If you happen to be looking at key-value stores and document databases for whatever little dev problem you have that might need to be looking at these, you’re probably like me and thinking you probably need to have a version of CouchDB on your trusty macbook to kick the tires on.
So, thank plok’s CouchDBX revival for sorting you out. Nice implementation, you can even run it independently of an already existing macports installation on your system.
This is great dev tip. The number of times I’ve accidentally cap deploy-ed something without checking I’d git committed everything is beyond counting, so this visual indicator on the command line is great - as well as telling you which branch you’re using:
(though I also use the excellent ProjectPlus Textmate plugin for scm status badges which I’d recommend if you’re using Textmate).
I had one of those weird little sinking feelings this morning as I looked at my friends’ facebook feeds. One of my friends, AG had been keeping his bookmarking on magnolia, which apparently suffered a major outage today and took some of his precious bookmarking with him. When I checked at time of posting the service was still down and they say they’ve got data corruption and loss. Not good.
Little uh-oh moment right then, realizing that I had no backups of my delicious bookmarks which, ever since Yahoo released the fantastic Firefox delicious add-on , I’ve been using in-the-cloud bookmarking exclusively. I was suddenly recalling someone’s Stallman-esque blog rant about how the cloud was all fine provided :
If you’ve been keeping up with the blog, it’s probably not hard to figure out that I really, really like git and capistrano. They’ve made my development and deployment better and much less painful. I’ve also been using github quite a bit lately (as well as pondering here on the ranch how we need to redesign our set of development and deployment tools in order to gain some consistency over our php, java and rails development as well as make them as painless and easy as possible).
Just pointed out to me that the latest Skype beta includes a iChat-like screensharing feature for users so that collaboration between OSX users is possible. Very cool. Haven’t had a chance to test it yet, and probably not as polished at iChat’s but still have to say this will be a killer feature when it works between OSX, Windows and Linux. It is definitely needed.
Apparently video and audio quality are also improved (great for my parents to worry about how I’m not taking care of myself).
There are a lot of things to really love about Rails apps. One of them is not deployment. Rails boffins, regardless of what they say, do look with longing envy over at those php kids with their simple copy of files up to a server and having it run on apache.
Admittedly, I’d rather deploy via capistrano anyway (cause even php boffins should be doing it that way) since it is fabulous and does deployment like it should be done, but there is something to be said for the wonderful mod_php under apache. Configuring proxying and mongrels under either apache or nginx is simply not fun. It feels like work.
One of the consequences of the macbook dying was that I had to cast around for another laptop fast to work off of. Luckily, we happened to have a Lenovo X300 laptop in we were testing with the (pretty amazing actually) 64GB solid state drive it has.
Not being a windows fan, I installed Ubuntu 8.04 on it. Here’s my impressions.
First off, the laptop is light and fast and really well thought out. As a response to the macbook air, it’s an excellent one and at least from my perspective there is no gap between the functionality of the two. In fact, I’d have to say that the IBM actually goes one further having the DVD built into such a small frame and a full range of ports.
I’m not sure if anyone but a close bunch of friends noticed, but I took the blog down while I was moving some things around in the background here. Nothing big, but moved a few subdomains over to the excellent slicehost and off my old hoster TextDrive (now Joyent).
They’re still excellent, but they’re not about to upgrade their old BSD boxes and it was getting to be a bit difficult with working with new stuff like git and rails 2.0.
It’s well known amongst my friends that I loath cleaning (though I love a clean house.). I’m not sure why. I have friends who find it therapeutic. It may be that it’s because cleaning, and especially dishwashing and vacuuming, were used as punishment for transgressions when I was a child – in fact, I used to “design” small saucer robots with treads (obviously powered by imagination alone) which would take care of the vacuuming for me.
I’ve been using the Firefox beta for a week now and I have to admit, it’s a wholesale improvement over the 2.x branch. More stable, uses lower memory and the OS integration is much nicer, particularly on OSX with the default Proto theme. Works just as nice as Aranox’s GrApple that I’ve been using.
Haven’t really taken advantage of most of the newer features they’ve developed though do like the way they’ve added tagging to the bookmarking though I imagine it will be a little while before the Delicious bookmarking Add-On moves in line with it.