As for the upgrade process, it was painless (even if you are a couple of versions behind). I recommend the extended upgrade notes for those who haven’t done this in a while. I do want to point out that you might want to transfer your settings from your current wp-config.php file to the wp-config-sample.php file since there has been some changes. After you are done, simply rename wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php and upload it. The reason this is important is due to the extra security settings. Namely, the following:

define('AUTH_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
define('SECURE_AUTH_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
define('LOGGED_IN_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
define('NONCE_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');

All of which can be easily generated by using the WordPress secret key service.

There are lots of new tweaks that you can do via your Dashboard but one that stood out for me was on Discussion Settings (Settings -> Discussions) page. You can now enable threaded discussion on your site, up to 10 levels deep. I suspect this has something to do with WordPress taking over IntenseDebate. I haven’t had a chance to experiment with this more but plan to shortly.

Anyway, perform the upgrade if you haven’t already. I think you’ll like it. Otherwise, you can read more about WordPress on my WordPress page.

As some might know, Ruby and Ruby and Rails comes pre-installed in Leopard (a.k.a. MacOS 10.5.x). However, the out-of-the-box experience is semi-incomplete. Here are the quick steps to polish off a fresh Leopard install so you can get back to writing Ruby code. Simply open a terminal window and execute the first four commands listed in the sequence below:

1. sudo gem update –system - This updates the entire gem system to the latest version. It is important that you do this first before anything else.
2. sudo gem update - This will update all of your currently installed gems to their latest versions.
3. sudo gem install ruby-debug - If you want to make use of the interactive debugger then you’ll need this gem. If you need further instruction, then let Railscasts show you how.
4. sudo gem install rspec-rails - This will install RSpec as your testing framework. Note that by installing the rspec-rails gem it will automatically install the required rspec gem as well. Feel free to substitute this step with Shoulda or whatever testing framework you like using the most.
5. Download and install Git - Most have switched to Git, you should too. Especially if you want to easily download and install Rails plug-ins or other open source code.

There are, of course, many other gems that can be configured to make you more productive but the items listed above are enough to quickly get you started. For a more comprehensive view of what you can do, check out my Ruby page.

1. MacOS 10.5 (Leopard Disk) - choose “Erase and Install” using Journaled, Case-Sensitve settings and make sure to skip the DVD integrity check (unless you are nervous or you want to spend an hour waiting).
2. XCode Tools (Leopard Disk)
3. GarageBand, iPhoto, iDVD, and iMovie (Tiger Disk)
4. MacOS X 10.5.5 Combo Patch (download)
5. Airport Extreme (disk)
6. Canon Printer Utilities (disk)
7. iTunes (download)
8. QuickTime (download)
9. PathFinder (download)
10. OmniFocus (download)
11. FileZilla (download)
12. Firefox (download)
13. Vienna (download)
14. 1Password (download)
15. Jing (download)
16. Caffeine (download)
17. iStat Menus (download)
18. You Control: Tunes (download)
19. TextMate (download)
20. Eclipse (download)
21. Netbeans (download)
22. VMWare Fusion (download)
23. Billings (download)
24. MoneyWell (download)
25. Delicious Library (download)
26. OpenOffice (download)
27. Skype (download)
28. Adobe AIR (download)
29. TweetDeck (download)
30. Lorem Ipsum widget (download)
31. Boxee (download)
32. Logitech Harmony 890 remote software (download)
33. Startup Sound
34. Software Updates (via the Apple icon, requires a couple reboots)

You can learn more about some of these apps on my Applications page. Also, since I’m one of those who likes organization, I wrote a post on data management a while back that sheds further light on how I manage my apps and the data related to them in case it is of interest (Note: even though the post was originally written for Windows some of the concepts still apply for the MacOS).

The trouble has been that OmniFocus for the iPhone initially only worked with the MobileMe and WebDAV services. I did setup an Online File Folder account with GoDaddy but it didn’t work right. I would sync my data only to find that repeating tasks would start duplicating on both my iPhone and my desktop. This proved too be to annoying to cope with and eventually I gave up using the app on my iPhone.

The good news (and something I have been patiently waiting for) is that OmniFocus for the desktop (version 1.5) and OmniFocus for the iPhone (version 1.1.2) both support Bonjour network synching now. This means that I can sync the data between my desktop and my iPhone using my local network. Finally, it all works!

