justaddwater.dk

(UPDATED) The GWT developer plugin has been updated to works with Firefox 9, a couple of days ago. Its not yet officially available, but can be downloaded directly from the codebase: google-web-toolkit.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ prebuilt folder in here  is the gwt-dev-plugin.xpi, and it works like a charm :) Previously i wrote when the plugin was updated to [...]

For projects I sometimes have lots of screenshots which I have to repeat whenever I change subtle things in the CSS or HTML. I ended up creating this little handy script based on webkit2png (download source) #!/usr/bin/env sh HOST=”http://localhost:8080/myproject/viewer” /usr/bin/python webkit2png -F -o “01dashboard” $HOST/dashboard /usr/bin/python webkit2png -F -o “02showdetail” $HOST/detail /usr/bin/python webkit2png -F -o [...]

Using maven behind a firewall in environments with an internal repository can be troublesome, and even break the build. Here is an option to set up Maven

Just a quick tip for intellij users. For an old project i wanted to convert JUnit 3 testcases to JUnit4 format. Most stuff was already in place, but after the conversion, i found that some of the old “assertTrue”, “assertFalse”, and “assertEquals” statements were failing. So i ended up with some short search/replace, which are really [...]

UPDATED 2011-12-14: Prebuilt folder now contains Firefox 8 version of the GWT developer plugin. Since Firefox 7 was released, i have defered upgrading for one simple reason: At work I am dependent on GWT Developer plugin. Today I found the ready-to-release plugin which actually works with Firefox 7: http://google-web-toolkit.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/plugins/xpcom/prebuilt/ in here  is the gwt-dev-plugin.xpi, and [...]

I thought it was time to collect some of my most useful findings when working with Git. These are typically from situations where I found a useful way, which I wanted to jot down. Also I have answered and asked some questions on StackOverflow. The good thing about it, is that I am always able [...]

Time for a little geeky gimmick. Some developers see and express a lot of “WTF??” while trying to understand code IN this spirit, i created a quick @WTF annotation for Java. Besides being completely useless (its removed at compile time), its only purpose is to give developers a new way to express themselves in code. [...]

Just a quick note to self about this tip i found. It is a Windows (XP) helpful command line snippet that removes all your temporary files. Delete all files in temp folder: DEL /F /S /Q %TEMP% Taken from the “A-Z Index of the Windows CMD command line”

At a current project I work on, we use a Windows server to run our subversion repository. I wanted to set up the pre-commit hook so that commits with empty comment are automatically rejected. All commit-hook example files that go with Subversion are written in bash (as unix servers tend to be the normal). Here [...]

Grabbing data from Restful webservices has never been easier. I use this code in the Rails /db/seeds.rb file to grab data from the Danish webservice with addresses, municipalities, regions, etc. I decided to import the data into a local database to ensure it could work offline. Code from /db/seeds.rb file: Now I can access municipalities [...]

Hudson continuous integration server has a console which is good for testing scripts and access to commands that your Hudson jobs need. The hudson console only let’s you run Groovy script. To run commands on the machine, Groovy has the method “string”.execute() . So now I can use this snippet to test versions of Ruby, [...]

I recently deleted a branch from our (svn) code repository. Did you know that it’s the general recommendation to delete a branch after a merge to ensure that nobody commits to it. (see svnmerge wiki for more on that advice) Svn checkout, svn info, etc. all fail when you try to access the deleted branch [...]

For a project I’m working on, I had to change some files with personal settings, and the files kept showing up with a git status . Adding files to .gitignore that are already tracked does not work. (and it’s actually pretty well documented in the documentation). In stead, it’s possible to use this command: git [...]

There are alternatives to Resolve Symlinks When Copying Files With Rsync . How about firing up a (tiny) webserver that starts up quickly. Yehuda Katz suggested this some years ago: Just drop this file in any directory, run the script, and it serves the files. I use this frequently for instance when I need to [...]

When it comes to source code, i am a perfectionist. I cant stand to see trailing whitespace, interchanged tabs/spaces, etc. This Stackoverflow user asked How To Remove Trailing Whitespace Of All Files Recursively. This reply helped me to work around the fact that \s and \t are not supported in the mac version of sed: [...]

For my own convenience I created this script to identify css files where colors like #aaaaaa can be rewritten in the short form #aaa (saves bandwith, but can also make it easier to identify similar colors) grep -nE ‘#([0-9a-f])\1([0-9a-f])\2([0-9a-f])\3′ **/*.css output from a random project: css/actions.css:19: color: #000000; css/actions.css:38: color: #000000 !important; css/actions.css:53: color: #ffffff [...]

In a project I’m working on there is a structure where images and css are common for some of the subprojects. One folder has static pages for testing HTML + CSS layout. This folder has some symlinks to the /css folder and /images folder. Now, on my Mac during normal development, this works perfectly. But [...]

I often want to extract parts of HTML page. Often I find myself parsing a doc with Nokogiri and extracting it with a CSS selector. It’s pretty straight-forward from scratch. To follow the Don’t Repeat Yourself principle, I created a script to make it a one-liner. Just run ruby parsepage.rb [url] [css_selector] Feel free to [...]

Here is a short one-liner that really annoyed my colleagues today. I set my mac to read aloud all changes in the repository since yesterday: git log –pretty=format:”%an commit %s, %ad.” –date=relative –since=yesterday |say if you remove the “say” command in the end it’s actually pretty readable: pagerbak commit VA17, 34 minutes ago. pagerbak commit [...]

