tail -f development.log

I’ve updated the ParseHTML code on github to the latest 1.12 version.

I haven’t done much work with the ParseHTML library, simply because I wasn’t actively doing development on the ClothBlue HTML-to-Markdown library. ClothBlue is the reason I wrote ParseHTML in the first place. Well, I’ve had some downtime and figured I would revive the ClothBlue rewrite effort and that meant getting ParseHTML up to snuff.

The library should be fully working now as most of the previously reported bugs have been sorted out. If you find any issues or new features you want added, just let me know.

$ history 1000 | \
awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | \
sort -rn | head

123 git
80 ruby
71 gs
43 cls
20 git-wtf
18 ll
17 rake
17 gba
16 cd
12 vim

I guess you can say I took the git plunge whole-heartedly. The gs, gba, and git-wtf commands are all git aliases or scripts (git status, git branch -a, and a git branch commit analyzer).

I had the need to use the old in_place_editor functionality in a new Rails app that I’m working on. I hadn’t used the functionality for a while now and using it in a Rails 2.x environment is a bit different than in a Rails 1.x environment so I thought I’d share what I found.

The in_place_editor functionality has been completed deprecated in the Rails 2.x codebase and now you need to install the plugin to use the functionality. To install the plugin use the following command from your rails root directory:

ruby script/plugin install http://svn.rubyonrails.org/rails/plugins/in_place_editing

Now, if you are using the new authenticity token features of Rails 2, the plugin won’t work for you out of the box. First you will need to apply this patch. It’s best to apply the patch even if you aren’t using the authenticity token feature just so you are “future-proof.” I’m not sure why the plugin trunk hasn’t been updated with the patch already, but it hasn’t so you need to do it yourself.

Now you can use both the in_place_editor and in_place_editor_field helpers in your view files.

I came across an article on Michael Minella’s blog the other day about continually adding new tools to the programming tool box. Specifically, Michael references on of the tenets of the Pragmatic Programmer to learn at least one new programming language every year.

That got me thinking and challenged me to pick up another language this year. I’ve been doing Ruby development exclusively for close to three years now and have really let my PHP level of expertise slide a bit. Other than a bit of JavaScript and some PHP for Wordpress plugins and themes, Ruby is all of done recently.

The language that I really want to learn and get into is Objective-C, mostly because I’d like to dabble a bit in Cocoa development for OS X. It’s been quite a few years since I’ve done any kind of desktop app development and I’d like to at least stay up-to-date in that world.

Ultimately though, I decided to really learn Perl this year. Now, I know a bit of Perl and have written some of it in the past, but I really am not as strong with Perl as I’d like to be and I think its probably one of the best languages to really have a good grasp on. Considering that the year is already halfway over, it helps to pick a language that I am already a bit familiar with as well.

So, what language(s) are you learning this year to stay sharp?

The Wordpress application for the iPhone has been released. In fact, I’m making this post from my iPhone to test it out.

Go grab it from the AppStore and give it a try.