Development

22 Nov 2011

In my quest to move away from WordPress (and PHP/MySQL, which reminds me far too much of 1999 for my comfort), I'm evaluating several static site blog solutions to migrate this blog to and to use for a couple of other blogs that I want to set up for next year. As part of the process, I wanted to give Octopress a shot. Octopress is a static site blogging solution built on mojombo/jekyll – the solution that powers GitHub Pages. The beauty of it is that you can simply deploy your blog to GitHub Pages, and even use a custom domain, simply by pushing to your repository (GitHub will pass your repository through Jekyll automatically–simples!)

The problem is that there are apparently issues with installing the dependencies on a box running Lion with Xcode 4.2. The following solution worked for me. I hacked it together from that StackOverflow thread as well as the Octopress Setup Guide:

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Installing Octopress (and Ruby via RVM) on a Lion box that has Xcode 4.2

Installing the latest Ruby via RVM on a Mac running OS X Lion and which has Xcode 4.2.x installed isn't as straightforward as it should be. This simple guide should help.

13 Nov 2011

I was working through a tutorial on Bogart and CouchDB and decided to implement the examples in CoffeeScript instead of JavaScript as I've been meaning to play with CoffeeScript for a while now.

One of the files in the tutorial is the package.json file for managing dependencies in the (absolutely lovely) package manager npm. When I wrote the data structure out in CoffeeScript, however, the compiled data structure wasn't valid JSON according to JSONLint (it was nested between parentheses, had unquoted keys, and a trailing semi-colon, as you can see in the code snippet.) (more...)

A simple CoffeeScript to JSON shell script for Macs

If you're as lazy as I am, you might want to write out your static data structures in CoffeeScript instead of JSON. This little script lets you convert a file containing a CoffeeScript data structure to valid JSON.

11 Oct 2011

So what do you do if you lose a public battle to change the face of JavaScript?

If you're Google, you decide to go it alone, implement what you want to anyway, and then tell the world that it is going to replace JavaScript.

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Google Dart, or ‘how we lost the ECMAScript 4 battle so we decided to create our own language instead’.

Introducing Dart, Google's second shot at ECMAScript 4.

25 Jul 2011

Update web site: before and after.

I just put a new iteration of the Update conference web site live, inspired by and in collaboration with designer Clare Sutcliffe. About a week or so ago, Clare – quite out of the blue – sent me an iteration on the Update site design that I absolutely adored. In organizing Update I'm wearing lots of hats at once and I couldn't do it all without the frankly humbling support and help I've been receiving from my friends.

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Update site update

A new iteration of the Update web site evolves the design with input from designer Clare Sutcliffe.

25 Jun 2011

File this under Ultra-Niche. If you happen to be one of the three people in the world using Adobe's easy-to-use and powerful ExtendScript to script the CS*-series of tools (e.g., Photoshop) and you're using the FIle object to write out files manually, read on.

Under Snow Leopard, the following code would work (you'll find variants of this code floating around the Internets):

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Adobe ExtendScript File object gotcha under OS X Lion

The File object behaves differently in ExtendScript under OS X Lion.