Echographia

Here’s a simpler version of that last post using Rich Kilmer’s HotCocoa library. I also use the approach I suggested at the end of the last post: Build a menu each time it’s requested, instead of trying to keep one at the ready.
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I’ve been wanting to write a Mac application since I got this computer a year or so ago. Still haven’t, but today I ran through a MacRuby/Cocoa tutorial, and I’m hoping to find the time to code the app I have in mind soon, before I forget whatever I just learned. More about that if it happens.

My original plan was to make the app accessible from the global menu bar, but then I learned that Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines discourage it, and you know how I love guidelines. And humans. So instead I’m going to use a Dock menu. The main advantage of both, for my purposes, is that after you take some action, control returns immediately to whatever application you were using; perfect for programs you use for a moment now and then, but don’t really spend time in.

Anyway, I thought I’d share what I learned about implementing Dock menus in MacRuby. (more…)

Yesterday was the first day of February Album Writing Month, so of course I kicked things off by sinking three hours into writing a script that I could have found on the Internet somewhere. See, last week I cleaned out my GMail inbox. Since I haven’t done that, like, ever, that meant reading a lot of old and unimportant mail - like, for example, the July 2008 DreamHost newsletter, which mentioned their Entire Account Backup service, which gives you a downloadable copy of all your data for a given account. I love backups, so in the interest of being able to archive that newsletter, I kicked off a backup right then and there.
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For my two readers, an update:  Yesterday we launched a new web site for Barefoot Coffee.  I’m really excited about it because it’s the first time I’ve been involved with something like this from start to finish (although it’s not really finished - I’m just in denial about the Phase 2 document I haven’t read yet).

It’s also the first time in several years I’ve worked as a truly independent contractor.  The team was very small:  Graphic design by Conrad Altmann; vision and many, many words by Andy Newbom; and technical implementation by me.  We used Radiant, which is mostly a joy to work with, especially once you get a couple of useful extensions installed.  The markup’s pretty clean, the CSS is somewhat comprehensible, and I wrote a custom Radiant extension and some jQuery scripts for a couple of things that weren’t easy to do out of the box.  I’m proud of this project.

What else is going on:  A couple of Rails applications for a tiny startup; version 2 of the Tin Cat web site; and an academic project that’s suffering from neglect since I noticed the recent drop in my bank balance.  Plus, you know, the band, and an intermittent life.

I’m hoping to start posting here someday.  We’ll see.

A few months ago, I had to move a project I was working on to a new production environment, and I had some trouble getting Capistrano to deploy our code. The problem was basically this: (more…)

If you’re getting this error:

ERROR:  http://gems.datamapper.org does not appear to be a repository
ERROR:  While executing gem … (Gem::RemoteFetcher::FetchError)
bad response Not Found 404 (http://gems.datamapper.org/yaml)

then do this:

gem sources --remove http://gems.datamapper.org