The Grand Adventure of Clinton R. Nixon

Trying Out IntelliJ

2010-02-19T00:00:00-05:00

I mainly develop in Ruby, but I use other languages from time to time, especially for fun side projects. I've been trying out RubyMine, as I have a free license for it, and I like it well enough. When I started a Java project recently, I downloaded RubyMine's big brother, IntelliJ.

This thing is stupid nice. I will lose all my cool points as a Rubyist using a giant Java IDE to write Ruby, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but I don't care. I am in love.

I am not in love with the $250 I am going to have to pay for IntelliJ in about 10 more days. Still trying to figure out how to swing that. Donations accepted.

What I Learned Today

2009-12-14T00:00:00-05:00

The most important thing I learned today wasn't about programming: it was about bottled water. Kind of terrifying from a waste level and a health level.

What I Learned Today

2009-12-11T00:00:00-05:00

This post from EngineYard on Google Go makes me want to learn it something fierce. I'm planning on curling up with it and Adam Keys' Just For Fun video this cold weekend by a warm fire.

What I Learned Today

2009-12-10T00:00:00-05:00

I needed to introspect on a Ruby method and find out the names of its arguments for a project I'm working on, and realized Ruby's own introspection wouldn't let me get this info. After some Googling, I found that Merb has this functionality. I didn't want to include all of Merb in my project, so I've extracted it.

class Dummy
        def one_arg(foo); end
        def multiple_args(foo, bar, baz); end
        def optional_args(foo, bar = 1); end
        def star_args(*foo); end
      end
      
      Dummy.instance_method(:one_arg).get_args
      # => [[[:foo]], []]
      
      Dummy.instance_method(:multiple_args).get_args
      # => [[[:foo], [:bar], [:baz]], []]
      
      Dummy.instance_method(:optional_args).get_args
      # => [[[:foo], [:bar, 1]], [:bar]]
      
      Dummy.instance_method(:star_args).get_args
      # => [[[%s[*foo]]], []]

You can get the gem from Gemcutter.

What I Learned Today

2009-12-09T00:00:00-05:00

I love emacsclient for opening files in Emacs from the command line, but closing those windows drives me nuts. I expect it just to work like killing any other buffer. With the help of some Googling, I put together this code today to close client buffers by using C-x k.

(defun close-client-window ()
        (interactive)
        (if (y-or-n-p "Close client window? ")
             (server-edit)))
      
      (add-hook 'server-switch-hook 
                (lambda ()
                  (when (current-local-map)
                    (use-local-map (copy-keymap (current-local-map))))
                  (local-set-key (kbd "C-x k") 'close-client-window)))

What I Learned Today

2009-12-08T00:00:00-05:00

I've been away from this too long, so I've picked a project to give me something to learn each day. I'm building a web-based Roguelike game. I've never built a computer game before, and I've got a lot to learn about sprites, collision detection, map generation, and other stuff.

For today, I managed to build a play area that you can move a character around in. Not impressive, but it's a solid first step. The cool thing I learned about is gameQuery, a jQuery plug-in for developing games.

New Post About MongoDB on Viget Extend

2009-09-17T00:00:00-04:00

Check out my post on MongoDB and MongoMapper at Viget Extend today.

What I Learned Today

2009-09-17T00:00:00-04:00

I am not sure what has gotten into me, but I decided to set up monit on my MacBook Pro. Monit's used for monitoring Unix systems, especially servers and the processes on those servers. I read a presentation on Monit (PDF) that showed me how to monitor files for changes and then execute commands based off that, like reloading Apache whenever you edit your Apache configuration file. And then I thought, "Why don't I do this on my laptop?"

There's only a few steps. The first is getting monit installed. It's not hard, and the tarball; ./configure; make; make install biz should work for you. If you like Homebrew like I like Homebrew, you can grab a recipe from this here commit.

Next, configure monit. I put my monit configuration file in /usr/local/etc/monitrc. I'll show it at the bottom of this post.

