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.

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).

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?

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

Late last night I was *lucky* enough to be included in a mass mailing from a *recruiter* who was looking to fill some Ruby on Rails positions.

From: Pradipta Archiputra

I have a couple of Ruby on Rails position, wanted to know if you are interested?

Max Archie
Technical Recruiter
Prodigus Source
Cell: 219-669-9216
Phone: 312-235-2365
Max@prodigussource.com

In and of itself, this email is not unfamiliar to most of us, but the interesting (annoying) thing is that the email was sent to about 500 people all in the TO: field of the email, not via the BCC: fields.

Personally, I clicked the REPLY button and told Max (Pradipta) that I wasn’t interested in working with someone who couldn’t use his email client properly and to remove me from his list. I didn’t think much else about it and went to bed for the night

Naturally though, it was only a matter of time before some noob person clicked REPLY TO ALL and sent the following message to all 500 recipients.

From: Zach C***** <****@******.com>

What are the positions?

That simple REPLY TO ALL set off one of the best spontaneous email threads I have read in a long time and when I woke up this morning I had about 50 replies to read and laugh at.

The list started off bashing the Bangalore HR scene for creating an Epic FAIL and then morphed into a very friendly and humorous discussion where people started introducing themselves like we all had been including in some kind of special Rails developer club for a reason.

Next a suggestion was raised to start a Google Group and the call when out for appropriate names. At about 1:30 AM EST, the Pradipta’s Rolodex group was launched complete with fancy logo.

Fittingly, the last email on the original thread was the following:

From: Matt S****** <********@gmail.com>

Hi Max,

I am a recruiter who has an opening for a top-tier recruiter such as yourself. I need someone who can unwittingly set off the fury of *at least* 400 people, while ignoring all basic email etiquette. Would you be interested? If not, do you know anyone else who is currently looking for such an opportunity?

Sincerely,
Thanks for the mile long email thread out of freakin nowhere

Instead of having to type

ssh username@hostname.com

from the command line to connect to your server each time, wouldn’t it be nicer to just type something like this

ssh foo

Well, if you edit your ssh config file you can add these aliases. You should most likely find your ssh config located in your user directory at ~/.ssh/config . If the file doesn’t already exist, go ahead and create it.

To add aliases you simply add new Host entries in the following format

Host aliasname
HostName your.domain.name
User your_ssh_username
Port 1234

Just give the alias you want to use and supply your server and username credentials. The Port line is optional if you are using the default SSH port (which you shouldn’t be for security reasons, but that’s beyond the scope of this post). Once you add those entries to your config file you can simply do the following and save yourself some typing:

ssh aliasname

Here is a quick video preview of the major enhancements in WP 2.6.

Well, it turns out one simple CSS rule was causing my problem and if you are having the same issue, you might want to check if you have the “offending” rule in your CSS as well.

list-style-position: inside;

Simply remove the list-style-position rule and the indentation behaves like you expected.

To those of you out there still using IE6, please, please, please help save the developers.

I’ve been using Bob Aman’s standard FeedTools library to grab and parse some RSS feeds for output in a WordPress site.

Now, it was obvious to me this had something to do with character encoding issues so I dug in to find out the problem. It turns out FeedTools converts the feeds it parses to UTF-8 encoding, which is great, but can result in some strange characters in the string depending on what the original feed encoding was.

Viewing the native feeds in a feed reader I could see they were simply quotes, apostrophes and ellipses characters. I needed a way to either convert these character strings into ASCII printable characters or simply discard them altogether.

I didn’t want to go through the process of setting up a translation table for every possible character code that might possibly show up in a feed title, so I simply chose to discard the “unprintable” strings completely. I came across this post by Obie Fernandez and decided his simple method would work for me.

require 'iconv'

class String
  def to_ascii_iconv
    converter = Iconv.new('ASCII//IGNORE//TRANSLIT', 'UTF-8')
    converter.iconv(self).unpack('U*').select{ |cp| cp < 127 }.pack('U*')
  end
end

Ruby’s built-in Iconv library can be used for charset conversions. I extended the String class to include a new to_ascii_iconv method. This method creates a new Iconv converter that will convert from UTF-8 encoding to ASCII encoding. The IGNORE and TRANSLIT flags tell the converter to ignore errors and transliterate accented chracters to an appropriate charcter in the ASCII charset. Next, I use the newly created converter to do the conversion and then strip out any characters with decimal values higher than 127 (non-ASCII printable characters).

The results are exactly what I needed. No “funky” characters in my output.