Safari has come out with their public beta and every is excited because the browser is now available for Windows XP/Vista; but there is also a beta available for Mac users.
So I downloaded it and I started to use it. I love the ability to resize text areas and there is a Web Inspector (only for OS X) that allows you to see what properties are available to HTML nodes and their styles.
So I was using it and I noticed something: Safari now styles submit buttons. Do you remember that aqua button that you could never do anything to? Well now it responds to border stylings and the like. Interesting.
I previously mentioned that I was experiencing pain points with dreamhost and I have finally done something about it. I purchased a slice from slicehost and set up my own Ubuntu box.
So now instead of Apache and FCGI running the show, I am using Lighttpd and Mongrel and I must say, it’s running much faster! In addition to running fast, holy crap is mongrel eating up some memory. I purchased the cheap slice, so I only have 256 megs of RAM(Random Access Memory), but 1 mongrel instance is taking up about 25% of my memory, and this blog isn’t the only blog I’m going to be hosting.
Because of this, it looks like I may be saying good-bye to Typo and am going to move to WordPress unless anyone out there has any suggestions.
Today I played around with Lighthouse a site for tracking the issues and features of your project. It’s very simple, but in a good way. I have used several issue trackers, like phpBugTracker Quality Center and Mantis to name a few and Lighthouse has a different feel about it. In a word, it’s all about simplicity.
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Javascript Kata has a teriffic an article on how to create objects with JavaScript the old fashion way, without any JavaScript libraries. But I use prototype and it has its very own way to create a classes.
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Rcov is a handy tool to make sure that your tests have at least run every line of code in your application. This is very useful if you have forgotten to write a test for a method, or if inside of a method, you forgot to test a conditional statement. Because I find this handy, I incorporate the rcov plugin in my rails applications.
Running rake test:functionals:rcov, my report shows me a long list of items, some of which I don’t want to see. I don’t want to see the coverage of my models in the report. I should get that report by running rake test:units:rcov. Luckily, the plugin allows for me to set arguments like SHOW_ONLY="app/models". But get this, I’m lazy and I don’t want to type that argument let alone remember it every time I want to run the rcov tests. What to do?
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Among the many Firefox extensions out there, there exists Firebug and it is good. It is truly an amazing piece of software. There is a CSS(cascading style sheets) viewer, so that when you inspect an element in the DOM(document object model), you can view all of the CSS attributes that apply to that element. Not only does it show you the applicable CSS rules, it breaks it down to the styles being used and to the styles which have been overwritten. Very nice. There are many other things it does, but one feature in particular that I don’t think I would want to live witout is the console API(application programming interface).
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Blocks rock and I couldn’t agree more. The functional programming aspect of ruby has started to interest me more and more. Blocks are used all over the place, with respond_to, collect, returning and ActionView::Helpers::FormHelper#form_for.
Sometimes, a design requires a little extra markup, perhaps something to get that rounded corner to work or what-have you. Now let’s say this piece of code requires certain classes, a certain kind of structure, including a tile, and has to be used in many places, something like a sidebar piece. Instead of copying and pasting this structure over and over, you can use a helper to make you life easier, and if you combine it with a block, it will just feel even more painless.
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Well, I am about over it. This site was down for a good portion of the day yesterday, serving up “Application Error” messages. I have not touched my code in one bit or tweaked any setting, and the joker was down. I have even noticed it down when Google tries to index my site, as when I used their webmaster tools I noticed the response errors
I was reading an article on shared hosting and Application Error and realized that Dreamhost may not be the answer I need.
So what is the answer? Right now, I don’t know. But the comments in the aforementioned article did make suggestions to Rails Playground Planet Argon and others. I suppose I will bit the bullet and look towards those services, once I have time after theInspirit gets through alpha.
gotAPI is a nice little resource for searchable documentation for some common programming languages and libraries, like PHP, Ruby, CSS, JavaScript, Protoype and the like. The site does not host the documentation itself, but rather provides an interface to find things on other pages.
What makes this service interesting is that users can help support what gets put on the site. To contribute to their API(application programming interface) you create a simple XML file which lists out all of the classes, properties, members and links to where those elements live.
For a project that I am working on, I required the use of RMagick and then i explored their documentation The Image class has methods spread across three different pages. So I created the XML document with some curling, awking and other scripting fun and posted it to gotAPI. It was fairly easy and I can find things a little easier now using this site.
I got this tip from Jerry Jackson who told me about storing all of my configuration files, like .bash_profile or .vimrc, in an etc directory inside of my home directory. Once the files are in that directory, you could create a subversion repository; and inside of this repository, put the etc directory in that. Once the files are in a repository, you can check out that repository on any machine. Now you have a way to keep all of your config files easily in sync.
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