About the Application The idea behind On the Spot was to allow everyone in the office at work to control the playlist, so that there was some semblence of fairness about what we listen to. Probably the simplest way of showing you what it is is to see some pictures, right? Part 1: You can search for music Open Full-Size...
I get stung by this one all the time, and I can never remember how I fix it. I’m noting it down here, in the hope that next time I’m googling for a fix I’ll stumble across my own blog post. Adding network adapters (or refreshing the MAC address) of a virtual machine running a Debian-based OS on VirtualBox causes...
Introduction I’ve spent the last week translating Latter (really badly) into Māori using Rails’ I18n support. Since this is the first time I’ve done a full site translation, I wanted to detail how I did this here. First, I’ll quickly explain how Rails I18n support works. Essentially, it’s a key-value store - you specify a ‘key’ which represents a bit...
I’m a big fan of not installing XCode on new Macs. I just don’t think it’s necessary, unless you’re genuinely building OS X or iOS applications. Instead, I prefer to download the [Apple Command Line Tools] straight from Apple’s Developer Center, and install everything else I need to with Homebrew. Here’s how to do that. First of all, download and...
For quite some time now, I’ve been using alloy’s fork of Macvim as my primary editor, along with janus, and it’s been working out really well. I’ve just started trying out Sublime Text 2 though, and it’s been pretty nice (although I still have reservations). Something I can’t stand in a developer application though, is for an application to re-open...
Documentation in Ruby on Rails apps tends to be somewhat of a hit-and-miss affair, particularly within non-product organizations. In this blog post, I’ll run through how Tomdoc has helped my code become clearer and easier to maintain, with very little overhead. First, a small explanation about Tomdoc. It is effectively a spec that dictates a way of writing inline documentation...
This morning I wrote a quick script that I found quite handy - it takes a CSV file, and adds cards to Trello from it’s contents. At 3months, we quite regularly get long spreadsheets with requirements, so this script saves us a lot of time when we need to import these lists into cards so we can estimate and expand...
For the last week after deploying my new blog to joshmcarthur.com instead of a ‘blog’ subdomain, and implementing a new design and back-to-basics blogging engine, I’ve noticed that my markdown wasn’t being parsed properly (/at all). Originally this was hard to spot - my posts had been migrated from Blogger, to Tumblr, out of Tumblr, transformed from HTML to Markdown,...
When Twitter Bootstrap first shipped, it came with a couple of handy integrations with external jQuery plugins. Once of the more popular of these integrations was styles that were compatible with the classes, elements and attributes added by jQuery Tablesorter. Recently, however, these integrations have been removed from Bootstrap, as it was felt that they were distracting from the core...
Last night I quickly patched together a command called git-browse - it’s a small but handy extension to git that looks at the remotes you have set up inside a repository, and opens up the first Github repository it finds - to give an example: -> git remote -v origin [email protected]:joshmcarthur/WriteIdeally.git (fetch) origin [email protected]:joshmcarthur/WriteIdeally.git (push) heroku [email protected]:writeideally.git (fetch) heroku [email protected]:writeideally.git...