Text

· · to read

The other day I went back to an old branch that had about five files that were changed and I only wanted to incorporate two of them into my master branch. In order to just merge in a couple, I used git merge with the –no-commit option.

git merge --no-commit planner

This merges in all changes but doesn’t commit it. Since it isn’t committed, it’s easy to roll back individual files. I ran git status to get a list of files and rolled back several files with git checkout. When I was done, I had only the two files I wanted to merge showing up when I ran git status.

Text

· · to read

Yesterday I started trying out Vimperator, and so far I’m impressed. It’s a Firefox extension that puts a vim-like keyboard interface on top of Firefox.

After using it for a while, I wanted to turn the bell off, because I find it to be distracting. I turned to the documentation. I quickly found a visual bell option, but I find visual bells to be even more distracting. Then I saw the visual bell CSS style option, which can be set to an empty string for no bell at all. Bingo! Or so I thought.

It turns out that the page flickers when the bell is triggered. This is not the desired effect. So after searching the docs one more time, I unpacked a jar and poked around in the source code of Vimperator.

There’s a beep function in there. I changed the beep function to return false and Voila! It did nothing when you scrolled past the bottom or top of the page.

Rather than keep the code patched, though, I figured out how to implement my change in my ~/.vimperatorrc file. There’s a javascript command for executing a line of javascript. Vimperator’s beep function is in a global “liberator” object. Combining these two bits of knowledge, I came up with the following line which can be added to ~/.vimperatorrc:

javascript liberator.beep = function() { return false; }

It’s simple but it works. It would be nice if completely disabling the bell (including any visual artifacts) were built into Vimperator, but being able to fix it with a one-liner in the configuration file is the next best thing! Kudos to the Vimperator developers for writing code that’s easy to modify.

I’m not sure how often I’ll use Vimperator. I need to learn how easy it is to pass the input through to the current web page first. But it certainly seems to do a difficult job remarkably well!

Update: I started a Silencing and Disabling Bells WikiBook and put instructions for disabling bells in Vimperator, MacVim, and iTerm in it. Contributions welcome!

Text

· · to read

I’m at the Merb and Rails 3 community forum with Yehuda Katz and Matt Amionetti right now. It’s an event with no agenda; they just opened the floor to questions. I asked them a couple of questions about Merb slices.

First, I asked them what would happen with slices in Rails 3. They explained that slices are going away in future versions of Rails and Merb, but the functionality will still be there. Instead of having slices, applications will simply be “mountable” within other applications.

I then asked if components such as models could be shared between slices. Yehuda said that their goal was to give all applications a namespace by default. He then went on to say that hopefully there will be no need to refer to an application’s namespace from within the application.

This sounds great! With a few contributions from the community, it should be at least as easy to install multiple apps into a site and get them sharing stuff as it currently is in Django.

Text

· · to read

After watching the Meet Emacs screencast on Peepcode and talking to a few local developers who use emacs, I’ve started using emacs again. Since I started playing around with it several weeks ago, I’ve learned about a number of useful features I either hadn’t used before or had just barely scratched the surface of. These include the following:

  • ido-mode – A tool for quickly finding files that uses a combination of history and intelligent name searching.
  • hippie-expand – Intelligently completes part of a word to match another word in the current buffer.
  • text macros – I’d seen this before but didn’t realize how often it can be done in place of a regex search-and-replace. Much more intuitive, too.
  • C-x C-v – Unlike the more commonly used C-x C-f, which loads a file in a new buffer, visit-file (C-x C-v) loads a file in the current buffer. This solves a common annoyance for me of opening the wrong file in the right directory, and having to choose between leaving the wrong file open or navigating back to the right directory after closing the wrong file.

These are things I wouldn’t have noticed if I had still been blindly following the Pragmatic Programmer tip, Use a Single Editor Well. The problem with picking an editor and sticking to it is that there really isn’t a way to learn how good an editor is without actually using it.

I’m also starting to think that maybe, even after I’ve gained a pretty good understanding of most editors, I still won’t want to pick a single editor. Maybe I’ll use emacs for some things and TextMate for others. Using more than one editor might not be for everybody, but for people who take a serious interest in editors, it might be a good idea.

