MirthLab

Zach Holman: Scaling GitHub

2012-02-01T17:17:48-10:00

A month after launching, GitHub hosted one thousand repositories. Three years later, we host over three million. In the same time we’ve gone from one thousand users to over a million.

An interesting look at the technical and organizational practices that GitHub uses to keep their team lean, happy and productive.

Magnus: Ten One Design's New iPad Stand

2012-02-01T16:49:08-10:00

I love the minimalist design of Ten One Design’s new Magnus iPad stand:

Magnus is first machine-crafted from pure aluminum and then hand-finished using the latest manufacturing techniques. After that, customized magnets are installed into the base, and rubberized feet are fitted to the bottom surface.

Unfortunately it only supports landscape mode since it leverages the iPad’s own built-in magnets.

How To Work From Home Like You Mean It

2012-01-13T14:46:27-10:00

Kevin Purdy:

Dressing for work and “arriving” on time, eating lunch on a rigid schedule, shaving, brushing, and so on seems pointless at first. But not doing these basic preparations is the start of a steep, Teflon-coated slope to all kinds of other transgressions. If you’re not dressed well enough to greet the UPS delivery person, you’re giving yourself license to hide. If you’re hiding, then you imagine nobody can see Netflix open on your second monitor.

Telecommuting sometimes feels like it’s equal parts blessing and curse. On one hand you have total freedom. On the other hand, you have total freedom.

I had been working for myself for many years before taking an actual office job. (You know, the kind you have to get up and drive to.) The lack of freedom was a big shock at first but it taught me that often productivity and structure go hand-in-hand. After leaving that job and going back to working for myself I found that I craved a structured schedule. Yes, it helps me be productive during work hours, but another great — even if unanticipated — outcome is that it helps me define boundaries for time I shouldn’t be working.

Learn To Speak Vim

2011-12-30T14:42:47-10:00

I’m a relatively new convert to Vim having only made the switch from TextMate about six months ago. This post by Yan Pritzker would have likely saved me some trouble in those first frustrating weeks:

Using vim is like talking to your editor in ‘verb modifier object’ sentences, turned into acronyms

learn some verbs: v (visual), c (change), d (delete), y (yank/copy). these are the most important. there are others

learn some modifiers: i (inside), a (around), t (till..finds a character), f (find..like till except including the char), / (search..find a string/regex)

learn some text objects: w (word), s (sentence) p (paragraph) b (block/parentheses), t (tag, works for html/xml) there are others

It’s a great primer if you’re considering making the switch.

Also, be sure to check out Janus if you’re looking to smooth the transition to Vim from another editor (like TextMate). Janus is a Vim distribution that includes some sensible default plugins and key bindings so Vim won’t drive you crazy while you’re trying to get your bearings.

Moving to Jekyll

2011-12-29T16:45:24-10:00

After battling with WordPress for years I finally decided to try Jekyll. Like others who’ve made the switch, I grew tired of the poor performance, overly-complicated publishing system and constant need for management of WordPress. I found myself spending more time fiddling than writing.

When the JohnnyA WordPress Hack hit Media Temple a little over a year ago, I tried to do some damage control and repair my blog. I thought I had wiped out the hack, but over the next few months it — or something like it — would continually reappear. Eventually, I realized that I had stopped writing altogether because I was tired of dealing with it. This blog has languished since then.

With the new year approaching I figured I’d start afresh with a new blogging platform. After looking at a few alternatives, I decided on Jekyll. Jekyll bills itself as “a simple, blog aware, static site generator” and it eliminates some of my major pain points with WordPress right out of the box:

The generated site is just a bunch of static HTML files so it’s fast and secure.
Jekyll doesn’t need to be constantly updated with security patches since it’s not actually running code in production.
There’s no “content management” or “publishing system” to get in the way. Everything is stored as simple, editable text files.

Additionally, I had a few requirements of my own that I wanted to meet with the migration to Jekyll:

Use Vim (or any standard text editor) to write posts.
Use a Git-based workflow for managing posts and updating the blog.
Host it on Heroku (for free).
Use Compass and SASS for layout.
Be able to use syntax highlighting in posts (without javascript).
Be able to easily write from anywhere.

Each of these items is a direct result of some pain point I experienced with WordPress. My goal was not just to move off of WordPress, but to really create a better work flow that would reduce friction and in turn encourage me to write more.

