Recent twitter posts
10.09.08 - 11:59pm
- think its time for a new desk. Maybe a standup, drafting table type. #
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My newest adventure - MythTV, SA3250 HD Cable box and PCHDTV 5500 tuner card for linux
10.09.08 - 07:31am
After converting to a mac many months ago I had remaining my previous ‘workhorse’ machine which wasn’t being used for anything. I was interested in HD television via tuner cards for a computer-based media center so thought i would try and turn that machine into such a resource.
What will follow is a few articles which will include diagrams of how i connected everything together to get the following results. I could have used this information when i started but could not find it.
My basic setup (I will go into details in next post):
- Ubuntu Hardy - 64bit
- MythTV - latest version from the repos
- PCHDTV 5500 tuner card for linux
- Scientific Atlanta 3250 HD Digital cable box
- SchedulesDirect Subscription for channel/program lineups ($20/yr)
Some of the problems I worked thru are as follows (also will be covered in next post):
- Handling different sources of input from the tuner card and the cable box to get best resolution.
- Handling the audio from the cable box versus analog cable line/inputs which included overcoming delayed, out of sync audio, and no audio at all.
I hope these articles will prove helpful to some.
Presenter Pattern
09.16.08 - 10:28pm
I took time to read more about the presenter pattern today. I came across an interesting post which included a few statements that were very compelling:
?The first advantage we gain is that we can unit test view logic easily.?
[ helps eliminate the the frailty of view testing to some degree]
?Secondly, we can move all helper methods into presenters so that we can have a more elegant way to implement these methods.?
[ this seems great because their tends to be either excessive code in helpers in many projects i see or not enough (correct) code in helpers.]
?The third and the most important advantage we gain is that now the model is free from view logic, making its intention much more clear.?
[ who wouldn't want this?]
Clips - a very ‘mac’ way to deal with clipboard fragments
09.12.08 - 09:20pm
I?ve been a user of Conceited Software?s Linkinus IRC application ever since it was first released and love it. Very classy. Now they have applied the same shine to another application that deals with managing the clipboard.
Clips provides a nice usability experience for this type of work. I am just starting to use it but it seems impressive. Pricey but if it really helps me manage the mess of information i deal with, well worth it.
Textmate - fix filetype recognition issues with RSpec and Rails bundles.
07.01.08 - 06:35am
Over time i have collected several ruby related textmate bundles which i have enjoyed tweaking for easier usage. During this time I somehow managed to mangle my file type recognition settings. I first noticed this problem by losing the ability to use the shortcut keystroke to execute rspec tests.
The solution lies in this textmate blog post: http://blog.macromates.com/2007/file-type-detection-rspec-rails
In summary i did the following:
Closed textmate completely and deleted the related manual textmate bindings for these languages with the following command in the terminal:
defaults delete com.macromates.textmate OakLanguageFileBindings
Next I changed the way textmate viewed ownership of the .rb file extension. I specifically revoked it from the Ruby bundle and enforced the ownsership in the RubyOnRails bundle.
Opened textmate and navigate to Bundles -> Bundle Editor -> Edit Languages and added rb to the Ruby on Rails grammar’s fileTypes array so that it reads:
fileTypes = ( 'rb', 'rxml', 'builder' );
Note: These are the values in my RubyOnRails language settings. Yours may differ but the important entry is ‘rb‘. Make sure its included in the list.
Next, I navigated to the Ruby Bundle -> Language settings in similar fashion and REMOVE the ‘rb’ file type from the list. There was a large amount of text to sort through in looking for this setting so i simply copied all to a text window, searched and replaced then pasted back into the textmate language definition window.
At this point the filetypes were registering fine for rspec tests and ruby/rails filetypes. I checked this by watching the status bar - filetype setting display.