Finds by @samoli

Convert Ruby 1.8 to 1.9 hash syntax

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 14:03:20 -0500

In vim, for an entire file:

:%s/:\([^ ]*\)\(\s*\)=>/\1:/g

In the shell, for an entire project:

perl -pi -e 's/:([\w\d_]+)(\s*)=>/\1:/g' **/*.rb

Now, instead of those old-school hashes like this:

get '/', :agent => MOBILE_BROWSERS do

You’ll have new-school hashes like this:

get '/', agent: MOBILE_BROWSERS do

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After Years Of Drilling, Antarctic Lake Will Be Reached

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 05:46:42 -0500

By Katia Moskvitch Science reporter, BBC News

The first satellite images of Lake Vostok were obtained in the 1990s

Continue reading the main story

Neil Young is right — piracy is the new radio

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 06:30:55 -0500

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Plan 9: The way the future was

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 06:30:54 -0500

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Study Finds Engineers Far More Likely than MBAs to Build and Run Companies

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 06:30:54 -0500

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Zsh is your friend.

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 15:17:55 -0500

I don’t know if you know this, but ZShell is your friend, you might not know it yet, but its true. I know what you are thinking , “whats wrong with Bash?”, nothing, except its not Zsh.

Its not that Bash is a bad guy, I don’t want to put him down, but if we were picking teams, Bash would be last picked in gym class.

He isn’t very versatile and he doesn’t do anything particularily great, all in all he is kind of just a worse Zsh(or Zsh is kind of like a better Bash).

Zsh is easy to get started with because it looks and acts like bash in a lot of ways. So if you are familiar with bash don’t worry, you can try zsh out without skipping a beat and you still end up with a better shell.

Why is Zsh better then Bash?

In my mind one of the most important reasons why Zsh is better then bash is autocompletion, and I don’t mean that whimpy autocompletion you get by installing bash completion. I mean, this is real deal command completion, besides getting all the completion of common commands on the command line, and being ridiculously fast, the completion also gives you a keyboard navigable completion list.

Okay, I know what you are saying, big deal right? Well how about really great built in autocompletion for common commands. Lets use Kill as an example. You type

Kill

in bash, you get what, the list of all files that are in your current working directory. Not very helpful behavior in my opinion. What happens if you type

kill

in Zsh? This:

Lists of all your processes with pids? Yes please.

Another thing that make makes Zsh stand out is shared history. If you are anything like me you live in the terminal all day long. There is nothing worse(I’m exaggerating) then opening another terminal in a tab and navigating your history looking for that recent thing you just did in another window and have it not be in your history. In Zsh this isn’t an issue.

Time for more awesome

Okay, so we have great, fast autocompletion and shared history. How much more awesome could there be? Lots!

Autocorrect is pretty cool

mikegrouchyv2 ::(master*) » gut status
zsh: correct 'gut' to 'git' [nyae]?y
git status

Hey thats pretty cool, autocorrect for known commands. What would I do without you(besides type the command again)?

Even cooler then autocorrect, for the super nerd(like me) Vi and emacs mode, shit yeah, you can have your favorite editor on your command line. It will support common movement commands and editing modes, like command and insert mode for Vi.

Last but certianly not least, Zsh has oh-my-zsh from the website:

A community-driven framework for managing your zsh configuration. Includes 40+ optional plugins (rails, git, OSX, hub, capistrano, brew, ant, macports, etc), over 80 terminal themes to spice up your morning, and an auto-update tool so that makes it easy to keep up with the latest updates from the community.

I know one exists for bash, but I find oh-my-zsh to be excellent, it autoupdates, has great plugins and a very active community behind it.

All in all, Zsh is pretty great, so if you haven’t tried Zsh, maybe its time you try it out. If so oh-my-zsh is a pretty great place to start.

If you are already drinking the Kool-aid and have some Zsh tips to share, either leave a comment or hit me up on twitter.

Also, More discussion on Hacker News

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Codecademy Becomes A Platform: Now Anyone Can Write Programming Tutorials

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 15:01:07 -0500

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Sorry, this blog post is not available in your country.

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 13:31:47 -0500

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Legal streams are less available for rentals than a year ago

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 12:31:28 -0500

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The Power of Introverts: A Manifesto for Quiet Brilliance

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 12:31:27 -0500

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Your Users Won't Read

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 12:31:26 -0500

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Once set, variables are always defined

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 07:16:43 -0500

When you set a variable in a section of code that is never executed, the variable will still be defined.

if false
  a = 'whatever'
end

puts a
# => "nil"
# Does NOT raise 'NameError: undefined local variable or method `a' for main:Object'

This post was submitted by Olivier El Mekki.

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I'm at The Clevelander - C-Level Rooftop Terrace!

