AirBlade Software

Overnight Success

2010-09-03T00:00:00+00:00

Timing, perseverance, and ten years of trying will eventually make you look like an overnight success.

Quicksilver Out, Alfred In

2010-08-31T13:00:00+00:00

Until recently I regarded Quicksilver as vital. However its creator has stopped working on it and, although the code is now open source, I’ve found it getting buggier and slower. It stops working every time I upgrade it.

Instead I now use Alfred. It’s super fast, stable, and easy on the eye. The team seems to have good momentum and they frequently release improvements. I’ve been using Alfred for a few weeks now and wouldn’t go back.

One feature Quicksilver has, but Alfred doesn’t (yet), is the ability to assign actions to keys. I bind the function keys to various apps and scripts — they’re ingrained in my muscle memory — and until Alfred supports this I need another way. Here’s my solution.

Comments

Did you check out Launchbar at all? It's awesome — I can't live without it!

Olly Headey • 3 September 2010

No I didn’t…that also looks v good. I'm sticking with Alfred though ;)

Andy Stewart • 3 September 2010

Binding OS X Services to Function Keys

2010-08-31T11:00:00+00:00

Snow Leopard revamped the System Services and made them much more useful. I wanted to bind a few simple Automator workflows and Ruby scripts to the function keys so I could run them with a single keypress.

Unfortunately it seems there’s a bug in Snow Leopard which means you can’t assign services to function keys in the Keyboard Shortcuts panel.

Happily Daniel Jalkut’s FastScripts solves the problem.

By default FastScripts picks up your scripts in ~/Library/Scripts. To get it to see your services, you need to alias them from ~/Library/Services to ~/Library/Scripts. A unix symlink won’t work; it has to be a Finder alias (hold down cmd and option while dragging an item in the Finder).

Once FastScripts can see your services, you can bind them to the function keys in FastScripts Preferences > Script Shortcuts.

Blog Upgraded. Finally

2010-08-13T00:00:00+00:00

Today I replaced my oldest production Rails app: this blog. For the past four years I’ve been running Mongrel 0.7.3 on Rails 1.2.3 and, while it was just what I needed in 2006, I’m delighted to spin up Nesta instead. I also replaced a more recent Rails app which ran the non-blog parts of the site.

Now I have half a megabyte of text files instead of a 142MB MySQL database; one app instead of two; the low memory usage of Sinatra under Passenger rather than 70-150 MB of Mongrel; and the colour blue (more below).

I had two questions when deciding what to use: static or dynamic? And comments or no comments?

Static versus dynamic

A blog is not complicated: you have articles, perhaps comments, a few fixed pages, and maybe some tags. Indeed DHH marketed Rails heavily with a create a blog in 15 minutes video. It’s easy to write your own blog.

Yet blogs are not interactive, apart from comments, so it’s more efficient to generate their static HTML on deployment and leave it at that. No code is faster than no code. Furthermore you can edit your articles in your favourite text editor, use proper version control, and so on.

But as Geoffrey Grosenbach said, I find it more natural to write it in a dynamic style.

Comment or no comment?

There are good reasons for and against comments. I always like being able to comment on others' blogs and I appreciate all the comments people have left on mine, especially the last one:

You, sir, are a scholar and a gentleman.

William Jones (bottom of the page)

However I’ve come round to Tim Lucas’s view (§ Comments and Discussion). From now on you can email me or catch me on Twitter.

Nesta

So I went with Nesta. I’d already customised Nesta elsewhere and I wanted to customise it differently this time. Rather than fork Nesta twice I’m maintaining long-running branches in Git. It works well.

I found the distinction between pages, articles, and categories slightly confusing. Basically an article is a page with a date, and a category page is a page for other pages and articles in the category. I didn’t like having to create a page for every category so I rewrote it. Part of Nesta’s appeal is the ease with which you can hack it to do what you want.

The only questionable part of Nesta is its inbuilt page-caching code. I’d prefer to use HTTP caching but, really, that can wait for another day.

Design

I am inordinately pleased to introduce a highlight colour to the existing palette of greys, black and white: blue! Or maybe it’s lavender. Indigo? Anyway, the particular shade comes from Derek Powazek’s site. I toyed with the blue from Tim Lucas but it was just wrong for here.

This is exciting because I found Mephisto’s theme management system so offputting that I couldn’t ever bring myself to change the CSS. Or indeed the markup. Now I’m writing HAML, SASS, and Markdown as God intended.

HTML5

Since I’m back in control of my site, I decided to try out HTML5. Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into HTML5 is lucid and informative, and I’m enjoying HTML5 a lot. So this site is coming to you in HTML5. I haven’t yet switched to the new semantic elements but that’s next.

