Hope you will like it too!

Thanks everyone whom has attended my workshop session at IP3 Forum. Here’s my slides for you:

Interactive Ontario, in partnership with Bell, is pleased to present the Toronto iP³ Forum — a one-day event that will explore the changing mobile landscape and the business opportunities associated with Apple’s Touch Platform (iPhone, iPad and iPod touch), as business models adapt to a market where people are always connected.

iP³ Forum will be hosted on June 21, 2010 at Hilton Toronto, 145 Richmond Street West, Toronto, Ontario (map)

There will be two spread threads running at the same time, business and technology. I will present a tech session in the morning, the topic is “Mastering Xcode”, in which I’ll talk about the tips and tricks which I’ve discovered in the past years.

Actually, I would change the title to “Mastering Xcode 3″ as Xcode 4 is just around the corner. After play with Xcode 4 for couple of hours, I found that a lot of things have been changed. Luckily most of the tips and tricks I will present will still apply to Xcode 4.

The speakers list for iP³ Forum is pretty impressive, look forward to the event on the next Monday. Hope can see you there too!

“Hacker News” from YCombinator is the major source where I get all the technology and startup news. I love reading it a lot, I’ve even created an iPad app “HackerNews for iPad” so I can enjoy it more.

Couple of days ago, the best update ever happened on Safari, so we can create Safari Extension now!

Here’s my 10 minutes work: “HackerNews OnePage” for Safari: HackerNews.safariextz

The extension only does one thing for now: provides users with the ability to browse Hacker News articles and comments without leaving the page.

How to use it after installation? Just refresh your hackernews page.

This is a port from the great work what Tim Dupree have done on his Chrome extension “Hacker News OnePage“. Thank you Tim Dupree!

Hope you enjoy it!

Peteris Krumins has done a great job on “Top Ten One-Liners from CommandLineFu Explained”. Here’s my short summary for quick reference:

#1. Run the last command as root

$ sudo !!

#2. Serve the current directory at http://localhost:8000/

$ python -m SimpleHTTPServer

#3. Save a file you edited in vim without the needed permissions

:w !sudo tee %

#4. Change to the previous working directory

$ cd -

#5. Run the previous shell command but replace string “foo” with “bar”

$ ^foo^bar^

#6. Quickly backup or copy a file

$ cp filename{,.bak}

#7. mtr – traceroute and ping combined

$ mtr google.com

#8. Find the last command that begins with “whatever,” but avoid running it

$ !whatever:p

#9. Copy your public-key to remote-machine for public-key authentication

$ ssh-copy-id remote-machine

#10. Capture video of a linux desktop

$ ffmpeg -f x11grab -s wxga -r 25 -i :0.0 -sameq /tmp/out.mpg

That’s it.

The lovely and amazing performance poet Gabrielle Bouliane performs for the audience at the Austin Poetry Slam.

This would be her last public performance.

Gabrielle was diagnosed with Stage Four Cancer shortly before this video was filmed. Our dear sister fought hard, but she ended her fight January 29, 2010. She was surrounded by family and friends, and her passing was in a very quiet, peaceful room full of love and affection. She was so brave.

Please share this video with everyone you know. I am sure it would tickle her to no end to have this video get as viral as a video can be. Tell the world.

Bunny up!

Recently, I am doing some heavy database migrations, so I spend a lot of time on playing with SQL again. It’s fun as always. But there are some SQL files are quite long and messy. There is no problem on running, but it’s really painful to look at and do any changes.

So I went out and tried to find any SQL Formatters. There are quite a few and I’ve tasted them as many as I can.

At the end, I found myself really enjoy using Instant SQL Formatter from Gudu Software. It has a free online sql tidy tool and it’s very powerful:

Instant SQL Formatter is a free online sql tidy tool, actually, it not only can beautify your sql but also can turn your formatted sql into html code, so you can post coloured sql code in your blog, forum,wiki and any website easily. In addition to beautifying SQL code, this sql tool can translate SQL code into C#, Java, PHP, DELPHI and other program languages. Another useful feature is find out all database objects such as table, column, function in sql by selecting output format to list database object.