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 21:17:37 -0500

http://4sq.com/quRa1X

I'm at Hog's Head!

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 17:17:00 -0500

http://4sq.com/cDdmQR

Rails 3.2.0: Faster dev mode & routing, explain queries, tagged logger, store

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 20:00:42 -0500

So we didn’t quite make the December release date as we intended, but hey, why break a good tradition and start hitting release targets now! In any case, your patience has been worldly rewarded young grasshopper: Rails 3.2 is done, baked, tested, and ready to roll!

I’ve been running on 3-2-stable for a few months working on Basecamp Next and it’s been a real treat. The new faster dev mode in particular is a major step up over 3.1.

Do remember that this is the last intended release series that’s going to support Ruby 1.8.7. The master git branch for Rails is now targeting Rails 4.0, which will require Ruby 1.9.3 and above. So now is a great time to start the work on getting your app ready for the current version of Ruby. Let’s not hang around old versions forever and a Sunday like those Python guys :).

There’s a v3.2.0 tag on Github and we of course we still have the 3-2-stable branch as well. You can see all the glorious details of everything that was changed in our CHANGELOG compilation.

For documentation, we have the 3.2 release notes with upgrade instructions, both the API docs and the guides have been generated for 3.2 as well, and there’s a brand new 3.2-compatible version of Agile Web Development with Rails. A smörgåsbord indeed!

Note: If you’re having trouble installing the gems under Ruby 1.8.7, you’ve probably hit a RubyGems bug with YAML that’s been fixed in RubyGems 1.8.15. You can upgrade RubyGems using “gem update—system”.

If you can’t be bothered with the full release notes, here’s a reprint of a few feature highlights from when we did the first release candidate:

Faster dev mode & routing

The most noticeable new feature is that development mode got a ton and a half faster. Inspired by Active Reload, we now only reload classes from files you’ve actually changed. The difference is dramatic on a larger application.

Route recognition also got a bunch faster thanks to the new Journey engine and we made linking much faster as well (especially apparent when you’re having 100+ links on a single page).

Explain queries

We’ve added a quick and easy way to explain quieries generated by ARel. In the console, you can run something like puts Person.active.limit(5).explain and you’ll get the query ARel produces explained (so you can easily see whether its using the right indexes). There’s even a default threshold in development mode where if a query takes more than half a second to run, it’s automatically explained inline—how about that!

Tagged logger

When you’re running a multi-user, multi-account application, it’s a great help to be able to filter the log by who did what. Enter the TaggedLogging wrapper. It works like this:

Logger = ActiveSupport::TaggedLogging.new(Logger.new(STDOUT))
Logger.tagged("BCX") { Logger.info "Stuff" } # Logs "[BCX] Stuff" 
Logger.tagged("BCX") do
  Logger.tagged("Jason") do
    Logger.info "Stuff" # Logs "\[BCX\] \[Jason\] Stuff" 
  end
end

Active Record Store

Key/value stores are great, but it’s not always you want to go the whole honking way just for a little variable-key action. Enter the Active Record Store:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  store :settings, accessors: [ :color, :homepage ]
end

u = User.new(color: 'black', homepage: '37signals.com')
u.color                          # Accessor stored attribute
u.settings[:country] = 'Denmark' # Any attribute, even if not specified with an accessor

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I'm at Envy Labs!

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 09:32:00 -0500

http://4sq.com/eu8Ky9

I'm at London Gatwick Airport (LGW)!

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 07:32:00 -0500

http://4sq.com/27d3PN

How I Program Stuff

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 14:01:38 -0500

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Data Mining: Finding Similar Items and Users

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 15:18:48 -0500

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Getting Started with Sublime Text 2

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 10:46:50 -0500

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Finds by @samoli

Convert Ruby 1.8 to 1.9 hash syntax

After Years Of Drilling, Antarctic Lake Will Be Reached

Related Stories

Neil Young is right — piracy is the new radio

Plan 9: The way the future was

Study Finds Engineers Far More Likely than MBAs to Build and Run Companies

Zsh is your friend.

Why is Zsh better then Bash?

Time for more awesome

Codecademy Becomes A Platform: Now Anyone Can Write Programming Tutorials

Sorry, this blog post is not available in your country.

Legal streams are less available for rentals than a year ago

The Power of Introverts: A Manifesto for Quiet Brilliance

Your Users Won't Read

Once set, variables are always defined

I'm at The Clevelander - C-Level Rooftop Terrace!

I'm at Hog's Head!

Rails 3.2.0: Faster dev mode & routing, explain queries, tagged logger, store

I'm at Envy Labs!

I'm at London Gatwick Airport (LGW)!

How I Program Stuff

Data Mining: Finding Similar Items and Users

Getting Started with Sublime Text 2