trevmex's tumblings

Google Chrome surpasses Internet Explorer as most popular web browser

Tue, 22 May 2012 08:10:21 -0400

Google Chrome surpasses Internet Explorer as most popular web browser:

The king is dead! Long live the king!

How to create and apply a patch with Git

Mon, 21 May 2012 12:20:06 -0400

How to create and apply a patch with Git:

This blog post is a oldie but a goodie. It really helped me to understand how to apply patches in git (ala gerrit).

npm registry has over 10,000 packages

Sat, 19 May 2012 11:31:21 -0400

npm registry has over 10,000 packages:

It looks like Node.js is entering big boy territory.

cimapps: This is where we work, glass, light, and color. You...

Sat, 12 May 2012 01:36:21 -0400

Ping pong table, check!

Pool table, check!

Having a stand up!

Some people writing some kick ass Java.

The higher reaches of CIM City.

cimapps:

This is where we work, glass, light, and color. You can see out over Philadelphia from no matter where you are. Pretty cool right? You could too if you wanted to, just check here.

Pictures courtesy of @davidmays and his awesome little camera!

That’s where I work!

cimapps: So I just whipped up these two sticker designs, I like...

Sat, 12 May 2012 01:35:42 -0400

8-bit

Fun script

cimapps:

So I just whipped up these two sticker designs, I like the 8-bit one better I think. If you’re looking to give some feedback, hit the Forrst link, thanks!

http://forr.st/~UMI

I want dozens of these.

Wolfenstein 3D in the Browser

Fri, 11 May 2012 13:39:54 -0400

Wolfenstein 3D in the Browser:

This is awesome.

HTML9 Responsive Boilerstrap JS

Thu, 10 May 2012 10:59:51 -0400

HTML9 Responsive Boilerstrap JS:

How do I install this?

Um… are you stupid or something? Just attackclone the grit repo pushmerge, then rubygem the lymphnode js shawarma module – and presto!

I just about died laughing at this.

Humans TXT: We Are People, Not Machines.

Wed, 09 May 2012 08:40:58 -0400

Humans TXT: We Are People, Not Machines.:

I love this idea. We should all be making humans.txt files in our websites.

Styling for SASS Addicts

Wed, 09 May 2012 08:36:26 -0400

@phillyrb May 2012 Meeting

Pam Selle

SASS is a CSS pre-processor. It makes CSS more like a programming language with mixins, variables, and scoping.

Pre-processers don’t magically make your code better.

Mistakes!

Styling with ids.

You cannot have more than one id on a page. You can have many classes.

ids are more powerful than classes, and classes are more powerful than elements.
The inception rule: you shouldn’t have more than 4 selectors!
Seriously, just don’t style your ids. Style is for classes.
Fear of classes.

More markup is not bad. use classes liberally.
Redundancy.

You keep your Ruby code DRY, you need to make your CSS as well.

You can use @extend to DRY up your code.

A mixin without an argument is suspicious (try @extend).

Avoid overwriting styles! Keep it simple!

Print your stylesheets, if they look bad on paper, you might have bad code!

Use CSS Lint to make your code better!
Forgetting fallbacks!

You cannot forget IE. Go to Can I use to learn what you can use on your browser.
Taking it too seriously
FACT: You will fuck it up!
Don’t be high and mighty about your code.

SASS doesn’t create bad code. Bad coder create bad code.

Check out the GREAT chart at standardista. They relate CSS specificity to fish. It is mega-cool.

Nesting too much in SASS is confusing! Don’t do it.

Check out HTML5 Boilerplate to kickstart your beautiful html pages!

Spriting in Compass is awesome! Check it out, and never edit a sprite sheet in Photoshop ever again.

Thanks to Pam for the great talk!

The difference between !foo == nil and !foo.nil? in Ruby

Tue, 08 May 2012 16:21:28 -0400

I got a question at work about the difference between these two statements in Ruby:

!foo == nil
!foo.nil?

The main difference is when the bang (!) is evaluated.

bang (!) in Ruby will return the opposite of the boolean value of the statement.

So if the statement is truthy, false will be returned, and if the statement is falsy, true will be returned.

We have to ask ourselves, what is “the statement” in each of these cases. In the first case, foo is the statement. That means the code will be evaluated as if it was running the following function:

def first_one(foo)
  # Step 1
  tmp = !foo

  # Step 2
  tmp == nil
end

In the second case, foo.nil? is the statement. Dot (.) has a higher priority that bang (!), so you get code that will be evaluated more like this function:

def second_one(foo)
  # Step 1
  tmp = foo.nil?

  # Step 2
  !tmp
end

Let’s look at some test cases:

foo is undefined:

!foo == nil # NameError
!foo.nil? # NameError

foo is set as a string (truthy):

foo = "bar"

!foo == nil # false (uh oh, that's not what you wanted!)
!foo.nil? # true

foo is set to nil (falsy):

foo = nil

!foo == nil # false
!foo.nil? # false

I hope this helps someone else out there. Happy rubying!

xkcd: Every Major's Terrible

Mon, 07 May 2012 18:51:30 -0400

xkcd: Every Major's Terrible:

Beautiful, just beautiful.