The setup is really easy. For OmniFocus on the desktop, you just need to adjust your preferences as such:

(click to view)

Then from the iPhone, you enter the settings menu and pick the Bonjour network as shown here:

The best part, of course, is being able to make use of all your actions while on the go. Here are some screenshots that show OmniFocus being used on my iPhone:

(home screen)

(main application screen)

(contexts screen)

I have written about OmniFocus many times before on this site (more notes here) but if you are looking for a GTD solution that works both from your desktop and while you are mobile, then this is definitely worth checking out. I’m definitely happy with it (finally).

For the MacOS only.

As a small business owner, tracking the projects that you are working on, the hours worked, your billing rate, generating invoices, etc. can be a hassle. I bought Billings 3 a couple of weeks ago to solve these issues and am glad I did. While you can visit Billings 3 web site to learn, here are a few pros and cons from my experience:

Things I Like

1. Getting started is really easy. Simply import client information from your Address Book, create a new project associated with the client, create a working slip, set your hourly rate, and start the timer to clock your hours.
2. After the application is started a little clock timer shows up in the MacOS menu bar giving you a handy way to start/stop time. You can also set when the timer should time out in case you forget to turn it off manually.
3. Working slips are how you track time and itemize work for a project as a whole. I like to label my working slips by versions, milestones, iterations, etc. For example, I might have a project called GeoMiner that requires two months worth of work with two-week milestones. Each working slip slip can be labeled Milestone 1, Milestone 2, etc.
4. Being able to generate professional looking invoices from working slips saves me a ton of time. It only takes a couple button clicks to turn a working slip into an invoice which can then be e-mailed as a PDF or printed out.
5. There are multiple theme templates you can choose from to style your reports, invoices, etc. There is also support for building your own theme or customizing an existing one.
6. Theme templates can also be applied to labels and envelopes. I find the envelope printing feature very handy not only for clients but for other printing purposes where you need a professional look and feel.
7. Even though a project must be tied to a client, there is support for personal projects. For me, this is extremely handy as I use personal projects to track time spent on open source projects, the work I do for my HOA, experimental R&D, etc. Even if you are not running a business, I see this as a great tool to add perspective on how you manage and spend your time.

Things I Don’t Like

1. Client information is pulled from your address book when setting up new work. That is fine. What I don’t like is that a new category gets automatically created in your address book called Billings. Bah.
2. I wish you could track stock being earned in a company. Let’s say that for each hour you work, 5 shares of stock is accumulated. It would be nice to automatically track and see a summary of your stock total by working slip and project as a whole. The workaround is to use the customized fields feature of a project, label it “Stock Shares”, and then manually do the calculations after each invoice billed.
3. When going into triple digits for hours worked, the timer really only has space for showing double digits so some of the numbering gets cut off unless you dig into the log a bit more. Not a big deal but something that could definitely be fixed in the future.

So give Billings 3 a look. I definitely recommend buying a copy (which is at a discount currently) if you are in need of tracking projects, time, and keeping yourself organized.

body { background: #e75210 url(/images/main/bg.jpg) repeat-x top; }

This worked greate in Firefox and Internet Explorer. However, in Safari, I ended up with the following:

Not too sexy, right? Turns out that I wasn’t saving my JPG image for web format in Photoshop. I was saving it as a straight JPG image at a medium quality setting. Once I saved the image for web, Safari was happy and now I get the same experience in all three browsers.

A word of caution though, these podcasts are pretty rough. Here are a few reasons why:

1. No Labels - Each show is simply a number both when viewed from your iPhone/iPod and on the file system of your OS. Makes it hard to remember what each show is about and why you would want to listen to it.
2. Poor Sound - The sound quality is so low that I have to set my headphones at maximum volume and even then it is hard to sometimes hear.
3. Poor Use of Technology - For me, when you start talking about code, it really should be in a screencast as it is hard to convey in speech only.

I downloaded the screencasts but haven’t had a chance to check them out. I’m hoping they are better than the podcasts. That being said, there are a few tips and tricks that I have picked up along the way.

Rubyology is hosted by Chris Matthieu who lives in the Phoenix area and can sometimes be found at the local Ruby user group gatherings.

