SpicyCode - The ramblings of Chad Humphries

GemKata - The Art of the Gem

2009-10-09T00:00:00-07:00

GemKata - The Art of the Gem

09 Oct 2009

The dust has settled. The GitHub has moved. What’s that you say? They don’t build gems anymore? Don’t worry, you should use GemCutter. This assumes that you are already using jeweler. You are, aren’t you?

Let’s say you want to release a gem

Make sure your jeweler config in your Rakefile looks something like the following.

begin
  require 'jeweler'
  Jeweler::Tasks.new do |gem|
    gem.name = "your-awesome-gem-here"
    # ...
  end
  Jeweler::GemcutterTasks.new
rescue LoadError
  puts "Jeweler not available. Install it with: gem install jeweler"
end

Now it’s as easy as typing:

# If you have never released before
rake version write MAJOR=0 MINOR=1 PATCH=0
# If you are back for more, releasing again
rake version:bump:(major|minor|patch)

You now have an updated gemspec, and with the version set correctly. Now to tag the release on github.

rake release

Finally, release it to GemCutter using:

rake gemcutter:release

The users are at the gates, and they demand documentation!

The next most awesome thing to do is to add sdoc. Think the best rdoc template in the history of the universe. And as a special bonus we’ll generate them on your gh-pages branch so you can go to http://yournamehere.github.com/your-awesome-gem-here to see the rdoc documentation.

Open your Rakefile back up and put this at the bottom:

begin
  %w{sdoc sdoc-helpers rdiscount}.each { |name| gem name }
  require 'sdoc_helpers'
rescue LoadError => ex
  puts "sdoc support not enabled:"
  puts ex.inspect
end

require 'rake/rdoctask'
Rake::RDocTask.new do |rdoc|
  version = File.exist?('VERSION') ? File.read('VERSION') : ''
  rdoc.rdoc_dir = 'rdoc'
  rdoc.title = "your-awesome-gem-here #{version}"
  rdoc.rdoc_files.include('README*')
  rdoc.rdoc_files.include('lib/**/*.rb')
end

To generate the docs the first time run:

rake pages:init

To rebuild the github pages branch after updates:

rake pages

Bask in your amazingness

Now you’ve done it! You’re the envy of ever ne’er-do-well programmer from here to there. Enjoy!

Speeding up port install

2009-05-17T00:00:00-07:00

Speeding up port install

17 May 2009

I’ve been doing a lot of software installation via macports recently and I wanted to make sure things were building as fast as they could. After reading through the macports FAQ I found a few easy steps for speeding up installations.

Install ccache

From the ccache homepage:

ccache is a compiler cache. It acts as a caching pre-processor to C/C++ compilers, using the -E compiler switch and a hash to detect when a compilation can be satisfied from cache. This often results in a 5 to 10 times speedup in common compilations.

To use ccache port install it by typing:

sudo port install ccache

Tweak your macports.conf

We will need to edit a few settings in our macports.conf to enable ccache, and to make builds faster. First open macports.conf in your editor of choice.

sudo vim /opt/local/etc/macports/macports.conf

Now find the configureccache setting and change it’s value to yes. Next find buildmakejobs and change it’s value from 1 to 0. Now you can save and exit the file.

With the last changes we have enabled ccache integration in macports and also told it to detect the number of processor cores to use, instead of leaving it hardcoded to 1.

Things should zoom along quite a bit faster now when compiling in macports.

RCov News Extravaganza

2009-05-12T00:00:00-07:00

RCov News Extravaganza

12 May 2009

It’s been a while since the last fireside chat about RCov, so let’s head into this one at full-steam.

No more REXML

The source of countless bugs in RCov reporting across multiple versions of Ruby has been eliminated in favor of simple ERB templates. This simplifies the codebase and makes way for better template support down the road.

The official repository on GitHub is now under the Relevance account

This is great for everyone as it means more support, faster response to issues, and generally nothing but up for RCov going forward. Issues are moving to GitHub as well, so make sure to keep track of them at their new location.

JRuby has a maintainer for their RCov version

Charles Nutter is maintaining the official JRuby fork at http://github.com/jruby/rcov. This should do similiarly great things for RCov on JRuby. Thanks to everyone who has submitted patches building out the initial version for JRuby in the past.

Ruby 1.9 support is drawing near

With the removal of REXML many of the biggest pain points are now gone, leading to a much more streamlined RCov. Work on Ruby 1.9 is progressing and already in alpha working state. More on this soon.

To recap…

1) Install Rcov by doing the following:

gem install relevance-rcov --source=http://gems.github.com

2) Need JRuby support?

gem install jruby-rcov --source=http://gems.github.com

3) Still having issues on Ruby 1.8.X with RCov? Make sure you are using relevance-rcov v0.8.3.2 or higher. If you have an outstanding issue, or requests file it at our GitHub Issue Tracker.

4) Waiting on Ruby 1.9? Support is coming soon.

Binding Option-Left and Option-Right in iTerm and Terminal

2009-03-11T00:00:00-07:00

Binding Option-Left and Option-Right in iTerm and Terminal

11 Mar 2009

I finally got around to solving one of the consistency issues I encounter on OSX as I switch between Cocoa and the terminal. I really enjoy Option-Left and Option-Right as skip back one word and skip forward a word. Drop the following in your ZSH config to get things done.

