August 2009
1 post
Closedown
Please see http://geoffgarside.co.uk/ for future content
July 2009
2 posts
RSpec with MacRuby, part 2 →
RSpec with MacRuby, part 1 →
May 2009
1 post
“I swear, sometimes it’s as if Hollywood sets out with...”
– A Joss Whedon-less ‘Buffy’ movie: Worst idea ever of the year
April 2009
1 post
Harsh highlighting
Just read about the Harsh ERb/HAML highlighter, it looks quite cool. Also because it uses UltraViolet it can be powered by my version of the Oniguruma gem.
March 2009
5 posts
Initialising Cocoa NSValueTransformers
Just a quicky, I created my first custom Value Transformer this evening. Normally to register your transformer you have to do something like the following
+ (void)initialize
{
[super initialize];
[self initialiseValueTransformers];
}
+ (void)initialiseValueTransformers
{
LoginStatusTransformer *loginStatusTransformer =
[[[LoginStatusTransformer alloc] init] autorelease];
...
Tweaking RDiscount
As I mentioned in my previous post I’d had some issues with Pygments and RDiscount. I have been using Pygments to highlight my code blocks in my blog. Unfortunately right after using a code block with linenos none of the markdown was being parsed anymore.
The Discount library upon which RDiscount is based has the ability to output a debug tree which shows the different blocks within the...
Changing the blogging gear
I’ve recently been working on merging my two blogs together into one. One of them I host myself, the other is with Tumblr. One has stagnated quite severely with the last update April 1st, 2008, the other only seems to get periodic and occasionally small updates.
Twitter has played a large part in the lack of updates to both of these sites. Through Twitter I can post short thoughts, URLs to...
Setting up MySQL Replication
Today I was asked to set up a MySQL Replication server to allow for failover on one of the services we operate.
A friend of mine also asked me to document the procedure as its been a while since he’d done it and couldn’t remember. So here goes….
The Setup
I’ll be doing all of this on FreeBSD 7.1 servers and I’ll be installing things from ports and then setting up...
So what happened to me on Friday the 6th of March?
As so many of these tales unravel it all started with alcohol. I’d been invited out by Claire for her brother Neils fiancé Alices birthday drinks do. This is only the second time I’ve met Alice, the first time at their engagement party. I’ve known Neil for a while as he used to work at the same company I’m at now.
At any rate over the course of the night quite a few...
February 2009
1 post
Proxying through complex situations
I was recently in need of access to my Windows XP desktop machine which is has
been left at my parents house due to lack of space anywhere I’ve lived in
London. I had previously set up a port forwarding rule on their home router to
push any RDP connections through to my desktop. Annoyingly as I found these
didn’t want to work. I don’t know what is wrong with my parents router but...
January 2009
4 posts
WatchRuby on Rails on Vimeo (via Vimeo)
This is brilliant to watch, it starts off in SVN and around 5:10 I think its been moved into git. At around 6:05 you might also spot a recognisable avatar ;-)
4 tags
My first Nu script
I get bored, quite easily and my desktop picture is no exception to this. Thankfully
in Mac OS X, I believe Windows too, you can have a rotating desktop picture. By
rotating, I don’t mean spinning, rather I mean you provide a directory of images
and the OS displays them in a random order. So every 5 minutes I get another
image.
Occasionally it will display and image which I am very bored...
“What the Fedora developers failed to realize, however, is that the USS Leonidas...”
– Regarding the Fedora 11 codename
Apple Wish: Xcode Building Embedded Projects
I’ve been spending quite a lot of my time recently using Apple’s Xcode
just hacking on things which scratch a bit of an itch I get from time to time. Mainly
I’ve been working on developing Mac OS frameworks for a couple purposes and I recently
wanted to make a GUI demo app which used my framework, so I created a new project and
use a git submodule to import the framework project....
December 2008
2 posts
“Next we see a much shorter growing up story – one of a boy with pointy ears. He...”
– Star Trek trailer: all 12-year-olds and whizz-bang action
“But better to be addicted to smartphones and gismos than cocaine or sex, I...”
– The New Adventures of Mr Stephen Fry
November 2008
1 post
My iPod is inspired
The other morning my iPod played the following songs:
Follow the Cops Back Home by Placebo
Evergreen by Faithless
Starting Over by The Crystal Method
Angels by Within Temptation
I’m still not quite sure why these songs flow so well into each other but the sequence really is superb.
October 2008
4 posts
WatchA SHORT LOVE STORY IN STOP MOTION on Vimeo (via Vimeo)
September 2008
9 posts
Rails f.submits
I’ve been using this sort of pattern for a while in my form partials. Because [Make Resourceful][m_r] provides a current_object method I usually pass this to form_for instead of a symbol matching the name of the instance variable. So I’ll have something like this
- form_for current_object do |f|
= f.label :name
= f.text_field :name
= f.submit f.object.new_record? ? 'Create' :...
DIY Easier Unobtrusive JS with Rails
I’ve been using this on a couple of projects recently and figured instead of sleeping I’d polish it up and put it together a bit better than I had been.
