Pixel Perfect HTML
Heard good things about these guys: http://www.pixelperfecthtml.com
Installing git on mac osx
Here’s how to install git on osx from source (or any other *nix system for that matter).
wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.5.3.8.tar.gz
tar xzvf git-1.5.3.8.tar.gz
cd git-1.5.3.8
./configure
sudo make && sudo make install
Test it out by checking out merb-core:
git clone git://github.com/wycats/merb-core.git
Dreamhost vs. DHH on Rails Shared Hosting
The Official Dreamhost blog had a post about shared rails hosting that got a quick response from DHH himself. My comment on the Dreamhost blog was ‘flagged as spam’ so I’ll post it here:
One of the great things about Rails and the Ruby development community is that our interests lie outside of just writing code in dreamweaver and ftping it to the server. I’d venture to say that most Rails developers want the kind of control of a server that shared hosting doesn’t offer. Sure, I could pay $5 to Dreamhost to get one site up in running, or I could pay $20 and get a VPS from someone like linode or slicehost and do whatever I want with it, all the while learning valuable unix skills. The whole ‘hosting is a black box mentality’ will just keep developers continually relying on hosting vendors for a crucial aspect of their business.
undefined method `require_gem’
I kept getting this error when running rake on new rails 2.0.2 app. Turns out the problem was that I needed to upgrade rake from 0.7.3 to 0.8.1. Fixed it.
Music 2007
Overall, 2007 was pretty disappointing compared to 2006, but these are the ones that left a mark on the calendar.
1. Shout Out Louds – Our Ill Wills
2. Miracle Fortress – Five Roses
3. Dan Deacon – Spiderman of The Rings (basically I just listened to Crystal Cat and Wham City a million times)
4. Band of Horses – Cease To Begin (will be forever linked with reading The Fountainhead on the subway)
5. Animal Collective – Strawberry Jam
6. Ryan Adams – Easy Tiger
7. No Age – Weirdo Rippers
Honorable Mention:
Brian Eno – Before And After Science (obviously did not come out in 2007, but I listened to it more than any other album this year)
db/migrate/100_…
A large rails project I’m working on hit the 100th migration milestone today. Despite what some might say, I love migrations. It think it’s really cool (if not 100% necessary) to be able to look back at the roadmap that the database has followed to get to where it is. I’ve never had to rollback a migration, but I can sleep easier knowing that all 100 migrations have valid self.down methods.
jQuery
The guys at err the blog have written a great post on using jQuery instead of the default prototype. As usual, it’s a high quality read and sure to become a defacto resource for breaking the prototype addiction.
merb vs. Django
Ever since zedgate the easily influenced are questioning their devotion to Rails. Zed’s post hasn’t really disillusioned me at all, but I’ve been more inspired by Geoffrey Grosenbach’s post to branch out into some other technologies for the sake of learning. Currently the two highest on my radar are Django and merb. I’ve been keeping an eye on Django for awhile and have built a few small utilities in it. Django seems cool but I really just don’t like python that much. To be fair, I actually didn’t really like Ruby all that much until I started doing non-trivial things. In the airport over Christmas break I wrote a small app to keep track of code snippets, kind of like a taggable pastie, to help me remember one-off unix commands. I’m going to to port it to merb and django for kicks to see how it goes.
nathanblend 