Oh Noes!

If you're sharp-eyed (and your DNS server has picked up the new address for A Fresh Cup, which it must have, otherwise you wouldn't be reading this) you may have noticed some changes around here. The root cause is simple: I've decided to abandon the Rails-based Mephisto and move to a locally-hosted copy of WordPress instead. There were just too many little things about Mephisto nagging at me and I just wasn't finding time to fix them.

I considered putting time in to customize Mephisto, or to move forward to edge Mephisto, or to switch to one of the other Rails systems like Type or SimpleLog. But ultimately, I came to the conclusion that tweaking blog software isn't really something I want to spend time on. There are good, mature, open-source systems available, so I might as well run one of them and get on with the rest of my life and business.

The change is not, alas, completely painless. WordPress does not understand how to import from Mephisto, so I hacked together a bridge for the past content via RSS. But I didn't move tags or comments (and I doubt I will ever find the time to do so). And the URLs for individual articles have changed (bad blogger, no biscuit). But moving forward, I hope, things should be stable.

Double Shot #109

There are days I actually feel like I understand what I'm doing with this Rails stuff. Yesterday was one of them.

• RubyGems 1.0.1 - The gem system for installing Ruby software actually hit release 1.0.0 and then in quick succession 1.0.1. Nothing too earthshaking but nice to see an official non-zero version.


• Better Nested Set - Successor to acts_as_tree and acts_as_nested_set. I used it in a project yesterday and it's doing fine, though I couldn't get the select helper for a view to do what I wanted and had to roll my own.


• Installing RMagick Gem On OS X 10.5 - I did a ports/gem based install of RMagick this time around and it was easier than building from source. I did have to sudo port install ghostscript in addition to the steps listed here to get it to work.

Double Shot #108

I spent a good chunk of yesterday wishing that someone had already written an RSpec book. I've got the general idea, and the PeepCode screencasts are great, but I find I really benefit from paper I can flip through when learning a new tech. Maybe there's a nice RDoc-to-pdf bridge out there somewhere.

• GrowlMail in Leopard - I'm surprised at how useful I find Growl notifications. I've been living - unhappily - without Growl notifications from Mail since upgrading to Leopard. Here's news of a new beta of GrowlMail that fixes the problem. I installed it, and it's working fine for me.

Double Shot #107

Yesterday was one of those days for tracing through code for two hours and then writing five characters to fix a bug. They were the right five characters, though.

• Stacks Overlays - I got sick of the stupid default appearance of OS X stacks and installed this fix.


• Firefox 3 Beta 2 - I've been using Firefox 3 as my default browser since beta 1 came out. It's been quite stable for me.


• GemInstaller - Automated management tool for Ruby gems, designed to avoid the "but it works on my machine" syndrome when moving to production (among other issues).


• Amazon DevPay - Limited Beta - Yet another new service from the Amazon Web Services team: billing and account management.

Double Shot #106

I spent much of yesterday doing an archive & install on OS X 10.5 on my main dev box, then reinstalling all the gems I use. Took a while to get everything set up, but it was worth it to not have two installs of ruby and two battling sets of gems. I think.

• Rails 2.0.2: Some new defaults and a few fixes - Here's the official announcement of yesterday's minor Rails release.


• Rails 2.0.2 released, so what’s new? - Another take on the new features.


• Sqliteman - With Sqlite3 being suddenly the default Rails database (as of Rails 2.0.2), I spent some time looking around for Sqllite GUIs that work under OS X. (Yeah, I'm a wimp that way). This one has the advantage of being free, though it's not real well-organized and has that Qt look to it.


• RazorSQL - Commercial database query tool that claims Sqlite compatibility via JDBC. Haven't tried it.


• SQLite Manager 0.2.11 - Sqlite database tool implemented as a Firefox add-on. Actually not bad.


• What’s Coming in Instant Rails 2.0 and Beyond - The Road Map - Plans from the new project maintainer.


• Installing ruby mysql gem in OSX 10.5 - I decided I could do without building everything from source this time around. MySQL was the trickiest to get cooking from a download & gem install.


• Ruport 1.4 Preview Release - If you're using Ruport for reporting you probably want to have a look at this.


• RSpec Textmate Bundle errors - I had a good deal of trouble getting RSpec to work correctly within TextMate. This thread describes the symptom, but the fixes there did not work for me. Ultimately I had to checkout the RSpec trunk svn, build that, and symlink the resulting TextMate bundle in to make sure everything was synched.


• Setting up autotest to use Growl - A nice little extra if you're doing continuous testing.


• Bazaar - Distributed version control system with an easy migration path from subversion.