I’m still polishing some rough edges, but so far I like my setup. I’m planning some follow up posts that go into more specifics, but for now I’m just enjoying being off of WordPress.

Installing iOS 5 Beta 1: Error Code 3002

2011-06-06T15:00:24-10:00

I was getting an Error 3002 when trying to update my iPhone 4 to use the new iOS 5 Beta. Although it doesn’t seem to say it anywhere, you need to use a Restore option to install it. (Instead of an update.)

Just be sure to do a backup first. You’ll be prompted to restore from an iTunes backup right on the device after the restore process is complete. Then you’ll be good to go with all of your existing data.

Happy Testing!

Seth Godin on True Leadership

2011-03-15T10:36:30-10:00

Leadership means embracing the failure of your people if it leads to growth.

There are so many great tidbits in this video that it’s hard to pick just one quote. A must-watch.

iPhone OS 4.0.1 Signal Strength Display Change Graphics

2010-07-15T11:12:22-10:00

Apple just released the iPhone 4.0.1 update that changes the way signal strength is displayed. The new graph looks pretty weird to me since it’s no longer linear. I made some quick graphics of the changes:

Old display (Pre 4.0.1)	iOS 4.0.1

To make the change easier to visualize, I did some combo graphics. The first is an overlay where the red represents the new bars and the second is an animation showing old and new states:

Overlay	Animation

Apparently the bars themselves now also represent a more accurate depiction of signal strength. AnandTech has a detailed write up of the changes. I’ve noticed that where I have normally gotten the full five bars at my office, I am now hovering around four, with the occasional 5.

CSS3 PIE: CSS3 decorations for IE

2010-07-13T12:03:10-10:00

CSS3 PIE: CSS3 decorations for IE:

PIE makes Internet Explorer 6-8 capable of rendering several of the most useful CSS3 decoration features. […] PIE stands for Progressive Internet Explorer. It is an IE attached behavior which, when applied to an element, allows IE to recognize and display a number of CSS3 properties.

Looks great. One of the most challenging aspects of web development has always been designing for the lowest common denominator of browser features. Tools like this help raise the bar for IE in a (mostly) hassle-free, consistent way.

PIE currently has full or partial support for the following CSS3 features:

border-radius

box-shadow

border-image

multiple background images

linear-gradient as background image

Using the Mac OS X Color Picker as a Stand-Alone App

2010-03-26T10:50:12-10:00

I’ve been looking for a good, simple, system-wide color picker. The built-in Mac OS X one is great, but it needs to be launched from within an existing application. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to use it as a standalone app? That’s exactly what Spot Color does:

Spot Color is a simple application that allows you to use the standard Mac OS X color picker as a stand-alone app. This allows you to quickly grab colors without having to be in an image editing app like Photoshop. Since it uses the built-in color picker, you can utilize the system wide color picker plugins and swatches.

It’s just a simple application wrapper that launches the system-wide color picker. The same exact thing can be done with Apple Script but it was way to sluggish to launch and I found I just wouldn’t use it. Besides, Spot Color has a cute icon. And it’s fast and light-weight. (I tried a similar app by Matt Patenaude called simply “Colors”. But it felt a little chintzy.)

The reason this is so useful is that the built-in color picker on Mac OS X is extensible and there are some really great plugins available. These are the ones I use:

Developer Color Picker: Provides color definitions in a variety of developer-friendly formats including NSColor, UIColor, CGColor, Hex and RGB. Written by Wade Cosgrove of Panic, inc.
Hex Color Picker: Displays the hex code for any color in a slightly different way than the above plugin. Very useful for web development. If you just need hex values, you can probably get away with just this plugin.
Mondrianum 2: Loads themes from the Adobe Kuler community.

The source code for Spot Color is on github too, which is always nice.