The answer? OmniFocus. With OmniFocus I can open the Quick Entry window from any MacOS Space by using the global CTRL+OPTION+SPACE key combo. BTW, for those not familiar with OmniFocus, you can read more about it on my OmniFocus page. Here is my setup:

The projects you see above are the standard fair where I have all my “next actions” listed in “Bug” and “Enhancement” projects so I can tackle them when I’m in my “Work” context. The new project I added was “Deliverables” to capture items that I need to send out using the “Pending” context. As I complete my next actions in the “Bug” and “Enhancement” projects, I bring up a new Quick Entry window and quickly document what I fixed or enhanced. This might sound like duplicate work but not really. The reason is that what I enter as a “Deliverable” gets additional documentation because it needs to be readable by the client. I can enhance the action by using the note capabilities of the action such as adding more text or capturing a screenshot or two. The Quick Entry window is also handy in those cases for capturing tangential fixes or enhancements while in the midst of working on another action.

When it comes time to release a new milestone to the client, I can export all “Pending” actions into a document and I’m done (or export the entire project as HTML). No longer is there extra work at the end of week assembling all the documentation together. Now I am getting things done faster with more time spent coding.

The following screenshot helps illustrate (this is a view of the “Deliverables project for all actions in the “Pending” context, sorry had to blur most of the content out — too many secrets ya know):

(click to view)

Now, if only OmniFocus would allow me to export the contents of my “Deliverables” project as PDF. Maybe it’ll happen in the future.

• /app/views/shared/message.rjs = The JavaScript code that will render my message partial.
• /app/views/shared/_message.rhtml = The message partial that will display the message.

The RJS code looks like this:

(click to view)

The first line inserts my message partial at the top of my “content” element which, in this case, is a DIV. The rest of the code forces the page to delay for five seconds while the message is being viewed. After the five seconds is up, the message is faded for one second. The fade should be quick as I think the effect is more visually appealing when it fades fast.

The message partial code looks like this:

(click to view)

I like to initialize my partials with default values for required parameters so if things are missing the partial will still work and that is what the first two lines of code do. The last line of code simply displays the message based on the parameter values: type and message.

The resulting desired affect looks like this:

Error Message (delay for five seconds)

(click to view)

Error Message (being faded out)

(click to view)

Error Message (gone, page is back to normal)

(click to view)

As you might gather from the code, the message type determines the type of CSS used to style the message. For example: info = green, warning = yellow, and error = red.

(click to view)

With the context of Lifehacker article (mentioned above) in mind, here is what I have done:

1. Added only the essential icons (i.e. back, forward, refresh, new tab, etc). to the Navigation Toolbar.
2. Added the address bar to and dropped the search bar (who uses this anyway) from the Navigation Toolbar.
3. Put only my most used bookmarks on the Bookmarks Toolbar and grouped related bookmarks into folders.
4. The last row is my web tabs which can grow and shrink depending on how much content I am reading, of course.

That is all that is needed IMO. Find what works for you and reclaim your screen real estate.

I have been busy developing a couple different Rails applications lately and wanted to share some of my favorite Ruby feeds that I follow daily in case it is of interest to fellow Ruby developers:

• Ruby Inside - Get the inside scoop on Ruby news.
• RubyFlow - A great site for picking up new Ruby resources to add to your development repertoire.
• Talk Like a Duck - Digs into the depths of the Ruby language.
• Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots - Good development tips and tricks, mostly related to Rails.
• Rails Inside - Get the inside scoop on Rails news.
• Rails Spikes - A multi-authored site of Ruby developers discussing news, tips, code, etc.
• Ruby on Rails Security Project - A good place to read up on security issues or at least keep your mind in it.
• Rails Envy - An entertaining and informative weekly podcast dedicated to Ruby, Rails, and web framework news.
• Rails Podcasts - Ruby/Rails podcasts by Geoffrey Grosenbach of PeepCode fame.

BTW, you can find this list and more on my Ruby page. While I don’t broadcast my page updates anymore I do update that page on a weekly basis.

You can find me on Twitter, learn how I use of Twitter, and study more about Twitter on my Twitter page if you want to learn more.

The site is being hosted by Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood and is only a week or two old. I applaud what these guys are doing and look forward to seeing how the site matures.

Documentation

Visit the main page for more info.

Enhancements

• Surfaced functionality as found in the wp_list_categories WordPress function. This allows you customize how your categories are displayed as part of your site theme. For an example of this widget in action, take a look at how it is being used on this site.

Fixes

• None at the moment.

