCES)
and
undefined local variable or method `require_giternal' for main:Object
Pat Maddox, the author, quickly responded to my question. The key is building the gem from the git source instead of using the gem on RubyForge. Here is how to do it:
git clone git://github.com/pat-maddox/giternal.git
cd giternal
rake install_gem
This may require you install a few gems like hoe and rspec first.
Then, to verify you are set up:
$ giternal
Usage: giternal (update:freeze:unfreeze)
Test it on a project
$ cd ../someproject/
$ more config/giternal.yml
rspec:
repo: git://github.com/dchelimsky/rspec.git
path: vendor/plugins
$ ls -al vendor/plugins/rspec
ls: vendor/plugins/rspec: No such file or directory
$ giternal update
$ giternal update
Updating rspec
..updated
$ ls -al vendor/plugins/rspec
total 272
Yay.
Awful UI of the day: Paypal
Here is Paypal’s transaction search. It would be nice if I could see the full year.
Inbox Zero
There are few things in life more satisfying than empty inboxes, my big accomplishment this weekend.
Merlin Mann gave a great talk on this at Google: http://www.43folders.com/izero#video
What should I build?
I’m bored. What app should I build this weekend? It can be a standalone web app or a Facebook app. And I only want to put in a day.
Ideas?