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The questionable Leopard dock “shelf” has been on a few mac users minds of late. Personally, I’m not a fan of the 3D glass shelf so I was quite relieved to see that there is a plist hack to fix it

Cut to the chase, here is a quick Applescript to toggle the dock from “shelf” to traditional bar and back:
Toggle Dock Appearance code

download a pre-complied Applet here

Yesterday was Minnebar and it was great! There have been several recaps and other specific posts related to particular sessions so I’ll just cut to the chase:

Justin Grammens, Dan Grigsby and I hosted a group discussion on Coworking and the turn out was good. It appears that there is some interest in the concept. In an effort to keep this on the radar I’ve created a Google Group to continue the discussion. Join in!

I also want to publish the notes I took during the session:

Who?

1. Independents with no office (cafe companies)
2. Startups
3. Corporate workers looking for collaboration, mentoring
4. Small companies

1. Community groups

   Models for funding the project

   • For Profit.
   • Mention of WorkSpace3 as well as Garrick’s recent post
   • “Health Club Membership”, 100 people $100 per month?
   • No Level of membership, some use it all day everyday, some not at all
   • Brings up issues of “seats and butts”, what’s the churn rate, would you have enough space for all that may choose to show up at any given moment.
   • Who Signs the lease?
   • Light weight, easy to implement now.
   • Non-profit
   • Seeks grants for local government, local tech companies
   • Provide mentoring, resources for donors, free or reduced rate consulting from member companies or individuals.
   • This is a kind of “incubator”, pool of talent for donor companies
   • Non Profit entity serves as logistics coordinator, arbitrator, organizer, single point of contact for the community as a whole.

• this is “heavy weight” and requires most time investment.

  I’ve omitted much of the conversation (my notes aren’t the greatest.) Please fill in the blanks by joining the group. The concept is pretty compelling. As Justin said to me once: “The atmosphere of Minnebar everyday” That sounds OK to me.

I wrote about the Yahoo! UI CSS components a while back. At the time I found an interesting article about vertical rhythm in Web typography. The article, Compose to a Vertical Rhythm from the 2006 24Ways list explains the how’s and why’s of nice-looking typography on the web. Turns out the Yahoo! UI Reset stylesheet is a great way to start with this technique since it basically “zeros out” all font sizes in a effort to achieve cross-browser rendering nirvana.

Fast-forward a few months… Geoffrey Grosenbach recently redesigned the PeepCode site using the same techniques for the type. Richard Rutter, author of the 24ways article, gave a talk at SXSW on the topic. What’s more, Geoffrey has published a great tool, the Baseline Rhythm Calculator, to generate the required CSS to implement Richard’s technique. Combine this with YUI Reset and you have good looking type with almost zero effort. Very nice! There are links to other relevant articles on the calculator’s page. Go check it out!

I innocently decided to upgrade my rubygems after reading Scott Boms’ blog. I wanted the gems outdated fu. Now typically one can simply gem update --system

I use MacPorts, so I decided to do a quick sudo port upgrade rb-rubygems and it starts installing Perl. Huh? It’s rubygems!? That left me scratching my head…

Turns out that the portfile now has a dependency on autoconf which, in turn, depends on Perl. Wow. I hope it’s worth it. Last time I built rubygems by hand it wasn’t that tough…

So now I have perl 5.8.8. What can you do with that?[me: ducks]

Another meeting of the rosy dynamic language lovers of Minnesota was held tonight at the Loring Park Dunn Bros.. This time out we had, 30, quite a few Rubyists in attendance. I forgot to count heads but I believe it may have been a few more than last month. A good turn out!

Three excellent presenters made the trip worth it. First, Chris Carter gave a great overview of Ruport. He has two great articles on his website. Tonight’s presentation summarized them for those of you that missed ‘em. Go, check them out, they’re short (but very informative), I’ll wait…

Ah, now then. Ross Niemi gave a presentation on Continuous Integration and its effects on marine plantlife. Not really, but it was about Continuous Integration (CI for those of us in the know). Pretty cool. I’ve never seen it so Ross’ live demos were pretty impressive. Head on over to his blog for more info; he promised to post his material. (for a quick sneak peek, have a look at the live demo of CruiseControl.rb).

Finally, Jon Dahl’s presentation entitled “Mortgage Driven Development” was pretty funny. Jon started by showing us examples from Dan’s code repository. Ha. What’s a dev to do when her web framework makes her too efficient? Nice tips on how to “speed up” you web app when your client complains. Actually this talk sparked a great discussion on how to market yourself a a Rails/Ruby contractor or consultant. Good stuff.

You should really join us next month.