Feedback

The hardest part of all this was setting up the rewrite rules in Apache to redirect my old URLs to the new ones. I don’t do this often enough to remember the pitfalls and I always fail to work it out on my own. If you do stoop to reading the instructions, this article sorted me out.

Anyway, let me know if I broke anything.

Backing up MySQL to Amazon S3

2010-05-20T00:00:00+00:00

I recently got round to backing up my applications' databases to S3. Previously I had a script archiving them each night onto the same server. This helped if a client deleted something by mistake and wanted to retrieve it, but didn’t guard against server failure.

Fortunately in the four years I’ve been with Rails Machine I’ve never had a server failure.

Having pushed my luck I’m now finally backing up the databases to S3. Better yet, I’m incrementally backing up every 15 minutes. It’s not as good as full-blown replication but it’s much easier to set up and good enough for now.

The steps are pretty straightforward. This note is really an aide-mémoire for the next server I do this on.

Enable MySQL’s binary logging

Edit /etc/my.cnf and add the line:

log_bin=/var/lib/mysql/binlog/mysql-bin

Create `binlog` directory owned by `mysql`

$ cd /var/lib/mysql
$ sudo mkdir binlog
$ sudo chown mysql:mysql binlog

Restart `mysqld`

$ sudo /sbin/service mysqld restart

Install `myql_s3_backup` gem

Marc-André Cournoyer wrote this gem and it does the job admirably. I encountered a strange problem though, which I fixed in my fork.

$ sudo gem install airblade-mysql_s3_backup

Configure the backups (one file per database)

Adapt the gem’s sample config and stick it somewhere like ~/configure.

Set up cron for nightly full backups

$ crontab -l
PATH=/opt/ree/bin:$PATH
0 0 * * * fyi "mysql_s3_backup -c=/home/deploy/config/mephisto.yml full"

Note this uses my fyi gem to find out what cron is doing.

Set up cron for incremental backups

We have to do this as root because of the file permissions on MySQL’s binary logs.

$ sudo su -
# crontab -l
PATH=/opt/ree/bin:$PATH
5,35 * * * * fyi "mysql_s3_backup -c=/home/deploy/config/mephisto.yml inc"

Note To Self: How To Build Gems

2010-05-18T00:00:00+00:00

This topic has come up quite a bit recently. I’d never really thought about it much before — I just used Jeweler because that’s what GitHub recommended. However I had been noticing that Jeweler made what should have been a simple task complicated. And it decimated the signal to noise ratio of my commits: my “real” commits were swamped by ones Jeweler made to update the version number and so on.

So after looking into the matter briefly, here’s what I now think.

The gemspec DSL is nice and clean. Don’t hide it behind something like Jeweler.

We need to: * build versioned gems * build versioned archives (.tar.gz) * tag the versions in Git / on GitHub * push the versioned gems to rubygems.org * (optional) install versioned gems locally

We can do all this by hand; it’s pretty simple.

We can also save typing with Rake.

Either DIY: * Fyi’s rakefile (but not DRY and no archives yet) * Shotgun’s rakefile * Mustache’s rakefile

Or using a simple tool like minimal gem (mg): * Gist’s rakefile

Smash Into Vim (Part I)

2010-05-11T00:00:00+00:00

My Smash Into Vim PeepCode screencast has just been released.

It’s the first of a double bill and after watching it you’ll be able to use Vim with confidence. Even if you’re a true blue Textmate fan, sometimes you need to edit config files on your server…and that’s when you’ll be glad you watched this screencast!

Part Two will go into advanced topics. After watching that you’ll be able to make an informed decision about whether to switch to Vim as your primary editor —– and be all set to do so.

Vim looks daunting but we’ve thought long and hard about it and distilled its essence. These 50 minutes are your fastest, best way to get up to speed and Smash Into Vim.

Peeping at PeepCode

This is the second time I’ve collaborated with Geoffrey Grosenbach at PeepCode — the first was my Rails 2 Plugin Patterns PDF. Both times were a real pleasure. If you get a chance to be a PeepCode author, go for it! It’s fun and worthwhile.

I also think Dan Benjamin did a wonderful job with the narration. Next time, though, we’ll get a British accent on there…

Publishing dotfiles with private information

2010-03-31T00:00:00+00:00

Like many people I put my dotfiles on GitHub. A perennial problem is what to do with files which contain private information. For example, .gemrc includes my Gemcutter credentials and .gitconfig my GitHub credentials.