# To see the key combo you want to use just do:
# cat > /dev/null
# And press it

bindkey '^K' kill-whole-line                      # ctrl-k
bindkey "^R" history-incremental-search-backward  # ctrl-r
bindkey "^A" beginning-of-line                    # ctrl-a  
bindkey "^E" end-of-line                          # ctrl-e
bindkey "[B": history-search-forward              # down arrow
bindkey "[A": history-search-backward             # up arrow
bindkey '^[[D' backward-word                      # option left
bindkey '^[[C' forward-word                       # option right

I’ve included the quick instructions on finding out what a key combo is in the terminal so you can bind any old thing. You can see what is currently bound by using bindkey -L.

Keeping things clean when using MacPorts

2009-02-23T00:00:00-08:00

Keeping things clean when using MacPorts

23 Feb 2009

A common pattern I perform in MacPorts is embodied in the following function.

function update_macports {
  sudo port selfupdate
  sudo port sync
  sudo port outdated
}

It updates MacPorts, syncs the ports database, and then shows me what is outdated. For most ports I tend to uninstall the old version and then install the newer version. Sometimes this gets you in a never ending dependency removal loop.

Use sudo port uninstall --follow-dependents your-portname-here. This will uninstall this port and any dependent ports not in use by other ports on the system. Useful for cleanup after experimentation.

Rubygems in your HOME directory, a 5 second guide.

2009-02-14T00:00:00-08:00

Rubygems in your HOME directory, a 5 second guide.

14 Feb 2009

It seems you are finally ready to let your gems live only in your HOME directory. I’ll show you the ropes.

First, stop typing sudo gem whatever, all the cool kids type gem whatever.
Add the following export to your zsh or bash config.
For ruby 1.8x it would be something like export GEM_HOME=~/.gem/ruby/1.8
For 1.9.1 it would be export GEM_HOME=~/.gem/ruby/1.9.1

Now you can install and remove gems in your home directory with no issue.

Installing Merb 1.0

2008-11-10T00:00:00-08:00

Installing Merb 1.0

10 Nov 2008

I saw that merb 1.0 came out and decided to install it. I jumped, nay leaped to the terminal and ran sudo gem install merb.

In the terminal I saw the following:

Successfully installed extlib-0.9.8
Successfully installed abstract-1.0.0
Successfully installed erubis-2.6.2
Successfully installed json_pure-1.1.3
Successfully installed mime-types-1.15
Successfully installed thor-0.9.8
Successfully installed merb-core-1.0
Successfully installed merb-action-args-1.0
Successfully installed merb-assets-1.0
Successfully installed merb-slices-1.0
Successfully installed merb-auth-core-1.0
Successfully installed merb-auth-more-1.0
Successfully installed merb-auth-slice-password-1.0
Successfully installed merb-auth-1.0
Successfully installed merb-cache-1.0
Successfully installed merb-exceptions-1.0
Successfully installed diff-lcs-1.1.2
Successfully installed templater-0.3.5
Successfully installed merb-gen-1.0
Successfully installed haml-2.0.4
Successfully installed merb-haml-1.0
Successfully installed merb-helpers-1.0
Successfully installed mailfactory-1.4.0
Successfully installed merb-mailer-1.0
Successfully installed merb-param-protection-1.0
Successfully installed addressable-1.0.4
Successfully installed data_objects-0.9.6
Successfully installed dm-core-0.9.6
Successfully installed dm-migrations-0.9.6
Successfully installed merb_datamapper-1.0
Successfully installed merb-more-1.0
Successfully installed do_sqlite3-0.9.6
Successfully installed dm-timestamps-0.9.6
Successfully installed uuidtools-1.0.4
Successfully installed dm-types-0.9.6
Successfully installed dm-aggregates-0.9.6
Successfully installed dm-validations-0.9.6
Successfully installed randexp-0.1.4
Successfully installed dm-sweatshop-0.9.6
Successfully installed merb-1.0

I’m all for modular, but ouch. 40 gems is quite a lot.

Using MacVim and want the same ruby bindings in console VIM?

2008-11-07T00:00:00-08:00

Using MacVim and want the same ruby bindings in console VIM?

07 Nov 2008

Just alias vim to the following.

alias vim='/Applications/MacVim.app/Contents/MacOS/Vim -p'

Bringing VIM to the people

2008-11-07T00:00:00-08:00

Bringing VIM to the people

07 Nov 2008

What’s included?

IRB
Shell Mode with Syntax Highlighting for running test results
GUI+Terminal theme (spicycode) with nearest match color palletes
FuzzyFinder built-in and setup with reasonable defaults
User Settings file for user specific bits

How do I use it?

Clone the repo, or fork it if you want, then symlink .vimrc, .gvimrc, and .vim to your $HOME directory.
Copy the ~/.vim/exampleusersettings.vim to ~/.vim/usersettings.vim
Customize it as necessary

Where is it?

git clone git://github.com/spicycode/bringing-vim-to-the-people.git