My major issue was with mail delivery. If you have a SMTP server you want to use, you're set. If you want to use your OS X box as a mail server, you've got to reconfigure Postfix. By default, it only runs when files are put in /var/spool/postfix/maildrop. Here's my configuration from /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.postfix.master.plist:


      
        "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
       version="1.0">
      
          AbandonProcessGroup
          
          KeepAlive
          
          Label
          org.postfix.master
          OnDemand
          
          Program
          /usr/libexec/postfix/master
          ProgramArguments
          
              master
          
          QueueDirectories
          
          RunAtLoad

Learn more about launchd so I won't have to post a giant slab of XML again.

Once I got mail delivery going (you might need to edit /etc/aliases and then run sudo postalias /etc/aliases; sudo postfix reload) and mutt installed to check my mail, which I leave as an exercise to the reader, I was set. I dropped the following configuration in /usr/local/etc/monitrc:

set daemon 120
      set logfile syslog facility log_daemon
      set alert cnixon@localhost
      set mail-format { from: monit@moro.local }
      set mailserver localhost
      set httpd port 2812 and use address localhost
          allow localhost   # Allow localhost to connect
      
      check directory vhosts path /etc/apache2/passenger_pane_vhosts
        if changed timestamp
          then exec "/usr/sbin/apachectl graceful"
      
      check directory apache_conf path /etc/apache2/other
        if changed timestamp
          then exec "/usr/sbin/apachectl graceful"
      
      check file monitrc path /usr/local/etc/monitrc
        if changed timestamp
          then exec "/usr/local/bin/monit reload"
      
      check device MacintoshHD with path /
        if space usage > 90% 
          then exec "/usr/local/bin/growlnotify -m \
            'Your harddrive is getting full' 'MONIT SAY'"

Check out the PDF presentation above, or the Monit documentation if a line doesn't make sense. The summary:

When I add or remove any files from /etc/apache2/passenger_pane_vhosts or /etc/apache2/other, Apache gets reloaded. I'd like it to do this whenever a file is changed in either one, but monit doesn't easily support file globs. Maybe I should write a script to write my monit conf.
When I change monitrc, monit reloads it.
If my hard drive starts to get full, Growl tells me about it.

What I Learned Today

2009-09-16T00:00:00-04:00

I continued adding stuff to my thor bandolier today, including some sweet meta-tasks to help deal with thor. Check them out at my git repo for my thor tasks. One thing to especially look at is provision.thor. I had no idea until today that you can make a .thor directory with a main.thor file inside to drive it.

My zsh completion for thor quest continues. It is still breaking me - three hours already, and not satisfied - but I'm making progress. Here's the latest:

#compdef thor
      
      # List of commands built into thor.
      _thor_commands() {
        _values "Thor" "list" "install" "uninstall" "help" "installed" "update"
      }
      
      # Get list of all thor tasks added.
      _thor_tasks() {
        compadd `thor list | grep -vP '^[\#\-]|^\s*$' | 
          sed -e '1d' -e 's/[^a-zA-Z0-9_\-\:].*$//' | grep -v '^\n$'`
      }
      
      # Normally, show all of the above.
      if (( CURRENT == 2 )); then
        _thor_commands
        _thor_tasks
      else
        # If we've typed 'thor install', let us look for a normal file.
        if [[ $words[2] == install ]] ; then
          _files
        # If we've typed 'thor help', just show us the built in thor commands.
        elif [[ $words[2] == help ]] ; then
          _thor_commands
        fi
      fi

What I Learned Today

2009-09-15T00:00:00-04:00

I spent some time this afternoon thinking about automation with Ruby. Even though I used to use it a lot, I've fallen off on using Thor, mainly because of API changes in Thor, and my move to zsh. I ported my bash completion script for thor to zsh, and it was way easier than bash:

_thor() {
        compadd `thor list | grep -vP '^[\#\-]|^\s*$' | 
          sed -e '1d' -e 's/[^a-zA-Z0-9_\-\:].*$//'`
      }
      
      compdef _thor thor

What I Learned Today

2009-09-11T00:00:00-04:00

I've been using Ruby 1.9.1 as my primary Ruby on my box for a week now, and no real problems. The only major issue I've had was that the Mongrel gem wouldn't install. I found a patched version of Mongrel for Ruby 1.9 this morning, and am in business now.

