Robby on Rails

Okay, as I haven’t quite figured out how to change the background colors of the osx terminal and I was attempting to use the syntax highlighting file that I posted earlier (some of the text in .rb files was not showing as the colors matched the background).

So, what I did was edit the ruby syntax file and add a few changes (color and new configurations). I decided to use the emacs rb highlighting as a base for what I wanted the joe highlighting to look like.

In the end, here is a side-by-side comparison of emacs and joe on my development server.

(click to view larger version)

If anybody wants my ruby syntax file, email me and I will send it over. I will probably continue to make some changes to it until I get the ideal color schema and will post a link to the file later on.

Now that I am spending more time outside of the office and away from my local development network, I find myself struggling with working remotely and continuing to be efficient. I have been trying to work with TextMate, but it’s really not doing it for me as an efficient editor. I prefer KDevelop to it by a long shot (integrated CVS, Subversion, debugging, documentation, etc). However, for small tasks I still end up doing a lot of work in joe. Yes, joe, that silly wordstar-like editor. It has syntax highlighting (as of last year) and I think that my liking of it started when a previous employer showed it to me and got me out of my vim-hell. I can work my way around vim… but when it comes down to it, I just don’t care for modes. Emacs is a nice editor, but I just haven’t taken the time to learn all the commands and when I am working remotely, I don’t have the time to look up the shortcuts. (in due time). Joe doesn’t have cvs or svn integration but I have it on all my servers… but it hasn’t had ruby syntax highlighting!

Well, I just stumbled across this. I will be adding this to all my servers now. :-)

In other news, I am hoping to announce some good news in the coming days… but need to wait for the official approval to make an announcement.

Eventually, I need to learn to use emacs more as it does have cvs integration.

I’m playing around with my powerbook at a coffee shop with my girlfriend who is doing homework on her Linux laptop. I am trying to give OSX an honest attempt but I am finding it to be a bit a bit unix-but-not-so-unix like. Another weird thing is programs. There are some beautiful programs, but they all seem to be using the native OSX theme, so it’s nothing exceptionally special. A blog posting program is what I need right now (trying Ecto) but it’s a free trial. This is something that I haven’t had to deal with much in the Linux world. BloGTK does pretty much the same thing..and is open source.

Perhaps I don’t know where to look.

I also tried out TextMate earlier today, was able to connect to my development server through samba and it worked alright. In the end, it’s just another editor and I didn’t see it as such a remarkable improvement from using the programs that I develop with in Linux. A few things that I didn’t check where to see if it had native subversion and cvs support. I’ve gotten used to right clicking and committing files to my repositories from programs like KDevelop and this is also available in emacs (and many other free programs).

So, I don’t forsee myself leaving my comfortable Linux world anytime soon in favor of paying for programs that might look prettier..but I don’t feel any more efficient in them. However, I haven’t spent a lot of time with this yet and will continue to give it a try…but at the moment, it will be my coffee shop and testing box.

next day

So, I am back at the coffee shop again. I wasn’t able to post the above entry with Ecto for some reason. MarsEdit worked however. It kept complaining about not being able to parse the response from the web service. (perhaps a typo bug?)

I have found fugu for sftp/scp transfers and I am playing with TextMate. I don’t see yet what all the excitement is about yet. I will keep playing around with it though on my current project and use fugu to test on my development server as I haven’t had a chance to get rails running on osx yet.

As many of you may or may not know, I helped start up PDXLUG over two years ago and it’s always been a very informal group. We have a mailing list, monthly meetings, a media sharing library (people lend books to each other at meetings and reserve books), have had a booth at OSCON (where we handed out tons of customized PDXLUG Knoppix discs), and it’s always been a fairly small group (in terms of people that show up to meetings). I don’t make it to most of the meetings as things like band rehersal come first.

Last night, we had our first ever speaker. However, the agreement was that he would just show up and sit around the coffee tables at our coffee shop meeting place and answer questions. Greg Kroah-Hartman co-wrote O’Reilly’s Linux Device Drivers, 3rd Ed..

Greg Kroah-Hartman has been writing Linux kernel drivers since 1999, and is currently the maintainer for the USB, PCI, I2C, driver core, and sysfs kernel subsystems. He is also the maintainer of the udev and hotplug userspace programs, as well as being a Gentoo kernel maintainer, ensuring that his email inbox is never empty. He is a contributing editor to Linux Journal Magazine, and works for IBM’s Linux Technology Center, doing various Linux kernel related tasks.

He was very friendly and fielded many different types of questions and gave honest feedback on peoples questions. It’s cool to know that so many great contributors to the Open Source community..live in Portland.

As Typo only supported SQLite and MySQL so far, I submitted a PostgreSQL schema file for the project. This new blog is running on PostgreSQL 8.0 and Rails!

I am going to use this blog to follow my Rails-related projects..and post tips and tricks!

Cheers