Daring Fireball: There's Nothing There →
Celebration of the James
Well, we’ve just got back in from Canary Wharf. Being that James blog is between six to twelve month behind the present day I feel that it falls to me to document this occasion in timely manner. I am writing this in the still inebriated state upon the completion of this day.
How it began
Well sadly like many a day of the so called “working week”, the noble James had to be in...
Cappuccino Web Framework →
I must come back to this later
August 2008
4 posts
“Previously, they only have been able to cloak very thin two-dimensional objects”
– FOXNews.com - Scientists Say Invisibility Cloak Now Possible - Science News | Science & Technology | Technology News
A thin two dimensional object, anyone else see a lack of intelligence in that statement.
Twinkle on iPhone →
Mildly addictive
Fixing SmarterMail for Mail.app
Ever since our companies mailserver changed from Merak to SmarterMail I’ve been unable to access my emails with Mail.app, I’ve had to resort to Thunderbird. Don’t get me wrong the migration from Merak was a welcome one, I’d frequently get emails with no subject or sender while on that one.
But using Thunderbird really, really, really sucked. The UI on Mac is not pleasant,...
July 2008
7 posts
Antibody Software - Star Wars III : The Backstroke... →
From nzkoz on twitter
“The current succession plan is to call JC out of retirement. Business leaders...”
– Donovan’s Views: Confidential succession plan for Apple - Mac Forums
Nicely wrapped lists
One of the projects I’m working on we have a model which can have a certain type. This type is essentially free form but at the same time we don’t want a huge long list types that were all nearly about the same. We also don’t want to go all out on the AJAX autocomplete yet either. So the obvious answer was a list or select box of the existing types. We also needed to accept new...
iPhone Configuration Utility for Web
Thanks to Tom I today found out that my iPhone does not support S/MIME encrypted emails. This is a bit annoying and hopefully, given its support of SSL, will come in a future update.
In the process of trying to find out this information I took a look at the enterprise iPhone Configuration Utility manual to see if I needed to use that to install the email certificate or something like that. In...
“However, the most popular handset in the US for browsing is the Motorola RAZR,...”
– BBC NEWS | Technology | Mobile web reaches critical mass
Learning how Git works
Since switching to git I’ve found the lack of a library slightly annoying for a couple of reasons. While I never wanted to use the Subversion library it was nice knowing it was around and the Ruby bindings certainly made some apps possible. Git though doesn’t have a library or Ruby bindings. Instead its a veritable hodge-podge of programs which when combined together make up git...
June 2008
6 posts
Working on Palmtree v1.0.0
Having seen a few people using palmtree for their deployment I’ve decided to do a bit more work on it and polish it up a bit. I’ve begun what will become v1.0.0 in a new branch which restructures the layout of the recipes.
The general intention is that palmtree will be used by direct inclusion of various groups of recipes as are required by the user. Categories of recipes such as...
Make Resourceful-ized form_for
One of the problems I’ve had recently is nested form partials in my Rails applications. I’ve got a controller which is always nested under another, it just logically makes sense that way. The problem I was having was that the rails form_for helper wanted to generate an un-nested url which the form would post to.
Now I also use make_resourceful with my controllers. This is important...
Updating the git repos in current dir
I’ve been using more and more git based TextMate bundles of late and updating them can be a bit of a pain. Mainly because you have to remember which ones are git ones, not too bad you can check for a .git directory in the bundles.
So I finally go round to slapping together a small script to do this for me. I give you ~/bin/update-git-repos
#!/bin/sh
find . -name ".git" -depth 2 -type d...
Its the little things
I’ve been forced to start using Thunderbird for my Office email as there is some bizarre incompatibility with SmarterMail and Mail.app. The short of this is I’ve had to start using an app I never wanted to.
I like Mail.app, and its the silly little quirks of Thunderbird which really piss me off.
Deleting an email
I have my most recent emails at the top, its a fairly regular...
Corrs Light
Just seen an advert for Corrs Light, apparently its brewed to be light. Given what I know about Corrs Light I can only conclude that Light equates to piss water in the US.
Its probably not dissimilar to piß wasser as advertised in GTA:IV.
FreeBSD 7.0 Installation with 8GB of RAM
I was installing a server for a client earlier today which had four 2GB RAM sticks in totalling 8GB of RAM. Bizarrely when trying to boot it, either via PXE or CD, irrespective of ACPI being disabled it would hang at
/stand/sysinstall running as init on vty0
when ACPI was enabled and at
Trying to mount root ufs:/dev/md0
with ACPI disabled. The latter case was worse as it would require an...
May 2008
12 posts
Palmtree
Can still hardly believe it. I’m one of those people that might write some code, but never really expect anyone besides himself to use it.
As such I was recently shocked and amazed when I went back to Robby Russell’s article about Interactive Capistrano and when checking the pastie example saw at the very top
require "palmtree/recipes/mongrel_cluster"
mainly because palmtree is a...