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Git branch in prompt (with svn support)

2007-12-19T21:19:00Z

I like having my git branch in my prompt, but I sadly still have to use subversion sometimes. So, I hacked something together (mostly out of this script for vcs info in your prompt) that gives either the current git branch or the current svn revision. In my .bash_profile, I include this file with source ~/sw/bash/vcs-prompt.bash.

Quicksilver to Remember the Milk via Twitter

2007-12-05T19:11:00Z

My coworker Coda Hale wrote a script that lets you send tweets from Quicksilver, and Remember the Milk recently came out with a twitter interface. Combining these two things was glorious, but it annoyed me that I had to type “d rtm” at the beginning of everything. So I copied the tweeting script, and modified it for a single purpose: adding tasks to RTM.

Here is a link to download the script. To install it, just unzip it and put it in ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions/. To use it, invoke Quicksilver, type some text, hit tab, and choose “Add to RTM” as the task. (You need to have a twitter account, and have saved your twitter.com password into your keychain.)

iPhone keychain (equivalent)

2007-07-08T06:15:00Z

So, I got an iPhone. Yay. And then I was utterly crushed, because it dosen’t have Keychain. At all. No password remembering for you, Safari Mobile user!

I was even more crushed when I realized that almost all of my passwords are unique per-site jumbles of numbers and letters, thanks to Nic Wolff’s Password Generator. But! (And this is a really, amazingly huge but!) The password generator bookmarklet that I already use in Safari, in the Bookmarks bar, works on my iPhone!

So, I don’t actually have to remember my passwords. All I have to do is hit the bookmarks button and then tap on my bookmarklet (which synced over from Safari on my laptop). The bookmarklet does the JavaScript magic needed to generate my per-site password from my master password and the site’s domain name, and fills it in to the password blank for me. Totally awesome.

So after all that, it turns out that the sites I don’t use a unique password for are the ones that are going to suck, since I’ll have to type it in every time. Figures.

Update: Okay, sorry, the bookmarklet is near the bottom of this page. You want the “master password” version, so you can fill in passwords on your iPhone without lots of typing.

Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

2006-11-27T04:18:00Z

It is difficult to describe the awesomeness. If you want to friend me, post or email me your code.

6891 7336 6203 5735

typo permalinks in Mephisto 0.7

2006-10-20T22:33:00Z

Update: This was definitely not the best solution. As Rick Olsen points out below, it’s possible to change the permalink style to /articles/:year/:month/:day in the settings. If you want to use Mephisto style URLs, but have Mephisto redirect Typo style permalinks, you add one line at the bottom of your environment.rb file:

Mephisto::Routing.redirect 'articles/*' => '$1'

It turns out that Mephisto 0.7 adds a highly sophisticated (and pretty damn confusing) dispatching system. This means that simply adding a route that matches Typo permalinks isn’t enough anymore. I wound up having to edit the lib/mephisto/dispatch.rb file, like so:

  def self.recognize_permalink(site, path)
    path.shift if path[0] == "articles" 
    full_path = path.join('/')

The center line is the only new one. Hopefully that helps.

error 418

2006-10-20T21:05:00Z

Q: Under what circumstances should you return error number 418: “I’m a teapot”?

A: Any attempt to brew coffee with a teapot according to RFC 2324, “Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol.”

The TCP/IP Drinking Game

Rails Core Q&A Session

2006-06-26T03:59:00Z

“it’s like brain calisthenics” – marcel

“education through patches, please” – david

“i hate fixtures” – marcel

“rails does have to talk to the database” – jeremy

_why the lucky stiff and The Thirsty Cups

2006-06-24T03:13:56Z

_why

“it’s like… Windows XP outside today.”

“okay, okay, I know what you’re thinking… put your best practices away“

“[10, 20, 30].each &4.method(:-)”

the least surprised

“It’s like Lexical Luthor is shoving vocabulary kryptonite into my thesaurus gland, here.”

“I had no idea how much idolatry I had been party to, and on company time!”

_why again

“Innovative. Groundbreaking. Web 0.0.”

RailsConf Day 0

2006-06-23T06:34:47Z

RailsConf is cool; many caboosers are present, and they are also cool. Caboosers got business cards. They are cool business cards, with monkeys on them.

Chicago is not cool, but not too hot, either. About 80–85°.

Went to dinner at Giordano’s, and ate stuffed-crust Chicago-style pizza. It was delicious.

Lots of people had DS Lites, including Amy Hoy and Tobias Luetke; much MarioKart was played. I won twice.

I have started working in earnest on a rails app I will probably manage to finish and release. Releasing is good. This conference is going to be fun. Woohoo.

Graduated

2006-05-29T20:41:11Z

Hurray. Graduated. Now all I have to do is figure out how to get them to give me my diploma…

Google Analytics

2006-05-10T00:50:16Z

Finally, finally, Google has seen fit (or gotten around to installing enough servers) that they sent me a Google Analytics invitation code. Soon, I will again have access to all the web site statistics I… already had 8 months ago, until Google took them away. Bah.

Mac Mini and Sony Bravia XBR issues

2006-05-06T22:55:44Z

A lot of people seem to be having ever so much trouble getting their Mac Minis to use their Sony Bravia LCD Televisions as displays. For some reason, when connected to a Mini via an HDMI-to-DVI cable, the Bravia appears to the Mini to have a native resolution of 1280×720. While that is, in fact, a 16:9 resolution, it leaves anyone wanting a good-looking picture in the dust. Unfortunately, the Mini only has two options: overscan mode, which pushes the menu bar and the dock off the screen, or no overscan, which makes the picture significantly smaller than the television is, leaving a couple of inches of black all around.

After downloading SwitchResX and DisplayConfigX, and a couple of hours of Googling, I discovered that HDMI ports on Bravia TVs just don’t seem to like any resolutions except 1280×720. After the third attempt that just resulted in a black screen, it occurred to me that I might try using the “RGB/PC” input on the Bravia, which is actually a standard VGA port. After plugging the VGA cable into the TV on one end and the Mini’s DVI to VGA adapter on the other end, I restarted the Mini to discover… a perfect screen. At 1366×768, the Bravia’s native resolution, no less. The computer is sending 1 pixel for every pixel on the TV. Front Row is beautiful, and DVD Player fills the whole screen. Hurrah.

Hopefully this will help all the people out there looking for instructions on how to set up a custom resolution to force their TV to work with their Mini, since it turns out you don’t need to at all.

Here’s a picture of the full-resolution, full-screen result:

DS Lite

2006-05-05T03:48:00Z

I have no idea why I didn’t think to post this sooner.

Way. Cool.

New Car

2006-05-03T19:36:16Z

Well, I really don’t know what to say, exactly, so I’ll just show you a picture:

It would be a picture of my actual car, but my camera decided to break this week. Sigh.

The car, however, is totally sweet.

The time Tim Bray crashed AOL

2006-04-11T05:04:01Z

I’m not sure exactly why, but I find it really, really amusing that Tim Bray managed to (well, at least it certainly looks like he did) crash AOL entirely, back in 1988.