I put my emacs dotfiles directory up on GitHub, if anyone is curious about the customizations I’ve made to it.

So far I like my new setup, and I’m using Emacs most of the time. I’m getting to be quite comfortable in it. I’ve dealt with a couple of things that used to annoy me most about emacs, which are confusing indentation and inaccurate syntax highlighting. I dealt with the former by setting the tab key to go to the next tab key, rather than use the current mode’s indentation code. To deal with the latter, I just turned off syntax highlighting. I’m actually quite comfortable without it most of the time, and if I really want pretty syntax highlighting, I can always fire up TextMate.

In the future, I may continue to use emacs as my primary editor, or I may not. If not, I don’t think my time learning Emacs will have gone to waste, as I’ll have learned new editor features and I’ll know what to look for when I explore the advanced features of whichever editor I’m using.

Text

· · to read

As stated before on this blog, I’m a heavy twitter user. I tried to quit twitter and found that it was hard to leave. Eventually I just gave in. Now I’m following somewhere between 100 and 200 accounts.

Sometimes I want to say or quote something that’s just below 140 characters, but I feel obligated to provide some context. In those situations, I usually wind up cutting out some punctuation or text in order to fit a shortened URL. Not anymore—if it’s searchable.

I created a new twitter account called @srch. If you click on the twitter ID, it takes you to @srch’s twitter profile. On that page are instructions that will let the savvy user know that if they have decent searching skills, they can probably find where the text came from.

Please let me know what you think of this idea.

Text

· · to read

Update: I was wrong about the popup preference not working. I had forgotten to turn off popup balloons on one of my computers, and missed a return statement while reading the source code. So my changes are unnecessary.

I am a big fan of twitter. I use it all the time. I follow a lot of people. Some I know personally, some I’ve only met online, and some I have never met. I like to interact with people on twitter in real time.

Of course, the benefits of twitter come at the cost of time. The little bits of time here and there spent reading and posting tweets add up. It can also cause interruptions, making it hard to focus.

twitter.com and twhirl

I used twitter.com at first, then twhirl, and twitter.com again before I discovered TwitterFox.

The biggest problem with using twitter.com is that I have to load twitter.com to check for new tweets, whether or not there are any new tweets. It takes a while to load a web page. Usually that is an interruption in itself. Usually I either miss the action on twitter or I obsessively check twitter.com to see if there are any new tweets. On days when I’m feeling less motivated or more curious about what’s happening on twitter it is usually the latter.

For a month or two I used twhirl to access twitter. There are two different ways of using it, each of which has its own problems. One way is the default, where it pops up new messages in the lower-right corner of the screen. This is the way most desktop twitter clients work. The problem with this is obvious: it’s an interruption, plain and simple. If I’m in the zone, I will likely get distracted. The other way of using twhirl is to turn off pop-up messages, and to either give the window some space on the screen or to switch to it using Alt-Tab to check tweets. The problem with this is it quickly devolves into a glancing or Alt-Tab frenzy, as at any time when I’m even slightly curious about what’s happening on twitter, I can check in an instant. Often times when I would check I would find no new tweets.

the twitter urge

Every so often I get the urge to check twitter. It’s perfectly natural for anyone who has discovered the joy of using twitter. What matters is what I do with those urges. If every urge turns into reading a list of twitter messages, it can turn into a real productivity killer.

For a while I’ve known the way that I would like to be able to use twitter. I would like a number of new messages on the screen. Then, if I got the twitter urge and there weren’t any new messages, it would only cause a split-second of interruption. If there were any new messages, I would know, and if I didn’t check even though there were new messages, I could give myself a pat on the back for staying productive, and know that once I got more work done I would have something to read.

After a week of being frustrated with twitter, I decided to do something about it. So I looked at the list of twitter clients again and tried a couple out. I wanted one that was open source and easy to customize.

TwitterFox

I spend enough time in Firefox, both at work and on my laptop, that having something in the Firefox status bar is pretty much as good as having something in the taskbar, if not better. Firefox extensions are also easy to customize (unless the code is a mess), so I gave it a try. When I saw the number of new tweets in the lower-right corner of my Firefox window, I was elated. This is exactly what I wanted!

