Copying and pasting between the clipboard and vim has always been a nightmare for me. You find a big chunk of code you want to copy over to your project, tab over to vim, get into insert mode, and hit Command + v. What do you get? A big wall of text that has every line tabbed over. Definitely not the format you were trying to copy over.

1
2
3
4
5

window.setTimeout((function() {
    $(".alert").slideUp(500, function() {
        $(this).remove();
            });
                }), 4000);

I’ve recently been working on a few RESTful API’s using Rails. One of the problems that I keep seeing with end users is that they usually don’t read the documentation very well and make simple mistakes when making specific requests and queries. This is easily solved with error handling and validation of the API. There are a few gems out there that will handle this sort of situation for you, but there’s already so much in Rails to help you get this done out of the box.

I’ve recently decided to pick up learning the Go programming language. Why Go? I don’t remember why. But I think I was interested in beefing up backend services for some of the webapps I deploy. Plus, the Gopher is kinda cool. Also, the language itself is very easy to read in a Ruby type way.

The one pain in the ass thing about Go is that, as of now, the resources for learning it are few and far between. So I figured, “Hey, why don’t I just write about the things I’m learning?” So, hey, I’m doing that.

I’ve been trying to get into the swing of things with pair programming lately. #pairwithme has been blowing up on Twitter, so buddying up with a fellow dev to learn(or teach) a thing or two is pretty easy.

I’ve seen a lot of different posts on how to get going with pair programming. Many of them suggest having another person ssh in to your computer and have at it. I like to keep remote work separate though AND I just happen to have a VPS for just such a thing. So let’s set up remote pair programming!

I gave a lightning talk this week for my Intro to Rails class at UW and thought I’d share it.

This took me WAY too long to figure out, but it seems like a LOT of people have trouble installing ruby-2.0.0 on OSX.

Just built out a VERY quick and dirty Smiley plugin for Pidgin. It adds all of the Github emojis to your chats.

You can find it at: https://github.com/benwoody/github-pidgin-emoji

A list of emoticons can be found at http://www.emoji-cheat-sheet.com/

Fun Stuffs

Below be the code snippet to generate the Pidgin theme file

1

Dir.entries(Dir.pwd).each { |d| File.open('github-emoji/theme', 'a') { |f| f.puts "#{d} :#{d.chomp('.png')}:" } }

I was playing around in the Pry source code and found a mountain of fun stuffs!

This uses growl notifications to alert you to your autotest status

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15

module Autotest::Growl
  def self.growl title, msg, img, pri=0, stick=""
    system "growlnotify -n autotest --image #{img} -p #{pri} -m #{msg.inspect} #{title} #{stick}"
  end

  Autotest.add_hook :ran_command do |at|
    results = [at.results].flatten.join("\n")
    output = results.slice(/(\d+)\s+examples?,\s*(\d+)\s+failures?(,\s*(\d+)\s+pending)?/)
    if output =~ /[1-9]\sfailures?/
      growl "Test Results", "#{output}", '~/Dropbox/Photos/autotest/rails_fail.png', 2 #, "-s"
    else
      growl "Test Results", "#{output}", '~/Dropbox/Photos/autotest/rails_ok.png'
    end
  end
end

I wanted to migrate some of my previous code snippets from my tumblr blog http://tumblr.com/benwoodall to here, and I also wanted to test out some of the available plugins. So here post number 1!