Unlike bash scripts, you can’t source one configuration file from another. So either you don’t publish these files at all — or you split them up, publish the public parts, then stitch them back together when you install them.

This is what I do now.

Example: gemrc

In my local dotfiles/ directory I have a gemrc_public and a gemrc_private. Git ignores the latter. When I rake install, the code creates gemrc, appends gemrc_public and gemrc_private in turn, then symlinks it as ~/.gemrc in the usual way.

To keep things neat, Git also ignores the generated gemrc.

Finally

This is basic stuff, but it’s always good to resolve the small niggles. It keeps coming up (e.g. Ryan Bates, Ryan Tomayko, and Stack Overflow) so hopefully this will provide a few people with another option.

PaperTrail Improvements

2010-03-31T00:00:00+00:00

PaperTrail is a gem which lets you easily track changes to your ActiveRecord models' data. Recently I pulled in some good work from Jeremy Weiskotten and Phan Le, while making some improvements of my own.

Here are the highlights of what changed between 1.4.0 and 1.5.0.

Easily store controller-level metadata

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  def info_for_paper_trail
    # Default is: {}
    { :ip => request.remote_ip, :user_agent => request.user_agent }
  end
end

Easily change how the controller figures out who was responsible

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  def user_for_paper_trail
    # Default is: current_user rescue nil
    logged_in? ? current_user.name : 'Public user'
  end
end

Time-based recovery of models

>> widget = widget.version_at 1.day.ago  # the widget as it was one day ago
>> widget.save                           # reverted

Global enable/disable (useful in your tests)

# config/environments/test.rb
config.after_initialize do
  PaperTrail.enabled = false
end

Invisible changes

Thread-safety
Cleaner module structure.
Cleaner tests.

Finally

Lots of people use PaperTrail in production and seem pretty happy with it. You can store any model-level or controller-level information alongside your models' versions, so it’s nice and easy to adapt to your specific needs. And of course it continues to work out of the box with zero configuration — that’s the way I like it.

See the README for more details.

Thinning Text in Firefox

2010-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

If your web design uses light text on a dark background, you’ll notice the text looks heavy and blurry. Instead of sporting a crisp look, your site appears a bit beginner.

Steve Smith at Ordered List solved this problem for Safari. However his solution doesn’t work in Firefox — so I came up with this CSS:

@-moz-document url-prefix() {
  body {
    font-weight: 200;
    letter-spacing: 0.3px;
  }
}

The first line targets Firefox, just like an IE conditional comment. The font-weight halves the normal weight of the text, and the letter-spacing gives the font a little breathing space. (Note the body is nested within the @-moz-document selector.)

Mark Boulton describes what’s going on:

When reversing colour out, e.g. white text on black, make sure you increase the leading and tracking, and decrease your font-weight. This applies to all widths of Measure. White text on a black background has a higher contrast to the opposite, so the letter forms need to be wider apart, lighter in weight, and have more space between the lines.

Here are before and after screenshots of Firefox so you can see for yourself:

It’s not quite as crisp as Safari but it’s close, and certainly much better than it was.

N.B. I’ve only done this on my main site, not here on this blog. You can see the difference.

Comments

Looks SO much cleaner :-)

Olly • 4 March 2010

This doesn't seem to work for me...does this target a specific version of firefox? Or have to be somewhere in the linked CSS? I'm using FF 3.6.

Matthew • 12 March 2010

Matthew, this works for me on FF 3.6 -- you can see my CSS here. I include it into my HTML with a standard stylesheet link.

Without more information I'm not sure what to suggest.

Andy Stewart • 12 March 2010

AirBlade Software

Overnight Success

Quicksilver Out, Alfred In

Comments

Binding OS X Services to Function Keys

Blog Upgraded. Finally

Static versus dynamic

Comment or no comment?

Nesta

Design

HTML5

Feedback

Backing up MySQL to Amazon S3

Enable MySQL’s binary logging

Create binlog directory owned by mysql

Restart mysqld

Install myql_s3_backup gem

Configure the backups (one file per database)

Set up cron for nightly full backups

Set up cron for incremental backups

Note To Self: How To Build Gems

Smash Into Vim (Part I)

Peeping at PeepCode

Publishing dotfiles with private information

Example: gemrc

Finally

PaperTrail Improvements

Easily store controller-level metadata

Easily change how the controller figures out who was responsible

Time-based recovery of models

Global enable/disable (useful in your tests)

Invisible changes

Finally

Thinning Text in Firefox

Comments

Create `binlog` directory owned by `mysql`

Restart `mysqld`

Install `myql_s3_backup` gem