a view from afar

Now, it is a widely known fact, among possibly half of my six subscribers, that I'm working on an ORM and database migration package for Rubyists that will kick ActiveRecord into the floor. Not that I don't have some respect for the library - it has, after all, seriously raised the bar in terms of user (ie webapp developer) simplicity. But it suffers some serious architectural faults, and has begun to outgrow the spirit of the ActiveRecord pattern (obligatory Fowler link). I am not the only person who thinks so either, some people such as Matthew at PlayLouder are far more frustrated than me.

WARNING: the following post is not suitable for anyone who has left high school, unless (like me maybe) your sense of humour didn't

Here is a simple bash script I use to get the latest RSpec gem and update the TextMate bundle:

After a discussion today on rspec-users, I confirmed that it would be nice if you could structure specs like this, to break your behaviour descriptions down into related groups:

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describe MyClass do
  facet "my_method" do
    it "should do this" 
    
    facet "some stuff" do
      it "should do that"
    end
  end
  
  it "should do the other"
end

I assumed this would be really obvious but I had to scour the internet to find instructions.

I wanted to use the included server side highlighting, as described on the Mephisto wiki. It turns out, though, that the correct tag is "filter:code", eg:

In reply to a post today on ruby-talk, I came up with this monkey-patch that lets you write long initialize methods in one line:

So, I was finishing off the list of programs I use on my Mac, which started off just as bullet-pointed plain text (I typed each program in as I installed it). This being the interweb, I figured it'd be a bit flash if you could click on the program names and be shown their web sites.

Half way down the page, doing this by hand, I got very bored.

Goal: I want to select a URL, select Shiira > Services > Markdown URL and have the title of the page at that URL used as the name of a Markdown link. (For some reason, I started using Markdown, not Textile.)

Easy? Well it is if you know how.