Downloads

• 1.0.0 (Downloads: 88)

© Twitter

I admit that I wasn’t the first get into Twitter. Even now I use it in moderation. That being said, I do enjoy Twitter and wish that more people that I know would make use of it. At least for me, sharing what you are up to and what you are learning can be quite educational.

Here is how I have integrated Twitter into my daily workflow.

Subscribing

I don’t follow, I subscribe. Yeah, instead of following people on Twitter, which is the default behavior, I just subscribe to the syndicated feed at the bottom of a person’s Twitter page. Like so:

Reading

Every day, during lunch, I check my syndicated feeds…

…using a feed reader, like Vienna, to see what is new. Occasionally, I’ll do a quick pulse check in the morning and evening but that’s about it.

Writing

As for posting new content to Twitter, I’ll use the following MacOS dashboard widgets:

If mobile, I’ll compose an SMS text message from my iPhone.

Rules of Thumb

1. Never subscribe to someone that averages more than 15 tweets a day unless they are really good. You’ve got other stuff to read and at a certain point it just becomes noise.
2. Never post more than 15 tweets a day with occasional exceptions for those special moments. Hey, you are just one voice out of many that someone might be paying attention to, so try to make your stuff worthwhile.

Related Resources

Check out my Twitter and Mac OS pages to learn more.

Documentation

• Main Page
• Javadoc

New requirements have been added for Apache Commons Collections and Codec. These details can be found on the main page.

Enhancements

• Chrono - Added this class as a way to record the duration of time with the ability to start, stop, and reset time.
• MeasurementKit - Added centering for int and float values.
• GraphicKit - Added this utility class for dealing with screen resolutions and the resizing of rectangles.
• Log4jKit - Added this utility class to aid in the logging of messages.
• FileInfo - Added this class as a way to surface human readable information about files such as file size, date, time, checksum, and a few other conveniences.
• JDOMKit - Added methods to aid in acquiring the XML document or root element objects from a XML file. Optional validation support is included as well. Also added methods that can write a collection of element producers to file and print documents and elements to the system console.

Fixes

• None at the moment.

Downloads

• 1.1.0 (binary) (Downloads: 89)
• 1.1.0 (source) (Downloads: 101)

WordPress 2.5 is finally out and I spent some time over the weekend upgrading this site from 2.2 to 2.5 (yeah, I’m a slacker). Not only did I upgrade this site to 2.5 but I also migrated from MySQL 4.0 to 5.0 (finally!). It was a painless process and I think things seem to be working fairly well on this site.

As for Wordpress 2.5, there are many interesting things to check out. I might write more about WordPress 2.5 in the future but, for now, here is the latest news:

• WordPress 2.5 - The official WordPress news.
• 10 Things You Need To Know About WordPress 2.5.
• WordPress 2.5 Object Cache Improvements.
• WordPress 2.5 Plugin Settings Pages Style Guide
• Wordpress 2.5 F.A.Q., Version 1
• Wordpress 2.5 F.A.Q., Version 2

By the way, if you like WordPress and want to learn more about it, you can find more information on my WordPress page.

JarScan is a tool that can aid in resolving import errors when you have a Java library missing from your classpath. This assumes you have the Java library on your system somewhere but don’t know where it is located or what is it named as.

Download and run “java -jar jarscan.jar -help” from the command line to learn how to use it. For example, a command like:

java -jar jarscan.jar -dir <directory to search> -zip -package javax.media

…can search a directory and sub-directories for the “javax.media” package in all JAR and ZIP files.

There is also an online version of this tool as well.

You also need to make sure that your Windows VM “Date & Time” properties are set properly:

Having both the Windows VM and your host computer (the one running the Windows VM) perform time synchronization can cause Windows to report the wrong time. Instead, just let the host computer do all the work.

Overview

This Java library is a collection tools I have written in the evenings and weekends to solve interesting problems that I have come across. Maybe you will find these tools useful as well. This library builds upon my other Java library: Aeonscope Core Library.

Enhancements

• File Stubber - Allows one to create a duplicate but lightweight file structure for testing purposes.
• Eclipse User Library Generator - A tool for creating an Eclipse user library (XML file) on a series of sub-directories that contain third-party Java libraries. This tool assumes you have working knowledge of the Eclipse IDE.

Fixes

• None at the moment, this is the initial release.

Documentation

• Main Page
• Javadoc

Downloads

• Binary (Downloads: 74)
• Source (Downloads: 84)