I’m a freelance software developer which means I generally work from home unless a client needs me to be on-site. I don’t mind being alone to a certain extent, but after a few straight weeks it can get pretty lonely. Recently, I’ve started doing what I’ve termed “nomadic programming.” Namely, … Continue reading
After spending nearly an hour tracking down where a particular TextMate bundle was coming from, I have surmised that there are no less than four places on my Mac’s hard drive where bundles may be lurking. In no particular order, they are: ~/Library/Application Support/TextMate/Pristine Copy/Bundles ~/Library/Application Support/TextMate/Bundles /Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Bundles /Library/Application Support/TextMate/Bundles
I just ran into a problem configuring a Rails app to deliver email through Google’s SMTP servers. ActionMailer doesn’t support TLS/SSL which is required by Google. Fortunately, the action_mailer_optional_tls plugin provides this functionality. I wanted to host my SMTP settings in an external YAML file so I wouldn’t end up … Continue reading
railspdf is a plugin that adds templating support for the pdf-writer gem to Rails. The project was last updated in January of 2007, but worked fine up until the 2.1.0 release of Rails which broke several things. I’ve forked the project on GitHub and tweaked it to run under 2.1.0. … Continue reading
OS X seems to get confused when I disconnect my MacBook from an external monitor. This confusion sometimes leads to the hot corners feature not working. This is definitely a bug in Leopard that needs fixing. Until that happens, restarting the Dock is a quick solution to the problem. This … Continue reading
Lyle Johnson just wrote a great tutorial on how to integrate Google Charts into an FXRuby application. This is perfect timing since I’ve been doing some experimenting with FXRuby over the past few days.
Google quietly released their new chart generation web service late last year. It’s a dead simple way to build beautiful charts using nothing but URLs. The gchartrb gem wraps Google’s API to make things even easier. InfoQ recently published this article that I wrote. It introduces the basics of the … Continue reading
Thought I’d do some hacking on FXRuby today. I ran into trouble during the installation so I’m posting the solutions here in case anyone else experiences the same issues. I attempted installing the fxruby gem first, but didn’t get very far. I ended up having success with the rb-fxruby package … Continue reading
I’m really enjoying using Brightkite. It’s a location-based social networking tool that lets you see what other people in your vicinity are doing. A GPS unit isn’t required and it integrates fairly well with Twitter and GMaps. (I’d love to see even tighter Twitter integration in the future.) Drop a … Continue reading
PersistJS was released just a few days ago by Paul Duncan. It’s a JavaScript framework enabling client-side data storage. Check out my post on InfoQ to learn how it compares with Google Gears and Dojo Storage.