http://yehudakatz.com Random Geek-Related Thoughts Tue, 13 May 2008 01:54:00 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en For the past few months, I've become more and more disillusioned by the current state of Ruby's scripting support. Sure, we have optparse, and a gamut of other solutions, but there's no full-stack package for writing robust binaries. Enter thor. The idea behind thor initially came from my work on a textmate ... http://yehudakatz.com/2008/05/12/by-thors-hammer/ I was at the Dallas Tech Fest this past weekend, and had the opportunity to meet up with some cool guys in the DataMapper community (Sam, Adam, Ben and Bryan). While I was there, I ended up hacking out a few unrelated tools that I thought I'd share with the ... http://yehudakatz.com/2008/05/05/best-things-come-in-threes/ So maybe my title was a bit overdramatic. But in the announcement of IE8's features, one jumped out at me as a potentially game-changing feature. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/readiness/DevelopersNew.htm#dom Yes. That's right. "Selectors are a query language for searching and “selecting” tags (elements) within a webpage. They are most commonly seen in CSS to “select” a group ... http://yehudakatz.com/2008/03/21/ie8-is-gonna-rock/ Last time, we talked about using event bindings to provide a publish/subscribe mechanism for your plugins, and introduce modularity via the event system. This time, we'll talk about two new features added since jQuery 1.2: Setup and teardown for events and the element data store. First up, the element data store: Prior ... http://yehudakatz.com/2008/02/05/modularity-in-jquery-part-ii/ There have recently been several comments along the lines that jQuery is not very modular, once you get past modifying DOM elements. I get why people are saying that, but there's been a lot of features added to jQuery over the past year or so that provide a compelling architecture ... http://yehudakatz.com/2008/02/01/modularity-in-jquery/ No, ladies and gentlemen, we haven't taken a break after releasing 0.5 (The "Thanks Zed" release). With 0.5 out, stable and fast, the Merb team finally took a hard look at where we're going with the framework. Thanks to Engine Yard's investment in our work, I was able to meet ... http://yehudakatz.com/2008/01/14/merbnext/ As you might know, I'm putting the final touches on jQuery in Action, an introductory book on all things jQuery for Manning Publications. I've spent the last half a year diligently plugging away at it, along with my co-author Bear Bibeault, and we're finally hitting the home stretch. It's taken a ... http://yehudakatz.com/2007/12/18/almost-there-30-off-jquery-in-action/ So for all two of you who have been using my Search in a Directory bundle, I have a new version, that has been substantially improved: a massive rewrite that successfully handles closing the window during a grep some UI tweaks an all-around improvement to the underlying code I am also in the process ... http://yehudakatz.com/2007/12/18/search-in-a-directory-third-times-the-charm/ I really like the new Mail.app in Leopard. With Gmail moving to IMAP, I was finally able to get virtually all of the functionality that I'm used to in Gmail on my desktop Mail application, which is really cool. Well... except for one little thing. Mail.app has threads, but it does ... http://yehudakatz.com/2007/11/19/better-threading-in-mailapp/ I posted my initial "Search in a Folder" solution a couple of days ago, and it turned out it had a few bugs (like the backgrounded ruby script never closing, and thus spawning a new ruby process for each time you loaded up the window. There were other user-experience annoyances, ... http://yehudakatz.com/2007/11/15/textmate-search-in-a-folder-with-grep-part-deux/