I also sometimes combine this with Digital Color Meter (found in the Applications/Utilities/ folder on your Mac) since its zoom view makes it a little easier to pick colors from the screen.

flashblockdetector: Javascript That Detects Flash Blocking Extensions

2010-03-15T17:02:42-10:00

Mark Pilgrim just released this nifty little flash block detector:

This is a pure-JavaScript library that detects whether Flash is blocked on the current page due to a Flash blocking extension. The current version can detect

FlashBlock #1 for Chromium / Google Chrome (Windows/Mac/Linux)

FlashBlock #2 for Chromium / Google Chrome (Windows/Mac/Linux)

FlashBlock for Firefox (Windows/Mac/Linux)

ClickToFlash 1.5.x (Mac/Safari only)

Pretty cool, but there’s a small catch:

If a Flash blocker is active, your callback function will be called almost immediately. If no Flash blocker is active, your callback function will be called after the 5 second timeout.

(Via Mark Pilgrim.)

HumbleFinance: Dynamic Charts with HTML5, Canvas, and Flotr for Prototype

2010-03-12T11:47:19-10:00

HumbleFinance:

HumbleFinance is an HTML5 data visualization tool written as a demonstration of interactive graphing in HTML5. It is similar to the Flash tool on http://finance.google.com/. The tool itself is written entirely in JavaScript, using the Prototype and Flotr libraries. It can be used to display any two 2-D data sets of real numerical data which share an axis.

Between this and gRaphaël I’d say there’s a lot of potential for open technologies to be a real, viable alternative to Flash based charts very soon.

jQuery Masonry

2010-03-11T13:06:49-10:00

jQuery Masonry:

Masonry is a layout plugin for jQuery. Think of it as the flip side of CSS floats. Whereas floating arranges elements horizontally then vertically, Masonry arranges elements vertically then horizontally according to a grid. The result minimizes vertical gaps between elements of varying height, just like a mason fitting stones in a wall.

Came across this for the first time today. Reminds me a lot of the old Grid-a-licious WordPress theme. Also, it’s hosted on GitHub so you can grab it there too.

html5media: JavaScript That Enables 'Video' Tag For All Major Browsers

2010-03-11T09:23:39-10:00

html5media:

HTML5 video tags make embedding videos into documents as easy as embedding an image. All it takes is a single <video> tag. Unfortunately, not all browsers natively support HTML5 video tags.

… and that’s where this clever little stop-gap script comes in. It replaces the video tag with a Flash Player if the video tag is not supported natively in the current browser.

Daily Deeds: The Other Side of "Getting Things Done"

2010-03-09T10:08:14-10:00

For me, apps like Omni Focus or Things — although great at managing tasks — don’t give you a complete picture of the things that need to get done. I’m talking about things that you’d like to do, maybe even every day, but that maybe don’t fit into a particular project or “Area of Responsibility”. Things that guide you to a bigger picture goal and remind you that checking off tasks is not the be-all end-all of your life or career.

As is often the case, Rands nails it in this article from 2008:

The curse of any effective task management system is that you get really good at capturing, prioritizing, and executing tasks. To the point that you start to believe that merely completing a task is helping your career. After a solid decade of rampant task management, I realized I needed to augment tasks with a system that would strategically guide and remind me that my job was not to do things, but to remember the interesting words in my title: manager, engineering, and products. That’s what I do.

What I needed was a guiding force behind these tasks, a way to remind me that I was pushing towards a goal and defining and refining a strategy.

He calls this a “Trickle List” and I highly recommend you read the entire article for a clearer picture of what exactly it is.

The problem, for me, with a Trickle List was just that I’d forget to mark stuff off since my list wouldn’t be with me all the time and having to build the list every day (on paper!) becomes a chore. Just yesterday an iPhone app was released that aims to fill this gap digitally. It’s called Daily Deeds and it has a super simple, clean and usable interface.

I still use Things as my task manager, but Daily Deeds seems to fit the bill as a Trickle List replacement very nicely. It’s a great (albeit simplistic) app that allows you to set daily “habits” that you can check off as you do them. Having it on your iPhone means that you have your list with you all the time and adding new habits can be done right away. (By the way, I love that they chose to call them habits since essentially that’s what I’m trying to form by using this app.)

At first I thought that I might want to see finer grained control over the time-frame for habits. Say, I only need to do something once a week, or once a month. After giving it some thought though, I’m inclined to think that those tasks should stay in my task manager as recurring tasks. Daily Deeds is better suited for just that: things you’d like to try to do each day.

One thing I would like added is the ability to see some stats about my habits. On average, how often have I watered the plants? There’s a nice calendar view that helps in this regard, but having some cold-hard stats would help define the things I really need to work on.