It worked really well for me, once I figured out how to turn off popup balloons, where it would show the latest tweet(s) in the bottom-right corner, much like twhirl. At first, I thought the preference wasn’t working, so I made changes to the source code. I found tinkering with the source code to be relatively easy. Since I’m a web developer, I’m very comfortable working in JavaScript.

The tiny difference between TwitterFox and twhirl that makes it work for me is that the number of messages appears on a part of the screen that I see regularly. The information I need is there, and presented in a way that is not distracting. This is also the way I keep tabs on my e-mail (GMail) and my RSS Feeds (Google Reader), though I like the way TwitterFox shows the number better. GMail and Google Reader have the number of new items in their titles, which appear in the Firefox tab bar. Sometime I’d like to find or make extensions that will show the number of new items in those two web apps in the Firefox status bar.

Text

· · to read

Since I love FireBug, and CouchDB has a JSON API, I attempted to combine the two. My goal was to find a way to use jQuery‘s AJAX functions to create, read, and update CouchDB documents.

Getting Started

The first thing I tried was creating a merb project with a single page referencing jQuery, and accessing CouchDB from there. The browser’s security model got in my way, however. A page on one port on localhost can’t access another port with AJAX. I searched for ways to give a page special permission, but my search turned up empty and I figured that I’d rather not go against the browser anyway, if I could help it.

The next thing I tried was getting a page that references jQuery to be served by CouchDB’s web server. That way the page and jQuery’s JSON API would be on the same port and Firefox would be happy. I opened up CouchDB’s Futon Utility Client at http://localhost:5984/_utils/ and found that it already had the latest version of jQuery included! Problem solved.

I opened the FireBug console (which was already enabled on localhost from when I was trying to get it working with my Merb project) and started trying out jQuery’s AJAX functions on CouchDB.

The GET request returned successfully! However, FireBug doesn’t retain the response, so I have to click Load Response to get it.

OK, there’s CouchDB’s welcome message! Expanding the GET request and clicking Load Response is tedious, though, so a better technique is needed. The first thing that comes to mind is doing a synchronous request. I find that get() doesn’t support this option, so I need to use ajax().

Aside from FireBug’s quoting FAIL, it works nicely. What I’d really like, though, is for FireBug to pretty-print the JSON. So I throw an eval() statement around it, and add the left side of an assignment statement because otherwise I would get an error (another way to get it working is to throw square brackets around the expression).

The output is quite a bit nicer, in my opinion.

Creating a Database

To create a database I use the HttpDatabaseApi page on the CouchDB wiki. Creating a database requires use of a PUT request, which can be made with jQuery’s ajax() function if the browser supports it (and Firefox does).

CouchDB returns a simple OK message to let me know it worked.

Creating a Document

Now that I have a database, I can create a document using the HttpDocumentApi. I opt to take the cavalier approach of having the server generate an ID rather than supplying an ID of my own. To do this, I send a POST with the database’s URL for the address and the document’s contents for the POST data. To send the POST data, I call ajax() with the document’s contents (as a JSON expression) for the data option and the string ‘json’ for the dataType option.

It didn’t work. I expand the POST and look at the data sent to find out why.

The ajax() function didn’t serialize the data! It’s not built into jQuery. It makes sense, given that one of jQuery’s features is its small footprint. I remember that when I viewed the source of the main page of CouchDB’s Futon Utility Client I saw a JSON include. It’s in http://localhost:5984/_utils/script/json2.js. It’s not a jQuery plug-in, but its interface is fairly simple. To serialize data, you call JSON.stringify() with an object as the first parameter. I add this to my statement and try again.

It worked! Or, at least, it didn’t error. It returned a globally unique ID (GUID) generated by the server. Now I use the ID to GET the document’s contents.

Only a summary of the object is shown. If I click the object it expands to a full view.

The data is there. The revision number is also present. One of CouchDB’s coolest features is built-in versioning.

After I realized that I was given only a summary of the object, I tried creating a document again and seeing if I missed any info that was supplied in the response to the POST request. It turns out that I did. The revision (_rev) was given. I’d like to have Firebug print out the whole response (and not a short summary), but I don’t see any way of doing so.

