Syntactic Saccharose

Cut'n'fold Stormtroopers!

A coworker, Juanma, and I use to send over IM more or less daily an star wars related link. In order to avoid all this effort to be lost, I'll post them here as time permits.

Here is the first one: Dave Hill: Jedi Master

As you might know if you visit this blog regularly, I'm not updating quite often. Part of the reason behind that is my schedule, and part of it is the current hosting situation: this blog is hosted at Textdrive on one of their shared FreeBSD servers.

Unfortunately, some time ago the powers that be at Textdrive decided to limit the resource consumption of their shared accounts, and since then, rails applications on Textdrive are often killed due to their excessive memory usage (for values of excessive starting at 48MB). Since the blog is powered by Mephisto, a rails application, it often occurred that I had to abandon editing a new entry, or updating the design.

However, not all is lost. As it turns out, Texdrive is massively migrating their FreeBSD accounts to their shared Accelerators, powerful Sun servers running OpenSolaris, and with much broad resource limits. According to users who have completed the migration, the new servers fly!

So, this post is mostly to announce that, until my account is moved to the new servers, I'll refrain from updating the blog. I hold a Premier account, so I'll be in the first lot of customers to move, though I'll still have to wait, since the order is alphabetical and my account begins with 'v'. Please be patient and stay tuned.

Update 18/10/2007: If you can see this, it means I'm on the new server

and here you have the results :)

Of course, not all my books are in Delicious Library yet. Specially since Amazon doesn't carry most of my books in Spanish. But this is, anyway, a representative sample.

As I said in the previous post, doing this example in Objective-C is trivial and its only purpose is getting familiarized with the tools, so let's try and do it in Ruby instead.

Following the text, the first thing to do is launch XCode and create a new project. Since we installed RubyCocoa, we'll have a new type of project, Cocoa-Ruby Application:

Since the first exercise on the book - on chapter 2- consists merely on following along the instructions and build a simple application, I'm gonna start by doing this same exercise with Ruby. To that end, the RubyCocoa bridge must be installed.

I use the ruby from MacPorts (formerly known as DarwinPorts), so I can't use the binary that one can download from RubyCocoa's site, since that is for the ruby that comes with Mac OS X Tiger. If that were your case, just download the biinary, but be warned that Apple's ruby is buggy.

Installing the bridge is as simple as

sudo port install rb-cocoa

The system will fetch and install the newest version available from the bridge. If a message like this appeared

Error: Target com.apple.activate returned: Image error: /Developer/Documentation/RubyCocoa/build.en.html already exists and does not belong to a registered port. Unable to activate port rb-cocoa.

it means that you already had the package installed for Apple's ruby and in trying to install it, it finds some conflicting files (while they are installed in different places, some files do indeed go to the same place, such as documentation and XCode templates). In that case, you will have to use the following command to activate the port:

sudo port -f activate rb-cocoa

To check that it's working, we'll invoke the interactive interpreter:

$ irb
irb(main):001:0> require 'osx/cocoa'
=> true

Since I bought the Mac I'm trying to learn to program in that environment. I have a couple of books to that effect, but for some reason I can't retain (pun intended) the knowledge in my head to effectively develop on the Mac - that is, I'm constantly referring to the books for every step I need to take. Be it for having to use Interface Builder and its myriad options, or the fact that not using automatic garbage collection scares me (my pointers are certainly rusty), the thing is, I'm sure that if I exercise regularly - as in a code Kata - in the end I will master it.

That's why I'm starting this new section. I'm gonna follow the exercises in Aaron Hillegass' book, Cocoa(R) Programming for Mac(R) OS X in public, commenting and expanding them, so that the peer pressure makes me do it regularly. Mi intention is, provided I have the time and skill, to also rewrite the exercises in some other language than Objective-C -but with bindings for Cocoa, of course- such as Ruby or C# and, while doing so, prepare myself for the release of Leopard, where alternative languages will gather more importance.

Even better if, in doing this, some reader can benefit from it. Likely, having the book will be a requisite to follow the posts effectively, but I will try to make them self-contained. Let's see how I fare...

Please pardon the dust... again. Looks like the resources at TXD are rather tight. Changing themes can bring the samurai's wrath upon the processes, if ye catch me meaning.

Since I’m still getting to know mephisto, I thought I’d try a couple of things out…

Lately, rails has been playing tricks on me. The applications would go and disappear under my feet, segfaulting sometimes without even logging a message. That’s why I’m posting this, to see if the problem appears now that the TXD folks are having an eye on it.

• Update: * Umm… somehow, it’s good news that no problems occur… but then, if there really is a problem, it won’t help that it doesn’t appear now…

It’s a bit annoying somehow. I migrated to mephisto because I suspected typo’s bloat would have something to do with the problems, and now I am missing some features that mephisto doesn’t yet implement (I don’t doubt it will, mephisto is very young still). And yet, I won’t go back, since I’m interested in hosting multiple sites with a single instance of whichever rails app will do that, and just now, only mephisto does it. If it stays stable for one more day, I’ll deem the issue –closed– vanished and try this feature (yes, I haven’t really tried it yet)

Tonight is the premier of the long-expected movie adaptation of the Alatriste novels, created by Arturo Pérez-Reverte. The plot is set in XVIIth Century’s Madrid, when the Spanish empire was beginning its decline. With Viggo Mortensen as Captain Alatriste and lots of other first-line Spanish actors and actresses in the cast, I can’t wait to see it (but I will, at least until tomorrow ;)

No queda sino batirse!

I have just downloaded Inbox during the lunch time and launched it, and then hibernated the machine, so I don’t yet have an opinion. But looks very nice!!

More comments when I test it…

Update: Yeah well… I can say it’s going to be very nice working with Inbox. The beta, though, still doesn’t do automatic processing of items, but looks very promising. I have decided I’ll pony up for it, without waiting to the MacZot or anything.

Via the Mephisto site, I’ve found that one of the projects that I have in the freezer (namely, the client-based syntax highlighter) already has a working implementation by Dan Webb. I don’t know how well it works yet, I’ll have to try it. I’m curious as to its support for nested languages and complex expressions (judging from the language definition files, it is only based on regexen, so I don’t know if Dan will have added support for that)

In any case, it’s in a more advanced state than mine and working on Safari, too! Cheers Dan!

Well, since Typo kept being a resource hog, and with all the pain that this move induces, I’ve taken the decision to try mephisto. Let’s see if with it, I’ll be able to keep the site running… I’ve begun by moving all my posts from Typo (had to put some dummy IPs for the older articles for that to work). The static pages, the themes with mint cookies and all that will soon follow.

Meanwhile, please be patient if you see some glitches. Looks like sometimes the db queries consume all the available memory :(

After too much reaping from TextDrive’s samurai resource keepers, I’ve decided to step down from edge Typo and use the stable version, to see if it keeps more than one day of uptime. I won’t be using my own sidebars until it proves to be stable, and until I adapt them to Piers’ new Sidebar API.

Funnly enough, and old revision of typo for another site keeps its own, under the same account as this blog is run under.