Here is the Free online Tool and here are some examples you can see. Quite impressive! To format your SQL, you just need paste the sql in the textarea, choose the database and output format then press “Format SQL”, you’ll get the result right away.

Every SQL file looks great now. But after tens of copy & paste and copy & paste between TextMate and browser, it feels not as smooth as I want. I think I should find a better way.

Gudu software does provide some desktop version even add-ins, sadly there are all Windows based. It’s not a option for me.

After reading the page source of their free online tool, here is the result:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'net/http'

url = 'http://www.dpriver.com/cgi-bin/ppserver'
url = URI.parse(url)
http = Net::HTTP.new(url.host, url.port)

query = "<sqlpp_request><dbvendor>mysql</dbvendor><outputfmt>SQL</outputfmt><inputsql>#{ENV['TM_SELECTED_TEXT']}</inputsql><formatoptions><keywordcs>Uppercase</keywordcs><identifiercs>Lowercase</identifiercs><functioncs>InitCap</functioncs><lnbrwithcomma>after</lnbrwithcomma><liststyle>stack</liststyle><salign>sleft</salign><quotechar>\"</quotechar></formatoptions></sqlpp_request>"

header = {
  'Referer' => 'http://www.dpriver.com/pp/sqlformat.htm',
  'User-Agent' => 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Firefox/3.0.1'
}

resp, data = http.post(url.path, query, header)

puts resp.error! unless data
formatted_sql = data[/<formattedsql>.*<\/formattedsql>/m].gsub(/<\/?.*>/, '')

puts formatted_sql

Download TextMate SqlFormatter Command

How to install?

After save to your own disk, unzip it, just open those tmCommand files and add them into your TextMate. The shortcut key has been set to Command+Shift+F for now.

As you can see there are two tmCommand files. The “SQL Formatter – Stack” will format you sql with every fields has its own line, the “No Stack” one will put all the fields into one line. Try them and you’ll see the difference.

How to use it?

Open TextMate,  select the SQL query you want to format and press Command+Shift+F. The beautiful formatted SQL will replace the selected SQL “instantly”!

Requirement?

The command is using free online Instant SQL Formatter, so the internet is required.

What’s next?

As I said before, SQL Pretty Printer is really powerful. I really should create a complete TextMate Bundle instead of just one command. But before doing this, I should get the permission from them now.

Any update will be posted here, hopefully soon.

Enjoy the SQL Formatter Command and stay tuned for more.

Can you see the squares marked A and B are the same shade of gray?

No way I can believe that, can you?

See the proof on Professor Edward’s page:

Proof of Checkshadow illusion.

Start from Rails 2.3, it includes a new class called BacktraceCleaner:

Many backtraces include too much information that’s not relevant for the context. This makes it hard to find the signal in the backtrace and adds debugging time. With a BacktraceCleaner, you can setup filters and silencers for your particular context, so only the relevant lines are included.

Here’s how it works:

bc = BacktraceCleaner.new
bc.add_filter { |line| line.gsub(Rails.root, ”) }
bc.add_silencer { |line| line =~ /mongrel|rubygems/ }
bc.clean(exception.backtrace) # will strip the Rails.root prefix and skip any lines from mongrel or rubygems

Which is simple, great and smart, well, most of the time.

If you are a hardcore TextMate fan, like me, and you like using command+R to run your ruby code/test, you will find you can’t open files by clicking the backtrace list links on the result window. Actually, you still can, but instead of opening the file you want, it opens a new window with a empty new file.

The reason is simple, BacktraceCleaner has a default filter “line.gsub(Rails.root, ”)”. It removes your project path from file full name.

Solution is simple too:

1. Remove “add_filter   { |line| line.sub(“#{RAILS_ROOT}/”, ”) }” from “vendor/rails/railties/lib/rails/backtrace_cleaner.rb”
2. Add “Rails.backtrace_cleaner.add_filter { |line| line.sub(“#{RAILS_ROOT}/”, ”) } unless RAILS_ENV == ‘test’” to “config/initializers/backtrace_silencers.rb”

That’s it. Is it a bug for Rails, or not?

This is another official update from XPlane to the original “Shift Happens” video. This completely new Fall 2009 version includes facts and stats focusing on the changing media landscape, including convergence and technology.

Anyway, if you don’t know, you should know!