jolma.org

New Wordpress Theme

jjolma — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 23:56:25 +0000

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

jjolma — Thu, 14 May 2009 16:11:30 +0000

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

jjolma — Wed, 13 May 2009 02:52:18 +0000

My hosting service screwed up a data migration and I didn’t notice until recently. Well, it’s fixed.

Bit by a Monkey

jjolma — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 15:50:13 +0000

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

jjolma — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 22:09:33 +0000

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

jjolma — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:26:44 +0000

Here is Paypal’s transaction search. It would be nice if I could see the full year.

How to nap

jjolma — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 16:15:17 +0000

Anyone who knows me is aware of my love of naps. But how does one nap well?

Full article here.

Error Message of the Day

jjolma — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 14:40:02 +0000

Courtesy of MS Office.

Inbox Zero

jjolma — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 18:56:00 +0000

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?

jjolma — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 16:58:42 +0000

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?