Updating a Document

Documents can be updated by sending a PUT request with the document’s URL as the address and the new contents as the data. The new contents must include the revision number upon which the update is based. This is to prevent conflicts. If a revision number other than that of the latest revision is supplied, it means that another client updated it first.

I update the document by getting the latest copy, storing it in a variable, removing the ID (since it’s already in the URL), changing the radius, and sending a PUT request with the new database contents.

The document is updated. If I expand the object I can see the new revision number.

Pretty cool, huh?

Conclusion & Next Steps

Before I tried using CouchDB with Firebug, I tried using the Futon Utility Client. I felt that I learned more and better retained what I learned when I used Firebug. Firebug as it is right now has a couple of issues that will keep me from using it as an environment in which to try doing different things with CouchDB. The first issue is that the pretty-print doesn’t show the full object in the console view, and there’s no option in the UI to make it do so. The second issue is that I find the editor to be insufficient. When the editor is in vertical mode, there’s no way to go through the history of commands entered. When the editor is in horizontal mode, it can’t expand beyond one line. When I switch between tabs, the text in the editor is often lost.

Firebug is, however, being actively worked on, and will hopefully get some features that will make it easier and more fun to use to play with JavaScript API’s and web services.

I would like to get the custom JavaScript environment mentioned at the top of this post set up and working with CouchDB. One way to get it working might be to set up a proxy of sorts to CouchDB. I could have any requests starting with /couchdb be forwarded to the CouchDB port with the /couchdb part stripped off.

This was fun. I think the next thing I’ll do with CouchDB is try writing a simple wiki using CouchDB and Merb.

Text

· · to read

In a matter of two days, Google has shaken up the web by releasing a brand new browser, and a pretty impressive one to boot. Google Chrome is in beta, but it’s fast, and as far as I can tell, stable. And it’s got some amazing new features.

The biggest feature is having one process per tab. That way, one badly-behaving site can’t lock up the whole browser. It uses extra memory, but not much. With the included Process Manager, I can see that a tab with a simple web page uses about 5 or 10 megabytes, while a page like Google Maps typically uses about 20 megabytes. With 8 or 9 tabs open (which is typical for me), the total memory usage came to about 100 megabytes. Firefox, on the other hand, was using 220 megabytes, but I was running it for a few days.

I think, however, that even if Chrome used extra memory it would be worth it, to be able to switch between tabs even while one tab was busy. They didn’t even have to make that compromise, though.

Another feature that I think will be extremely valuable is the V8 JavaScript Engine. A Google team in Europe made a new JavaScript engine designed from ground up to be fast and light. How cool is that?

There are also some neat things about the UI. The search bar and location bar are combined. Tabs can be dragged freely between windows. The location bar AutoComplete only shows things you actually typed, not every single site you’ve been to. The history opens up to a full tab instead of a sidebar which winds up wasting valuable screen real estate when the user forgets to close it.

Wow. What an exciting project. This will no doubt keep Google’s ability to recruit new talent going for years to come. Every time things just seem like business as usual at Google, something really exciting comes from them. This is why I chuckled when I read the last item of a list of the Top 10 Reasons Why Chrome Was Developed: Bored Google is bored.

Text

· · to read

I’ve been trying to find clever Ubiquity commands in the Herd. I want to see things that use the preview functionality in interesting ways, like the built-in map command does. What I’ve wound up doing so far, though, is sifting through dozens of commands that do nothing more than what could be done with a custom entry in the Firefox Search Bar, or commands that are nothing but links to another page.

While I think it’s useful to be able to search and go to websites from a command line, it’s not what I have in mind when I search for new commands.

I think that search engines and bookmarks should be separated from the rest of the commands, and that posting search engines or bookmarks as commands to the command part of the Herd should be discouraged. This will help in several ways:

  • Users who don’t know JavaScript will have an easy time adding bookmarks and search engines to Ubiquity and assigning them strings
  • I’ll be able to add search engines and bookmarks from websites without having to look at the code or decide whether I can trust the people who write the code
  • If I provide a bookmark or search engine on my website I won’t have to worry about convincing my users to trust me enough to install it, since it won’t be able to send any information from their browser to my website except for a search query
  • I won’t have to sift through bookmarks and search engines to find commands that provide advanced functionality
  • It will encourage website owners to create more powerful Ubiquity commands

Ubiquity is at an early stage, so I won’t be surprised if someone’s already working on separating simple commands from more complex ones. I hope so. I really want to see Ubiquity catch on, and for that to happen I think it needs to be easier for users to customize their commands.

