Urban Puddle

If you spend some time googling for Rails plugins to interface with Flickr, you'll no doubt run into rflickr. Dig a little deeper and you'll find that it hasn't been updated in a while. There is a fork of it up on Github, but unfortunately that doesn't work with Rails 2.1 either. But, there are two plugins that I have confirmed work with Rails 2.1 AND Ruby 1.8.7. At the time of this post, the documentation was a little lacking in some areas so I'll save you some time in case you decide to pursue flickr integration with your Rails app before the maintainers do some writing. Let's move on..

It's been a long time since I posted a free music download. I had some rare downtime today (Saturday) so I took the opportunity to expand my music collection and discover a cool new band at the same time. The result is this track from Embarrassing Fruits called The First Time. These guys are a trio out of Chapel Hill, NC. You can check out their MySpace page here and then click this link to download the MP3.

There are lots of great instructions out there for using Git so you may not be interested in another one. Mine is no doubt imperfect as well, but I didn't find a front-to-back tutorial for getting rolling with Git on your own centralized server. I ended up cobbling information together from a bunch of sources (which I will list below). Mostly for my own benefit, I'm posting what I learned here. Feel free to ignore or read on as you desire.. By the end of it we'll have installed Git on a server, created a repository on that server, and checked in code from our local machine.

I had a hardware failure on my Dell XPS 1330. This time I didn't drop it.. it's a known issue with the display and motherboard. Looks like I'll be getting a replacement shortly but in the meantime it's back to the Mac. In trying to get my MacBook up to speed I ran across a couple of useful links I thought I'd share in case anyone is interested.

First, how to get Visor running on OS X Leopard. Courtesy of the Ars forum.

Second, the easiest instructions I've seen yet on getting Git installed on OS X. Thanks to Thomas Aylott.

If you're running Leopard and haven't gotten around to either of these tasks, I promise it's super easy with the above links.

About a month ago I wrote a post about converting Railscasts to PSP video using a simple bash script. Well, with the help of my friend Lou, it's now been converted to a Ruby script instead. The files are posted at Github and the public clone url is git://github.com/vince/mp4-to-mobile-video.git so feel free to hack at it and improve it in any way you like. For those too lazy to check out the code, there's a copy/paste version (which of course will not be updated..) below.

In particular I'm posting this to help those familiar with Ruby get started with Ruby scripting since there are some methods you may not have used before if you've only used Ruby via Rails programming.

I've been using Ferret to do searches in BuyIndie for a quite a while now. It works ok but I know there are better solutions out there. One of those that I'm experimenting with is Sphinx. If you want to play along and install it along with the Thinking Sphinx plugin, here's how you do it.

I'm starting to use Shoes for a project I'm working on. I've never done used it before so this is all new. Going through the tutorials page I ran into one called Running with Shoes. Problem was I couldn't get the basic code running. The error I got was a daunting one considering I had only 12 lines of code.:

undefined method 'text' for app

Looks like there's a new version of Ruby Gems available. If you've already got gems installed you can update to the latest version just by running this:

sudo gem update --system

Full release notes courtesy of Eric Hodel can be found here

I really enjoy free software. I love benefiting from it and I sleep easier knowing that no person or company is going to screw me out of money for an 'upgrade' or take away features under the same guise. Still, programmers have to make a living and the maintenance model of giving away the software and charging for support leaves me wondering what happens to a company/individual when too many people opt for the free option over the other. As a developer I cringe at the thought that my livelihood is dependent on donations or people clicking ads. It makes me wonder: can we charge for applications anymore in a world of free software?

There's no doubt that sometimes mistakes happen. If you make a terrible terrible subversion error and need to start over, rather than check in your code again, use this command to erase all the hidden .svn entries:

find . -type d -name '.svn' -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rdf

It's not perfect, but if svn export doesn't work and you've got no other choice the above command will help you out in a pinch.