What I Learned Today

2009-09-10T00:00:00-04:00

This weekend, I posted about my love affair with Homebrew, a new package management system for nerds who use OS X. I improved the API a lot today, which lets me make formulas that look like this:

class Zsh < StandardUnixFormula
        url 'http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/zsh/zsh-dev/4.3.10/zsh-4.3.10.tar.gz'
        homepage 'http://www.zsh.org/'
        md5 '031efc8c8efb9778ffa8afbcd75f0152'
        skip_clean true
      end

Grab the commit or clone my branch on GitHub.

Package Management with Homebrew

2009-09-07T00:00:00-04:00

I've spent my Labor Day weekend completely nerding out over Homebrew, a new package-management system for OS X 10.5 and 10.6. It's especially geared for Snow Leopard (10.6), where it can make 64-bit packages. I was using MacPorts previously, which I liked a lot. Homebrew differs in these ways:

Pros:

Heavily optimizes binaries and libraries
Easy to write your own formulas for packages
Super-hackable
GoboLinux-style package naming (like /usr/local/Cellar/Ruby/1.9.1/bin,lib,etc)
Easy to manipulate everything using normal Unix tools

Cons:

No dependency management
Few packages right now
No variants
Homebrew's Ruby coding style is special

"No dependency management" isn't as much of a con as you'd think. It can be painful, to be sure, but it prevents the MacPorts way of installing everything under the sun that you could possibly rely on, even if it already exists in OS X. Instead of creating a self-sufficient environment, Homebrew creates an environment that relies on what OS X already provides. Depending on your preferences, this could be good or bad.

Homebrew is just a set of Ruby programs, which makes it easy for me to work with. It's in a git repository, so I've forked it to customize for my own tastes. Each package has a formula -- a Ruby class -- to define the installation steps. This helps with the issue of having no named variants. If you want the package to be compiled differently, change it in your fork. The same applies to non-existent packages: it's easy to make your own and add them to your fork. Here's an example package for zsh:

class Zsh <Formula
        @url='http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/zsh/zsh-dev/4.3.10/zsh-4.3.10.tar.gz'
        @homepage='http://www.zsh.org/'
        @md5='031efc8c8efb9778ffa8afbcd75f0152'
      
        def install
          system "./configure", "--disable-debug",
                                "--prefix=#{prefix}",
                                "--disable-dependency-tracking"
          system "make install"
        end
        
        # Prevents .la files from getting removed, which was
        # not working for zsh.
        def skip_clean? path
          true
        end
      end

I'm enjoying the heck out of Homebrew. It's not quite as convenient as MacPorts yet, but it feels like I'm in complete control of my user environment.

Check out the README for installation and setup.

What I Learned Today

2009-07-28T00:00:00-04:00

I pulled off a feat in the last few days: I upgraded a Radiant 0.6.9 site to 0.8.0. A lot of the architecture has changed between those revisions. There's not a clear upgrade path, but lessons I learned:

Migrate each extension one at a time. If possible, get a new version of the extension.
Not all extensions are Rails 2.3 compatible yet, so make sure you change require_dependency 'application' in all of them to require_dependency 'application_controller'.
Don't forget to run rake radiant:update. I did, and it bit me hard.
There's one migration change between the two that isn't a new migration, but made in an old one, so you'll have to do it yourself: add a schema_version integer column with a default of 1 to extension_meta.

The other thing I've been learning isn't technical. It's the Spanish language. So far, I'm enjoying it. It will be quite a while before I'm proficient, but I'm considering attending Conferencia Rails as a reward if I work hard at it.

What I Learned Today

2009-07-03T00:00:00-04:00

I had a heck of a day! I spent the day working out of Carrboro Creative Coworking, which I recommend. I ran into friends there, and knocked out a prototype of an app I've wanted to build for a while.

The cool part is that I used a bunch of technologies I don't normally use. I'm using Haml and Sass, Compass, and MongoDB with MongoMapper. I've had a hate-on for Haml for a while, but I wanted to try Compass, and since I was using that, I thought I might as well try Haml, which is required by Compass. So far, I have lost my hate for it. I'm not up to even strong-like yet, but there's definitely weak-like.

I even made a patch for MongoMapper and sent a pull request. Any day I contribute back to open source is a good day.