Filtering out Foursquare and Gowalla Tweets with Tweetie for Mac

2010-03-04T22:59:31-10:00

Gowalla and Foursquare tweets are annoying. If you’re using Tweetie for Mac, you can add a list of “filter terms” that remove matching tweets from your stream.

Nathan Smith posted a Gist with a terminal command that will filter out Foursquare and Gowalla Tweets:

defaults write com.atebits.tweetie-mac filterTerms -array "@gowalla" "http://gowal.la" "@foursquare" "http://4sq.com"

It’s basically doing a string match for tweets that contain the above terms and excluding them from your stream. Really though, you can add any string of text to be matched and it’ll get filtered out just as well. There’s more info (and a few more examples) at the official Atebits Posterous.

Using iPhone Apps to Curb Email Based Notifications

2010-02-21T00:03:53-10:00

I get a lot of email. Most of it — since its managed to get past my barrage of server side and client side spam filters — is actually relevant in some form or another. The problem is that relevancy depends on context. Do I want to know that I have a new follower on twitter equally as much as I want to read an urgent email from my boss or a family member? Probably not.

I do my best to sift through the noise, but the best way to get to the signal is just to cut out the noise as much as possible in the first place. Social media presents an interesting challenge. Sites like Twitter and Facebook are constantly vying for our attention and unfortunately, using email as a medium to do it.

One solution that has been working well for me is using iPhone apps as replacements for email notifications from these services. I find that a push notification to my device is much less invasive than an email and there are a number of cleverly crafted iPhone apps that make use of push notifications and simple “dashboard-style” overviews which make it easy to keep from resorting to email.

Here’s a quick list of services who’s notifications I’ve turned off and the corresponding iPhone apps I’m using instead:

Twitter

New Follower Emails: Email when someone starts following me
Direct Text Emails: Email when I receive a new direct message

I’ve replaced new follower emails with BirdBrain. It’s probably my favorite app of the bunch. Not only does it tell you who has recently started following you, but it gives you a ton of useful statistics and information for pruning your Twitter social graph. (Including my favorite, the “Nonreciprocal Following” list.) This app also makes it almost comically easy to see who the “I’ll follow you if you follow me” people are.

Direct text emails are a perfect candidate for Push notifications. I use Tweet Push which has the added benefit of sending me notifications for @replies. Boxcar is similar app.

It should be noted: You can set up twitter to send your phone SMS messages for direct message notifications but, like email, these come into an “inbox” that has to be viewed and marked as read, which is what I’m trying to avoid. Also, before I finally succumbed to an unlimited text messaging plan, I found that Twitter was eating into a significant amount of my SMS message quota.

Facebook

Messages
Wall Posts
Friend Requests
Friend Confirmations
Photo Tags
Events
Comments

I’m not a big fan of Facebook and hardly use it, but I still want to know if someone’s trying to get in touch with me through the service. Sadly, the Facebook iPhone app only covers a handful of the (numerous) notifications they send, but it in practice it does a nice job of cutting down on the email that’s sent.

Flickr

When people comment on your photostream
When your contacts upload new photos or video

This one’s a bit of a cheat. In conjunction with the (very decent, but ultimately insufficient) official flickr app I’ve subscribed to an RSS feed of all comments on my photostream as well as all uploads by my contacts. (The links are in the account page.) Since they’re just Google Reader subscriptions, they come up in my iPhone’s RSS reader: Byline.

Moving Forward

With just these email notifications turned off I’ve significantly reduced the noise in my email inbox. I’m constantly looking for new apps to add to my arsenal so if you know of any other iPhone apps that can be used in a similar fashion, let me know in the comments!

Using Capistrano to Deploy to a Media Temple Ruby on Rails GridContainer

2010-02-12T23:47:37-10:00

What I thought would be quick to set-up nearly took an entire evening. Using Media Temple’s Grid Service along with their Ruby on Rails GridContainer seemed straightforward, but they really don’t provide much help for what I’d assume most people are using to deploy: Capistrano.

After following the basic Rails container installation steps outlined on their knowledge base, I had to figure out how to use capistrano to deploy. Media Temple does provide a special set of capistrano tasks that work with their service called mt-capistrano, but as far as I can tell, there’s no official documentation other than the file itself. The following is a recap of a few of the hurdles I came across.

