Aug 21, 2009

_why?

It really doesn't matter what his name is, what I know is I read his book, use his projects and admired him.

Be good - Why The Lucky Stiff.

Aug 17, 2009

Vim and CTaglist plugin

My ctaglist plugin stopped working after I migrated to my new MacBook Pro 13". After playing with it for a few minutes, I realized that my default ctags cmd is not correct. To have your ctaglist working, you have to use Exuberant Ctags. I am hoping this could save you some time for looking for the answer.

$> wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/ctags/ctags-5.8.tar.gz
$> tar zxvf ctags-5.8.tar.gz
$> cd ctags-5.8
$> ./configure && make && sudo make install

You probably have to copy it over the old one if you not set the $PATH on you Mac( there is a ctags under /usr/bin)

$> sudo cp ctags /usr/bin/.

That's it, start you Vim, you are ready to go.

Aug 10, 2009

Render without calling the controller's action in Merb

I was working on a Merb project in the company, I found a common request is generate the report to view in the browser and also send the report as an attachment of an email in a cron job. Usually I have to do two parts of job, one is for the regular MVC parts to get the report in a browser. Then I have to generate the report and write it a file(html, text or pdf). Then send it out later. As you might see, there is a duplication here, I have to design the report twice. This really bothered me, why can't I just re-use the view templates which is used in the MVC. After poking around the merb-core source files, it turns out pretty easy to do that:



This is another reason I love Merb.

Aug 4, 2009

Enable/Disable bluetooth via cmd line

Since I got my new MacBook Pro 13", I found I constantly lost the connection with my bluetooth devices, like mouse or keyboard. It is so annoying that I have to reach my touch pad to disconnect the devices and re-connect them from the status bar or system preference. You'll know what I am talking about if you have the same problem as what I have. It is pretty pain.

Today, I found a command line tools for you to enable or disable the bluetooth, it is so handy. I just love it. Here is the link for blueutil.

Now, I can just issue the command: blueutil off and blueutil on, I am back on track again.