Jay McGavren’s Journal

Tomas Carillo spoke on speaking at Gangplank Academy Brownbag today. Here are my notes:

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Just submitted a talk proposal for the next Desert Code Camp at DeVry on June 13:

Though many would argue it’s far more elegant, Ruby was inspired in its early days in part by Perl. That heritage means it’s an awesome environment for text parsing, file manipulation, and many other tedious daily chores faced by every developer on earth (and their Aunt Tillie, too).

This session will cover some of the powerful features of the standard Ruby library - utilities that may already be installed on your Linux or OS X machine (and can easily be added to Windows). Learn to slice and dice files and directories, HTML, XML, shell commands, and more!

We have a series of small new projects coming at work, and I hate project setup. We’d used Bort previously, but it uses Restful Authentication, and my boss was recommending Authlogic. I also didn’t want to have to set up Cucumber on five new code bases.

So, Git/GitHub being the wonderful platform it is, I forked the Bort repo and set to work:

Bort with Rails 2.3, Authlogic, and Cucumber

…I might have done better starting from scratch. Bits of Restful Auth kept disrupting my Authlogic setup, likewise Rails 2.2 code with 2.3.

But in the end I prevailed (I think). There may still be odd errors lurking in there. Those should be teased out by the many projects I hope to use it on, though.

Man, was this a pain to find. I’m assuming some proficiency with XML and Quicksilver here; leave a comment if you need more specific directions.

Install the Web Search module from the Quicksilver plugins pane if you haven’t already. Quit Quicksilver. Then edit this file:

~/Library/Caches/Quicksilver/Indexes/QSPresetDocWebSearches.qsindex

Search for:

<string>qss-http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=***</string>

And change it to:

<string>qss-http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=***&num=100</string>

Be sure you’ve got the “Google Search” entry; there are many similar ones. I originally edited the file while Quicksilver was running and had to quit and reload the catalog several times before I got it to stick. Your mileage may vary.

To test, bring up QS, type “Google Search”, tab twice, type your query, and press Return. Your default browser should load a Google Search with 100 results per page. You can of course make any other tweaks to this or any other search URL that your heart desires.

I’m having way too much fun with the out-of-the-box SVG support in Firefox 3…

It’s SO nice to finally have an editor (TextMate) with a proper “filter selection through command…” command. I’ll never go back to an IDE without one.

For those not familiar, commands like this take the current selection and pipe it through a Unix command (shell scripts, Perl, Ruby, Python, etc. included), then replace the selection with the command’s output. So if you have this text in the open document:

foo
bar
baz

You can select it, choose Filter Through Command (Cmd-Option-R in Textmate), type “sort” (the Unix command) in the dialog that appears, and wind up with this:

bar
baz
foo

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Was sitting at a red light when I remembered that I needed to look into GitX (thanks for the tip, Byron and Andrew). So I commit a minor no-no and flip out my cell to send myself a voice-to-text note via jott.com. As I’m doing so, the cross-street’s light changes, and I step on the gas. That’s when I realize my light hasn’t changed.

Fortunately it was late at night, so there was no traffic to have an accident with. But I did find this message in my e-mail:

Jott Networks to Jay:

Reminder. Computer research Getex(?). Wooh! Jesus!