Deploying With Capistrano

Ok, my grid container is turned on, but how do I add deploy my app to it using capistrano? Contrary to what I’ve seen in other articles, you do not need to do activate an app in their control panel, but you do have to turn on your rails container. Once the container itself is turned on, you can do everything else from capistrano. This is where mt-capistrano comes it. Media Temple has provided special tasks so you can add a new app directly using capistrano without having to touch the Account Center control panel. Robert Prill’s site was an excellent resource for getting everything set up, but I had to add a couple of things to his deploy script:

# I commented out this line since it was causing my deploys to fail
# set(:rake) { "PATH=$PATH:# --snip-- #" }

# necessary for functioning on the (gs)... (my deploys were failing without this)
default_run_options[:pty] = true

# use svn export instead of checkout so we don't include .svn folders
set :deploy_via, :export

After you’ve set up your deploy.rb file, you can use the mt capistrano tasks to get everything set up. The directions are at the bottom of Robert Prill’s deploy file:

The first time you deploy, do it step by step:

cap deploy:setup
cap deploy:update (performs deploy:update_code, deploy:symlink)
cap deploy:migrate
cap mt:add
cap mt:start
cap mt:status
cap mt:generate_htaccess
cap mt:create_link

Going forward:

cap deploy
cap deploy:migrate # if there are database migrations to run

Troubleshooting A 500 Error

Once I had finally successfully deployed, I got a 500 error (the dreaded “We’re sorry, but something went wrong.” page) and my production.log file was empty. After trying script/console and everything loading fine, I tried script/dbconsole and I got this error message on startup:

Couldn't find database client: sqlite3. Check your $PATH and try again.

I finally realized that this was because my database.yml file was using the default sqlite connection, but sqlite was not installed. The rails app I was using was just a shell with nothing in it so I overlooked the fact that the database would be trying to establish a connection. It’s not noted anywhere here by Media Temple but sqlite3 is not installed with the default gems and for some reason manually installing the gem doesn’t work:

$ gem install sqlite3-ruby

ERROR:  Error installing sqlite3-ruby:
    sqlite3-ruby requires Ruby version > 1.8.5

So then I tried installing the previous version:

$ gem install sqlite3-ruby -v 1.2.3

Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
ERROR:  Error installing sqlite3-ruby:
    ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

    /usr/bin/ruby extconf.rb
    checking for fdatasync() in -lrt... no
    checking for sqlite3.h... no
    *** extconf.rb failed ***
    # --snip-- #

At this point I didn’t really feel like figuring out why sqlite was failing to build since I’d be moving to a mysql database eventually anyway, so I just changed my database.yml and added a mysql connection for production and then re-deployed. Everything worked fine.

Extend CSS With Variables, Mixins, Operations and Nested Rules Using LESS

2010-02-09T10:57:52-10:00

LESS:

LESS extends CSS with: variables, mixins, operations and nested rules.

Best of all, LESS uses existing CSS syntax. This means you can rename your current.css files to .less and they’ll just work.

LESS defines its own extension to CSS syntax which then gets compiled into standard CSS. It’s a really great idea. And there’s a great companion app for Mac OS X called less.app:

This app makes working with LESS a snap by turning it into a graphical interface.

Basically, this standalone app allows you to compile your .less files into CSS with a click of a button. The really nice thing about it though is that it can be set up to monitor changes to your LESS files and then recompile the associated CSS files automatically.

You can also use LESS directly from within Ruby on Rails using the More plugin (which compiles the .less files into .css files automatically).

Update: Konstantin Kudryashov pointed me to a version for Symfony as well. And while we’re at it, here’s a plugin for Django. It’s a little more generic but LESS is one of the compilers it supports.

Great Looking Cross-Browser Forms Using jQuery and Uniform

2010-02-08T14:15:07-10:00

Just came across a great looking new jQuery plugin called Uniform:

Have you ever wished you could style checkboxes, drop down menus, radio buttons, and file upload inputs? Ever wished you could control the look and feel of your form elements between all browsers?

If so, Uniform is your new best friend.

Uniform masks your standard form controls with custom themed controls. It works in sync with your real form elements to ensure accessibility and compatibility.

You can also submit patches via github (or even new themes!) if you’re so inclined.