Recently in Software Category

I wanted ta take a minute to highlight Jammit, one of the most useful (and best documented) plugins I’ve used lately. Jammit is a really easy way to get CSS and Javascript minification and bundling with really low development overhead.

After installing the gem, it’s as simple as setting up your bundles in an assets.yml that looks something like this:

From code, these bundles can be referred to with the include_stylesheets and include_javascripts methods. When using these functions in development mode, the unminified, unbundled assets are included. In production environments, I wrote a capistrano task to bundle these up using the jammit command provided by the gem:

This minifies, bundles, and gzips all the assets and dumps them in the public/ directory, making generating these bundles something we don’t ever need to think about again.

Way better than the manual bundling rake tasks we were using before.

I got a new work laptop yesterday, and so I’m writing this down for my future reference. These are the things I install on any new Mac system.

1. Xcode (from the snow leopard disk)
2. Fink
3. Binary Fink Packages
4. Ruby/Rubygems/Rails (through fink)
5. Imagemagick (through fink)
6. Git (through fink)
7. Mysql (through fink)
8. Emacs (from the unofficial git repo at git://git.sv.gnu.org/emacs.git)
9. My dotfiles and dotemacs repos (from a shared git repo)
10. Adium - iChat doesn’t do MSN, which doesn’t work in an office of former Microsofties/Expedians
11. Tweetie
12. Skype
13. Colloquy
14. VMWare Fusion
15. NetNewsWire - This is for both the iPhone and Mac, and is the best RSS reader I’ve found.

For pretty much anything else, I just use the built-in stuff.

Just saw that this came out on the iPhone. Sweet! Maybe now I’ll play enough that I can keep from dying so much.

Three things about Marco Arment

This was a great post about the author of Instapaper, one of my favorite web tools. It’s the first thing since RSS that has totally changed the way I read, not just on the web, but in general.

Marco says it better than I could:

From a personal perspective, I appreciate great writing, but I’ve become frustrated with the quick-consumption nature of many devoted blog readers. Authors are encouraged to cater to drive-by visitors hurrying through their feed readers by producing lightweight content for quick skimming.

There’s no time to sit and read anything when you’re going through 500 feed items while responding to email, chatting, and watching bad YouTube videos.

As a result, popular blogs are now full of useless “list posts” with no substance or value.

Well-written content is out there, and we do have opportunities every day to read it — just not when we’re in information-skimming, speed-overload mode.

A bunch of people linked me to Facebook’s presentation on their use of Erlang (among other languages) to build their chat platform. The presentation is definitely worth scanning. One of the things that always strikes me about Erlang is the way people writing software in it can so matter-of-factly dismiss problems that would be huge in infrastructure built on other languages. It blows my mind that things like hot code upgrades, live node inspection and repair, and overall system stability in the presence of tons of errors can be considered “mostly solved problems.” I love the fact that the presentation mentions that error logging could take down Erlang nodes, and it’s considered a footnote, rather than a serious stability problem.

I bought the beta book for Programming Erlang in 2007ish, but forgot most of it, since I didn’t have a good project to use it on. I’m re-learning it now that we’re running into problems that can be naively solved by throwing cores at them, and presentations like these make me really excited about the possibilities it might open.

When it comes to music services, I’ve always preferred the subscription-based to the pay-per-song model. I even prefer a decent subscription-based music service to downloading music for free — it’s way less hassle, and I don’t have to free up a bunch of disk space for a music collection that’s mostly full of stuff I don’t even like anymore.

I started around 2004 or 2005ish with Rhapsody (then Listen, now Real). Rhapsody was awesome, and I had an account for a year or two, but started to have some problems with it. First, I started using a Mac at home. As far as I know, Rhapsody is Windows-only software. It has a web interface, but it never worked well for me. Later, I began working at Microsoft, and wasn’t able to get Rhapsody working through their network without dropping out, so I decided to cancel the subscription.

Canceling Rhapsody was ridiculously frustrating — There’s no way to cancel online, and the phone number leads to something similar to the AOL fiasco from a while back. After months of lies from their representatives about my account being canceled and frustrating phone calls, a credit card chargeback was enough to get the service cancelled. Needless to say, even if they’re the only U.S. music service with an iPhone app, I still won’t do business with Real any longer. No wonder Rob Glaser is one of the most hated CEOs in America.

Spotify is what I started to use next. A native Mac app and free (with ads) music made it exactly what I was looking for. It’s still not available in the U.S., but there are ways around that. Even though the selection still isn’t fantastic, it was more than enough to keep me happy for a while. Unfortunately, the amount of baby-sitting Spotify took to keep it running in an unsupported country led me to give up on it.

I had seen Grooveshark mentioned as being pretty awesome a few times, but I never quite got it. I’m sure it’s great for people that listen to songs individually, but I usually listen to a CD at a time, and Grooveshark’s terrible de-duping and track ordering in their album view made it totally unusable to me. The old interface made it even worse. I’ve started trying to use it again, and the new interface is a lot better — I’ve discovered that the Playlist view is much better for finding full CDs than the Album view, even though most of them still take some fiddling to get right. The selection is illegally fantastic, and there’s not much I’ve looked for that I haven’t found. It’s still not great, but it’s the least annoying service I’ve found so far… at least, until something better comes along.

I saw Streaks mentioned on Giles Bowkett’s blog, and had to second his recommendation. That isn’t too surprising, since I bought it on his recommendation a few months ago. When it comes to forming new habits, I haven’t found a better way to keep motivated. I started using it to track every time I went to the gym, and it became addicting — I could see every gap and target the gaps to discover better ways of closing them. After a few months, the habit was there and I could switch to tracking a new habit.

I discovered early on that I could only really handle one calendar at a time — more than that and I would do things like forget to check each one off. I was only able to see the length of my current streak on the home screen, which made the other ones less prominent and easier to forget. As long as I can concentrate on a single habit at a time, though, Streaks has done an incredible job of allowing me to internalize practices that have already changed my life for the better.

The free version will probably work, but for a product that has literally changed my life, the full version was more than worth the money.

I can’t stand running Windows. I don’t have anything against you if you do, but I’m someone who spends a ton of time in a terminal, and cmd.exe is an atrocity. On the other hand, every company I’ve worked for has used Exchange for mail. This is a problem, since Exchange support is hard to manage on non-Windows machines.

Over the past few years, I’ve tried a lot of things. Entourage is crashy, slow, and takes over the keyboard shortcuts every other program on the Mac uses. Exchange over IMAP tends to randomly delete messages I move between folders. Outlook in a VM is great if I don’t mind going without the extra half gig of RAM and the Windows license. Outlook through WINE kept dropping connections, forcing me to restart it every hour.

Snow Leopard’s integration is great, and something I’ve been waiting for for years, but it doesn’t solve the problems on my Leopard and Linux machines. Finally, I found DavMail. It’s a proxy between OWA and mail and calendar standards, where OWA goes in one end and IMAP, SMTP, CalDAV, and LDAP come out the other end. Once it’s set up on a Leopard machine, it acts almost exactly like the Snow Leopard Exchange support, and it works great on Linux through Thunderbird. I haven’t been able to get the LDAP support working on Leopard yet (Directory Services says it can’t contact the server), but it works great through Thunderbird. I have no idea how I never heard about it before, but it’s something I’ve been looking for for years.

Leave it to Apple to solve the Exchange thing right before I do, but DavMail is going to be one of the first things I install on any non-Snow Leopard machine.