Space Babies

Rails 3: clean water

joost — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 19:23:55 +0000

To celebrate the release of Rails 3, DHH has started a campaign to raise $100,000 for clean water in Africa. You can help too, by donating. Since Rails 3 is free, you can spend some of your saved cash on this charity, right?

RubyAndRails Europe

joost — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 19:43:48 +0000

RubyAndRails Europe is held on 21-22 October 2010. I will be attending! This year marks the debut in Pakhuis De Zwijger which is a pretty nice place. The old one was good too, but this one is just a tad more upscale. And in the center of Amsterdam (i.e. closer to my home) so that’s a nice bonus. See you there?

Ruby on Rails folder icons

joost — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 11:43:11 +0000

Just came across this Ruby on Rails icon pack and wanted to share!

Docfix in Rails

joost — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 17:10:41 +0000

A patch of mine was accepted for Rails just two hours ago. True, it’s only a documentation fix. I’m still proud though And I have done a great deal more l33t things recently, all of which I will be blogging in due time.

If you’re still reading, you get a little bonus: yesterday the Rails master branch was targeted for version 3.1. This means that 3.0 has its own branch which will see only fixes now. Release of 3.0 final has to be imminent!

Migrating subversion to git

joost — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 13:38:02 +0000

I thought I had written this down somewhere, but apparently I didn’t. Here is the perfect guide for transferring a svn repo to a git repo.

And just in case that blog ever goes down, here is the text:

The first thing we need to do is create a users file that maps all your SVN users to your GIT users. Just make a file on your Desktop named ‘users.txt’. Map the users using this format:

jmaddox = Jon Maddox bigpappa = Brian Biggs

Simple. Now here are the commands you’ll run. I’ll explain them below.

mkdir my_blog_tmp cd my_blog_tmp git-svn init http://code.yoursite.net/my_blog/trunk/ --no-metadata git config svn.authorsfile ~/Desktop/users.txt git-svn fetch

The first two are self explanatory, we’re making a new directory for the temporary repository. The second command initializes the directory as a git-svn hybrid thing and points the origin at your SVN repository. The flag, –no-metadata, tells GIT to leave all the SVN details behind (not the commit log). The fourth command tells GIT to remap all the SVN users to GIT users when it sucks down the source and history. The last command actually does the fetching.

Ok, so now after a few LONG minutes, your source is all there. Do a git log to see that your users have been mapped. Sweet!

Now you just have one last step. You need to clone this repository. Why do we do this? When doing a normal git clone it will take everything we want from the temporary repository, while leaving behind all the SVN cruft that was there to support the git-svn stuff.

git clone my_blog_tmp my_blog

Think of the children!

joost — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 11:05:00 +0000

An idea as brilliant as it is simple: Godblock. A filter to block the violent and “psychologically damaging” content on religious websites.

Rails3 RC

joost — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 13:33:52 +0000

Omg. Rails3 RC is out! And new iMacs!!! With SSDs!!!!!!!! All on one day! [faints]

Widgets

joost — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 12:03:36 +0000

Last week I have completed a small project for SpangaS, a Dutch television series for teenagers. They are starting their new season on September 13th and wanted a count down on the website. I went the extra mile and made this in Javascript instead of just Rails.

Widgets like these really beg to be implemented in Javascript. I could have stuck to my original assignment and made the entire thing in Rails, fully integrated into my existing code. But then it could not have been re-used on other websites easily. And for a series like SpangaS, a lot of websites exist. From the top of my head I count four official ones.

By splitting the back-end code from the front-end, and doing the latter in Javascript, I enabled a viral aspect of this count down widget. Implementing it in any website takes just one line of code. In fact, if you are reading this before 13 September 2010 you will see this widget in action in the right-hand column of spacebabies.nl.

It has the added benefit of keeping the core website code clean as well.

Developing with subdomains

joost — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 23:40:37 +0000

Every now and then I am working on a project that uses subdomains extensively. Up until now I had to use my local hosts file and a bunch of hosts I had to maintain by hand. Tiresome. Now thankfully there’s smackaho.st and the more concisely named lvh.me. These DNS entries point to 127.0.0.1 and have wildcard support too. Neat.

Overnumerousness

joost — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 20:44:57 +0000

The IT Crowd is brilliant. This little clip doesn’t make sense if you don’t know the series, so if you don’t, fetch it from teh intertubes and LOL!