One of the things that bugs me about some people in the technology field is that they do not perform enough occupational maintenance. Today I just purchased Agile Coaching and Beginning Mac Programming: Develop with Objective-C and Cocoa. Both from the Pragmatic Bookshelf.
If you have not done so already, do yourself a favor and go to the Pragmatic Bookstore, check yo self, and get better at what you do! Here is my bookshelf to date.
This guide is all encompassing but primarily focuses on the benefits of MacPorts, second the development stack for SQL Server and lastly on anything else a rails developer might need on OS X. If you are on a Mac, possibly running Snow Leopard and x86_64 is near and dear to your heart, this article is for you. If you do not "have" to use SQL Server, you can safely skip those sections and get to the Ruby1.9/Apache2/SQLite3/MySQL stuff.
UPDATE: Hacks no longer needed, latest Visor/SIMBL is 64-bit Snow Leopard happy!
This is a similar process that I had to go through back in the day when I had to hack visor terminal in Leopard. Basically the steps are pretty easy. First you just install SIMBL and the Visor.bundle as a SIMBL plugin in ~/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins/Visor.bundle. Once that is done here is the process to get this working in Snow Leopard.
Earlier this week I gave a talk at our local ruby users group, 757.rb, about Memcached. Here recently I started picking it up again so that I could keep track of large sets of PK/FK changes during a big database move. In doing so, I decided to dig deep into it's internals and get a better grasp of how I would use it when I decided to do some serious fragment caching again.
If you have legacy code written for ruby 1.8 and you want to run 1.9 and support your old PDF::Writer code, then just jump right over to my Github pdf-writer fork and get it.
sudo gem install metaskills-pdf-writer
If you are interested in knowing some of the dirty details about what pitfalls are under 1.9, read on. The biggest thing for me was getting used to the character encodings. Including string literals in your code that are say UTF-8 or some other encoding will blow up on you real quick. I highly highly suggest that you read James Edward Gray II: Everything About Ruby 1.9 Character Encoding Series series. He covers all the basics. If you want to see what two commits I did for pdf-writer, see here and here. The second one is very very hackish, it basically add a marshaling support to the Mutex class which 1.9 does not have. The reason this is needed was due to pdf-writer's use of transaction simple to roll back object state as it is drawing across multiple pages. If you are like me and wish all your PDF::Writer code was in Prawn, your not alone!
What have I been up too lately? Well primary working my butt off in my day job and after that, I just finished a week of vacation. As an aside, I need to disconnect more often, my vacation was very relaxing. But what's more relaxing that doing things in the fresh outdoors? Well learning another programming language of course.
That is why this week I have seriously started learning Objective-C and iPhone application development. In fact I just got my approval today from Apple that I am a registered developer, see that pretty icon in the right column? So do you want to do the same? Below is a list of resources that I have found helpful to me. Let me explain something first, I am very tangential in my learning methods. Basically that means I take frequent breaks from my main course to learn deep details. For instance my main course is the iPhone SDK Development book. But I have found it very helpful to break early on and watch the Becoming Productive In Xcode videos. Knowing keyboard bindings and customizing my, dare I say it... IDE, just helps me get business done! Stay tuned for some updates.
Want a list of the users and the number of commits they made? Git makes it really really easy, while I could not find such an easy method on Subversion. Here they are.
git log | git shortlog -n -s