I have a couple of rails sites running on an Xserve at work. There are ways to rotate rails logs using Logger. While it would be nice to just let rails take care of it, it seems that that technique will fail when you’re running a cluster of mongrels. Those puppies write to the same log, so if you pull it out from under them it will surely result in dreaded 500 errors. That’s embarrassing.

Mongrel FAQ advises us to use something like logrotate. That’s a Debian package and it does not come with OS X. I spent way too much time looking for a binary to use. If you’re not a sysadmin this dark art of rotating logs can be deucedly tricky to nail down. In the end, MacPorts to the rescue (again). I <heart> MacPorts. BONUS: I can use it to rotate my Apache logs too.

As you know, table based layout are bad news. Well, personally, I came to this game late and never used table-based layouts. As a former prepress guy accustomed to Quark and Photoshop (GUI’s) the avalanche of <table> tags in much of the HTML I viewed in 1994 scared me off. Yikes! Fast-forward 10 years or so or so and I found myself back in school learning how to write basic HTML. Much to my surprise those damn <table> tags were still prevalent. Drat!

One of the requirements of the “Hello World” page for class was to use Cascading Style Sheets to spec fonts and colors. So I did a little googling and it turns out one can use CSS to layout the page too. Seemed like the way to go, no more deeply nested <table> tags… I was excited. That semester was an exercise in pain-management. As you might guess, bending CSS to my will was not easy. Lots of reading and lots of trial and error. And lots of requests to my instructor to use Firefox when viewing my assignments!

Over then next few years I built many pages and layouts and always battled against CSS. I had amassed a boatload of links to descriptions of how to do fluid, hybrid, and fixed layouts. Arcane information about browser incompatibilities and “hacks” littler my skull. Each time I started a project I spent an inordinate amount of time fiddling with the CSS – which structure, how to name selectors, and on. Makes me tired just thinking about it.

A few months ago I finally found the answer: Yahoo! UI Library. According to the site:

All components in the YUI Library have been released as open source under a BSD license and are free for all uses.

The library has a bunch of javascript utilities and controls. I use Ruby on Rails primarily so most of that is taken care of by Rails and it’s integration with prototype and script.aculo.us. My interest lies in their CSS tools. But, oh, the CSS!

The key ingredient for page layout is YUI Grids CSS. Pretty amazing. Simply follow the conventions describe in the code (as well as the excellent documentaiton) and you’re ready to go. They even provide a nice interactive builder page to generate the basic structure. No more trial and error, fluid, fixed, this just works. The other two sheets help with the finer points. Reset CSS provides a nice foundation for predictable cross browser rendering and Fonts CSS helps make font size look consistent.

So if you don’t don’t wear black turtlenecks and berets, take a look. If you do, well, take a look anyway. Really. While not an example of beautiful design, I was able to remove the “just scaffolded” look of the Ruby Users of Minnesota website using it. And now, if we find someone more artistically inclined maybe they can spend time making it look good and less time rasslin’ with CSS.

The temperatures were hovering around zero last night but we still had 28 (by my count) hearty Ruby enthusiasts descend upon the Loring Park Dunn Bros to discuss all things red and glittery.

Here’s a summary:

Nate Yourchuck gave a very nice overview of the use of irb (the Ruby console). He demonstrated many cool features that were new to me. And he did most of it “live” with very few slides (yay). Nate: let us know were the slides are.

Tony Collen gave a talk about GIS on Ruby. The information about shapefiles was pretty interesting. I’ve done a little bit with the YM4R he used for his Rails demo. Go check out that code it’s amazing how easy it it to do cool stuff with Google Maps. The library and plugin are nicely implemented.

Finally, I gave a cursory overview of the changes Rails 1.2 brings us. The biggies (which have been covered in detail elsewhere) are RESTful routing and Multibyte support . Charles Nutter was able to explain the multibyte features to the rest of us. He pointed out that, until Ruby itself supports Unicode, you can simply require activesupport to leverage the work done on this in a plain Ruby application. I didn’t think of that. More discussion ensued. Here are a few choice links(re: Rails 1.2) that I have found useful:

• RC1 overviews from “Riding Rails”
  • New in ActiveRecord
  • New in ActionPack
• New in ActiveSupport
• CHANGELOG
• actionmailer 1.3.1
• actionpack 1.13.1
• activerecord 1.15.1
• activesupport 1.4.0
• railties 1.2.1
• Bob Silva’s overview of lesser known features
• Deprecations in 1.2

• My favorite overview of rails 1.2

Well, it seems that Ruby on Rails is just not designed for shared hosting, at least for me, on Textdrive. I have grand plans of actually posting stuff here. Having to bump the rails process each time is no fun so… I’m gonna try Wordpress on plain ol’ Apache/PHP. I’ll try to migrate my old posts for kicks. It’ll be a good exercise to write a Ruby script to do something (semi) useful.