a view from afar

If you haven't seen GetBundle, I recommend you give it a look. It makes it easier to browse and install the available bundles (based on what's in the MacroMates repo).

I noticed a couple of issues. If you have bundles checked out from another repo, or you have any bundles checked out with a recent version of Subversion (GetBundle includes its own svn binary), you may have issues.

Here is a modified version of the Update Installed Bundles command that (I think) plays nice in both these situations. I've posted to textmate-dev so hopefully will find out soon enough if it works as I think it does.

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.

I thought this would be straightforward, but actually there are a couple of minor issues. (Updated with a tip on fixing the problem where moving focus back to the host machine would cancel dialog boxes.)

I like to stay pretty current with ports - generally it avoids Big Update Day where you realise you need a 0.0.0.0.0.1 update of something but most of the dependencies have seen several man-years of development in the mean time. Here is a launchd script to drop in /Library/LaunchDaemons (I called it org.macports.port-selfupdate.plist):

Came across this little gem on Tom Copeland's blog today: LOLCode

I think the prize for best syntax goes to exception handling: