Screencast Addiction

Ruby/RoR
http://www.railsenvy.com/speaking
http://railscasts.com
http://www.rubyplus.org
http://www.buildingwebapps.com/podcasts
http://peepcode.com
http://www.pragprog.com/screencasts
http://envycasts.com

Rails Conf(s)
http://www.railsenvy.com/tags/conferences
http://www.railsenvy.com/2008/6/2/Railsconf-videos
http://blip.tv/search?q=rails+conf&x=0&y=0
http://www.confreaks.com
http://mwrc2008.confreaks.com/
The RubyFringe Videos

OSCON
http://www.railsenvy.com/2008/7/29/oscon-videos
http://blip.tv/search?q=oscon&x=0&y=0

Other
ThoughtWorks IT Matters and ThoughtWorks Talks
http://www.justin.tv/signals37/archive
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/
http://www.theflexshow.com/blog/
Gooogle search railsconf
Google search oscon
InfoQ Presentations

 

ruby-mp3info

I have an old SanDisk mp3 player that I use to listen to music and podcasts. Though it's a rather small card (512M), it's still annoying to have to scroll through my single playlist to get to a specific file.

The SanDisk sorts by the mp3 info title tag, so I wrote a small script that I run on my podcast files before I load them on my player so that they will show up first in the playlist by prepending '01_' to the mp3 title tag (and using the mp3 filename if the title is nil).

First, install the ruby-mp3info gem if you don't have it:

gem install ruby-mp3info

edit_mp3info_title.rb

require 'rubygems'
require "mp3info"

dir = Dir.open('/Users/dsparlingimbp/PODCAST/mp3')
puts "mp3 directory: #{dir.path}"

dir.each do |file|
  next unless /\.mp3$/ =~ file
  puts "mp3: #{file}"

  mp3file = "#{dir.path}/#{file}"

  Mp3Info.open(mp3file) do |mp3|
    puts "original title: #{mp3.tag.title}"
    title = '01_' + (mp3.tag.title || file)
    mp3.tag.title = title
    puts "new title: #{mp3.tag.title}"
  end

end

Podcast Addiction

It's bad enough that I subscribe to more RSS feeds than I can possibly read in a day, but I've also become addicted to podcasts...many are tech podcasts, but I listen to a wide variety...

From my current iTunes podcasts directory:

Andy Jordan's Tech Diary
Audible Ajax
boagworld
The Bugle
The Christian Science Monitor - News
Digital Media Insider
The Flex Show (podcast and screencast)
FOO Casts
The French Pod Class
Hanselminutes
IT Conversations
L33t Tech News
Learning Rails (now a screencast)
.NET Rocks!
php_abstract
php|architecht
podcasts - Channel 9
Pragmatic Programmers
Radio Allegro
Rails Envy Podcast
Railscasts (screencast)
Rubyology
Ruby on Rails Podcast
StackOverflow
TalkCrunch
The Thirsty Developer
This American Life
Wall Street Journal Tech News Briefings
Wall Street Journal on Small Business
Wall Street Journal's Your Money Matters
The Washington Institute Podcast
The Web 2.0 Show
Web Design TV
WebDevRadio.com

A few others:
French Vibes

And a couple of "top tech podcasts" links:
The top 40 tech podcasts - .net magazine
Top 10 Best Technology Podcasts

Ignore exisiting directory in subverion Rails repo

I needed to ignore the log directory of an existing Rails app I had checked out:

svn up
svn delete log
svn commit -m 'removed log dir'
mkdir log
svn add --non-recursive log
svn propset svn:ignore "*" log/
svn commit -m "Add log dir, ignore contents"

With a little help from:
http://rails.wincent.com/wiki/Checking_a_new_Rails_application_into_an_existing_Subversion_repository

BDD - Behaviour Driven Development, RSpec, JSSpec

Behavior Driven Development - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

O'Reilly Network -- Behavior Driven Development Using Ruby (Part 1)

O'Reilly Network -- Behavior Driven Development Using Ruby (Part 2)

O'Reilly Network -- Behavior Driven Development Using Ruby (Part 3)

Behavior-driven testing with RSpec

PeepCode - RSpec Screencast Tutorials

JSSpec - Javascript BDD(Behavior Driven Development) framework

JSSpec - Official Homepage

CocoaMySQL - MySQL GUI for Mac OS X

I had to restore a MySQL database dump to a server at new host with no shell access. The host recommended SQLyog, but I'm working on this project on my Mac, and SQLyog is Windows only.

CocoaMySQL was a quick and easy install and did exactly what I needed.

Of course, on my Mac itself, it was the standard MySQL command:

$ mysql -h localhost -u root myshinynewdb < mydatabasedump.sql

CSS, Firefox - font-family, form intput and textarea

I'll do my own write up at some point, but ran across this, which solved a problem I was having with FF:

http://cakebaker.42dh.com/2006/02/02/some-css-trouble-with-input-and-textarea-in-firefox/