Text

· · to read

Today I got a chance to try out Ubiquity. What a neat concept! It’s a GUI command line like QuickSilver, only it’s implemented as a Firefox extension instead of a desktop application.

The demo movie is impressive.


Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

I like how it shows information based on the text typed as I’m typing it. This functionality, called preview, is used extensively in the map command. In fact, most of the time the map command doesn’t even need to be executed, because a small map can be viewed and added to documents without executing a command. I think the preview functionality will be especially useful for looking up programming documentation.

The preview functionality is also used in the built-in twitter command, which posts an update to the microblogging site Twitter. It shows how many characters are left before you hit twitter’s limit. The built-in twitter command, however, uses 160 characters for the limit instead of the 140 character limit on twitter’s website. The 160 character limit for API’s is provided in case a long URL is included in the tweet, which twitter will auto-shorten using tinyurl.

I often post long tweets and don’t want to guess at whether one is going to be too long, so I created my own command, tweet, which uses is.gd for URL shortening. It uses the longest length of is.gd URLs to calculate what the size of URL will be, and bases the number of characters left on that. It replaces any occurrence of the string isgd with an is.gd link to the current page.

It was very easy to write, in large part due to being integrated into Firefox, and having Firefox’s JavaScript environment. It also is written with JQuery and command writers have jQuery available to them.

Ubiquity might not be the embodiment of a totally new concept, but I find that since it’s a Firefox extension, as opposed to being a desktop application, it’s a lot more convenient for me to use and develop for.

Text

· · to read

When installing Merb on my laptop, which runs Ubuntu Linux, I ran into a compiler error with hpricot, one of Merb’s dependencies. Before bothering to see what might be causing it, I checked to see if there was a precompiled apt-get package available. There was! I installed it and tried installing Merb again.

It still tried to install hpricot, however, and when I said to skip it, it said it could not install Merb because it was missing hpricot. I could have used force, or “pretty please”, but I wanted to instead tell the packaging system that I have hpricot installed.

I seem to remember a UNIX packaging system having an inject command — which tells the packaging system a program is already installed. I may have got the terminology wrong. I searched for such a command for rubygems but couldn’t find one. I did, however, find another way to convince rubygems that I already had hpricot.

I decided to do some digging in the gems directory. To find the gems directory, I typed:

ben@magicthise:~$ gem environment
RubyGems Environment:
  - VERSION: 0.9.4 (0.9.4)
  - INSTALLATION DIRECTORY: /var/lib/gems/1.8
  - GEM PATH:
     - /var/lib/gems/1.8
  - REMOTE SOURCES:
     - http://gems.rubyforge.org
ben@magicthise:~$ cd /var/lib/gems/1.8/
ben@magicthise:/var/lib/gems/1.8$ ls
bin  cache  doc  gems  source_cache  specifications
ben@magicthise:/var/lib/gems/1.8$ cd specifications/
ben@magicthise:/var/lib/gems/1.8/specifications$ ls
abstract-1.0.0.gemspec          merb-cache-0.9.2.gemspec
actionmailer-2.0.2.gemspec      merb-core-0.9.2.gemspec
...
ben@magicthise:/var/lib/gems/1.8/specifications$

I took a look at the gemspec files and found that they contained the name and version of the library. I copied the smallest of the files to hpricot-0.6.gemspec and used the gemspec documentation to find out which parameters are required. I wound up with the following in /var/lib/gems/1.8/specifications/hpricot-1.6.rb.

Gem::Specification.new do |s|
  s.name = %q{hpricot}
  s.version = "0.6"
end

I tried running:

ben@magicthise:~$ gem install merb --include-dependencies

And it worked!

It might not be everything that’s needed to get it working — but now I at least know how to inject a package.