Does anyone else remember this game? Every now and again I get...

Thu, 03 May 2012 09:44:41 -0400

Does anyone else remember this game? Every now and again I get the opening song in my head. It is simple, but I love it.

Manhunter 2 - San Francisco (by ShagittariusIntros)

Eclipse Maven Plugin for Scala Spring Apps

Wed, 02 May 2012 22:07:00 -0400

Eclipse Maven Plugin for Scala Spring Apps:

I am playing around with Scalaz and Spring, and I use STS as an editor. One nice thing about STS (which is just fancy Eclipse) is that you can have a maven plugin in your pom.xml file to make Eclipse have all the right settings for hacking on Scala and Spring.

This is what you do:

Install the Scala IDE for STS (or Eclipse).
Copy this into your project’s pom.xml file in the section:
Save the pom.xml file.
Execute the following in Terminal.app or PowerShell:
```
mvn eclipse:clean eclipse:eclipse
```
Hit F5 in STS (or Eclipse).

Your IDE is now set up to deal with Scala files. Hooray!

Paxos Made Live

Wed, 02 May 2012 21:38:02 -0400

Paxos Made Live:

It is time to dig into the goodness that is the Paxos algorithm. It is the technology that Google’s Chubby and Apache’s Zookeeper are based off of, and I am working to implement it as well. Time to study up!

Editing your hosts file to stop goofing off

Tue, 01 May 2012 23:11:00 -0400

So, when I get home, I want to work on my pet projects, but I often end up, well, not working on anything. I end up goofing off on the internets.

I have a Windows 7 laptop at home that I use, and I knew that I could block sites by adding entries to my hosts file.

You can access your hosts file by following the great instructions at Help Desk Geek.

Once you have the hosts file open, you want to add lines to it that look like the following:

127.0.0.1 reddit.com
127.0.0.1 imgur.com

The first entry is the IP Address of your computer (127.0.0.1)
The second entry is the domain you want to direct to your local computer (note that these entries do not have paths, they are only the domain parts of the URL, e.g. reddit.com, not reddit.com/r/funny).

Why would you want this, you ask?

Well, I want to stop myself from going to websites that suck my time away. By essentially blocking these sites (like reddit and imgur) from my computer, I am giving myself a wake up call to do something productive.

But for me, that isn’t good enough. I want to be reminded that I am slacking off when I try to go to these sites. So to do that I created a little page and added it to a web server running on my Windows 7 laptop. Here is how I did it:

Download and install WampServer. It is free (as in freedom), and installs with a click of a button. Easy!
Once installed click Start Menu -> All Programs -> WampServer -> start WampServer. This will start up your server.
Navigate to http://127.0.0.1/. You should see something that looks like the following:
But we want that page to be a bit better. No problem. I wrote an HTML page that you can use. Save the following gist in a file on your Desktop called index.html:
Open up Windows Explorer by clicking on Start Menu -> All Programs ->Accessories -> Windows Explorer.
Paste C:\wamp\www into the address field at the top of the window and press Enter:
Drag and drop the index.html file from your Desktop to the C:\wamp\www directory in Windows Explorer.
Finally, delete the index.php file (different from the index.html file) in the C:\wamp\www directory.

Now, when you go to http://127.0.0.1/ you should see something like:

Even better: When you are tempted to go to someplace like http://www.reddit.com/, you will see the above page, which is a nice reminder that you could be more productive right now.

I have a few ideas on how to make this better, for example, it needs some CSS love, and I think it would be neat to let people design their own productivity pages with a simple web app. In any case, this is a good start, and it helps me (at least it helped me write this post. :D).

I hope it can help you too. Take care!

DCI in Real World: Domain Context and Interaction with Scala in a Real World Project

Tue, 01 May 2012 08:53:27 -0400

DCI in Real World: Domain Context and Interaction with Scala in a Real World Project:

This is an older blog post, but it outlines a couple thing I have been thinking about a lot lately. DCI and Scala. Sadek outlines a simple to understand implementation of DCI concepts in Scala that is easy to follow. Check it out!

Introducing WebJars – Web Libraries as Managed Dependencies

Tue, 01 May 2012 08:46:47 -0400

Introducing WebJars – Web Libraries as Managed Dependencies:

Adding your web libraries as a JAR in your Java web app. This is a very cool idea for us in the enterprise web world. Good thinking James!

What Makes Valve Software the Best Office Ever?

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 00:39:51 -0400

What Makes Valve Software the Best Office Ever?:

That sounds like a GREAT place to work. Just check out the employee handbook. Sounds neat!

366 or How I Tricked Myself into Being Awesome

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 14:19:27 -0400

366 or How I Tricked Myself into Being Awesome:

Wow. this is a pretty cool article about following through. Makes me want to follow through on more things…

The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 10:53:29 -0400

The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing:

An oldie but a goodie. Whenever I am interviewing someone (which I am today), I like to re-read this guide. Good stuff.