FernyB

I just discovered this new band called Fireworks. I think it’s catchy and I like it.

In one of the projects I’m working on I’ve been seeing the following all over the codebase.

CGI.escape(plaintext).gsub(“+”, “%20″).gsub(“%7E”, “~”)

At first you wonder why are they replacing “+” with “%20″.
Then you realize what they really wanted to use was “URI.encode”.

When using “URI.encode” you don’t need to gsub “+” with “%20″.

RailsMailPreview has been updated to work on Mac OSX 10.8.
To download visit: http://nufex.com/

I recently wrote an app called RailsMailPreview which will capture any emails being sent from your Rails app.
Once they are captured you can preview what they will look like to the end user.

It is available for purchase from the Mac App Store:
http://nufex.com/link/rails-mail-preview

Today, I published a Ruby gem called has_distance. has_distance is used to return nearby records based on the record’s origin (latitude, longitude).

More info can be found at: https://github.com/fernyb/has_distance

Lately I’ve been working on updating www.skatr.us which is a site built with Rails and the new code will be ridding Rails 3, and I’ve been porting it over to use HAML as it’s way better than writing erb.

I’m also now using the new sass which I can now get rid of the css less plugin which essential did the same.

For Fixtures I started using machinist and it’s just awesome, at a project I used to work on I had to use monkey type fixtures and that was not fun, machinist makes it fun again. Try it see for yourself.

In the past years I’ve always tried to use MacVIM but I just couldn’t keep with it because for one it didn’t look great and I had grown to like Textmate. Recently I decided to get back into learning and use MacVIM for all my development needs except for Cocoa Development where I use XCode because it works awesome with it. I think it has taken me about a week to start getting used to it, the only problems I have at the moment are, I will sometimes type the wrong command but it’s getting better. Practice makes perfect so I will keep trying.

When I test my iOS apps on my local network to debug issues I setup a host on my router to point my mac on the network. On my development machine I port forward all requests from port 80 to port 3000 because I’m using Rails and want to view the request log.

This is what I used to forward port 80 to 3000.

This weekend I was playing with some neat Core Animation and was looking into how to get an NSImage of a NSWindow. My first solution was to find out if someone already figured that part out and yes of course they did according to google. But the problem was all the examples never had the shadow of the window and I wanted the shadow. So I poked around the docs for some long hours and I came out with this after looking at SonOfGrab sample code.

In the current project that I’m working on I wanted to give the user the ability to add an email to their address book.

The thing I wanted the user to see was AddressBook.app open and show the current person’s email in edit mode.

The way I did that was like so:

A while ago I wanted to get GAMV back online and I decided to use Cupcake the PHP Framework I wrote. If you’re looking for it go to: http://gamv.fernyb.net/

I’m going to start posting more code snippets on my blog and each of those posts will be called Cocoa for today and of course the title changes for the specific code I’m writing.

If your working with NSOutlineView and need to deselect all items you can use

the deselect all method from NSOutlineView

[myOutlineView deselectAll:nil];

Yes that’s me the first blurry one. Photo by Chuck Toporek.

After attending NSConference USA 2010 in Atlanta, GA all I have to say it was awesome! Really it was. The content was great. The folks were cool and the food was ok not bad. One thing that I really did not like and I think everyone would agree, food was not allowed in the auditorium. I’ve managed to record a few of the talks using QuickTime on my Macbook. I think one of the best talks was “Spelunking OSX” it’s just awesome. The lunch talks were also great. The Cocoa Rumble was really great and entertaining. Hopefully next year it will be at a different city, I have nothing against Atlanta but having a conference in different cities will be great.

Atlas is like Xcode. Atlas is built with Cappuccino and Cappuccino is built using a language called Objective-J which is just a superset of JavaScript and its very cool! Just like Objective-C is a superset of C. The best thing I like about it is that it’s so much like Cocoa and Objective-C. The syntax is almost the same, NSObject would be CPObject.

280 North makes Atlas and I signed up for their beta program from beta version 3. Once I had access I played with it but didn’t do much. Now just yesterday I got interested in it again and while reading the forums to see what people where saying I saw a tutorial that caught my interest ( http://blog.jerodsanto.net/2009/11/280-atlas-introductory-screencast/ ) and I decided to write a simple app as-well.

I wrote a simple calculator to calculate the tax of an item but my goal was to find out if NSNotification was being supported and well, it is being supported of course it’s not called NSNotification but called CPNotification. In Objective-J ALL classes are prefixed with CP instead of NS. Here is my source code for the app I wrote using Atlas.

To learn more about Atlas go to their site and read about it and of course try it out!

Francisco Tolmasky – FOWA Maimi 2009 from Carsonified on Vimeo.

Today, I started a new project. A minimalistic bug tracker that should really work under Dreamhost. The only reason I need this to work on Dreamhost is because bills begin to add up after having a few VPS accounts and I’m trying to cut my spending and since Dreamhost gives me unlimited disk space and bandwidth I figure I will use it and yes I know I can use GitHub but that cost money for private repositories.

I installed the latest rails using sudo gem install rails –version 2.3.5 and I got Capistrano all set-up and was able to deploy. Now the only thing that took almost all day was trying to figure out why rails would not process the request. So I did “rake rails:freeze:gems” to freeze the gems. Once I did that I was having problems with Rack version 1.0 already activated and I hacked around RubyGems to see if I can deactivate it but I didn’t find anyway of doing that. I also googled a ton of searched but found nothing.

What did work was to modify the rails core, ActionController to be specific in file:

vendor/rails/actionpack/lib/action_controller.rb

I modified lines 34 and 35 and commented them out.
I then added the following:

load "#{RAILS_ROOT}/vendor/gems/rack-1.0.1/lib/rack.rb"

the end result look like this:

#gem 'rack', '~> 1.0.1'
#require 'rack'
load "#{RAILS_ROOT}/vendor/gems/rack-1.0.1/lib/rack.rb"

which after doing that, it ALL worked well. Now I can continue with building my app.