I learned this nice little hack to bypass the standard browser setting that normally prevents background images from being printed. The hack makes use of converting the background-image to a list item with an image. /* Hack, to trick the browser to print another logo Unfortunetaly, Firefox on Windows doesn’t show logo on print — [...]

I made this addition today after (once again) struggling with option groups for a nested Rails model. My solution: create a new tag for FormOptionsHelper: grouped_select http://gist.github.com/179075

UPDATE 9 hours later: Changed to “remote = origin” to the specific branch “remote = dean” which works! Short explanation on how to pull changes from different Git repositories into your local Git repository. Last week I worked with three different Github forks of a project. Now for standard, when you clone a Github repository, [...]

Many of my colleagues know svn but are in general not (yet) ready jump over to using Git for bigger projects. Today I had to import my existing Git repository into SVN. I had been working locally with a Git repos and wanted to keep my history before giving access to my colleagues. The guide [...]

For the last months I have been using Git to work with my Subversion repositories. Besides from reducing disk usage, Git also makes my work slightly faster and independent of network access — I can make commits to repository which is sync’ed later when I get online. One challenge though: Using branches I ran into [...]

My problem this week: I wanted to share some work with a colleague. Unfortunately we have not yet setup our caplab environment with git server. Nor did i want to push this particular project to GitHub or Unfuddle. My alternative was a file-based setup: Each developer’s machine has it’s own Git repository. On my machine [...]

A side benefit of switching from Subversion to Git for source control is that Git does not use shadow files and directories to find out what has changed. I created two checkouts of a svn project — one using traditional svn and one using git (which can actually clone a svn repos — see explanation [...]

If you’re using Resource Controller for Ruby on Rails, you may want to look atthe plugin I just created. From the readme file: ResouceControllerRespondTo ========================== Extends ResourceController plugin for Rails to make it respond_to .xml and .json formats Based on code by Florent Piteau and Joe Fiorini… Jesper merely provided the glue and packed as [...]

I used this quick trick today to help me clean up and refactor some javascript functions today: if (“console” in window) console.warn(‘DEPRECATED function call to ‘+ arguments.callee +’\nCalled by:\n’+ arguments.callee.caller ); Which results in a fine deprecation warning in the console: There is plenty of space for improvement here. Feel free to use or tamper [...]

After reading Pragmatic Programmer at my recent vacation, I immediately found an urge to repeat myself and read it again.

Ironic that one of the most popular tips from it is “Don’t repeat yourself”.

Christian Dalager and I did an internal Capgemini SmartLunch presentation about REST interfaces in the public Danish sector. REST interface is great news for those in favor of easy-to-integrate, scalable SOA interfaces, and REST services is actually used more than SOAP, XMLRPC, etc. in companies offering multiple interfaces to their data (Amazon, Yahoo, Google, Ebay, [...]

A problem in a current Rails app just found a decent solution, as Danish letters like æøå did not show up decently. It turned out (surprise) that Outlook had a problem accepting UTF-8 charset. On the Meeting model in the Rails app I want to save to calendar in an Outlook compatible format. We solved [...]

What’s Watir? Read “Watir: Another sweetspot for Enterprise Ruby” Is it possible to run JavaScript functions or execute code from within your Watir test scripts? As a matter of fact it is, but I had a hard time finding the proper documentation for it. Here is what to do and how: Call JavaScript Functions from [...]

E-texteditor just got out of beta. I have actively contributed with improvement suggestions and error reports, as this editor has all needed features for rapid web devlopment, and has potential to become even better. I suggest you check out the inspiring screencast and perhaps buy a trial if you like it. More info: E-Texteditor website: [...]

Firebug keeps surprising me. I’ve recently been working on code for several web designs and this little trick helped me to understand existing HTML and CSS much faster. Just to give an example I use our Justaddwater RSS feed page (but could be any page). Before you start, get Firebug for Firefox (if you haven’t [...]

I have been looking a fast, intuitive editor for my Windows laptop. Now I stopped looking. E-texteditor for windows is very intuitive and easy to use. I highly recommend watching the screencast (a short tour of some of the best features). Although it’s still in beta, it seems so much better than the alternatives. I’m [...]

UPDATE May 1st, 2007 (forgot the two final steps 8 and 9). I’ve run into the situation a couple of times where I get started on a client’s office, but due to delays and politics it takes time to get a proper versioning control server set up. It turned out to be easy when I [...]

It’s been a while where web standards don’t get the attention it deserves on this blog. In that spirit, here’s a behind-the-scenes view on how Technorati makes rounded corners on a faded background. I remember Eric Meyer mentioned this solution back at a workshop in 2005 (before he could actually tell that it was for [...]

2 years ago I wrote a small javascript to view, edit and delete cookies. The really cool thing about this user interface is the inline editing of cookie names and values. I really like the principle that you hover the value that you inspect, can see that it’s editable. Then click directly and the text [...]

Recently I’ve been working on a plugin for Ruby on Rails that help me out when creating new Rails applications in Danish. Previously, when we’ve created Danish prototypes for our customers all the default Rails error messages were still written in English.

I generalized it for use with any language, and currently (with the help from contributors) it’s now available for download on rubyforge.

Project managers often have a hard time understanding web standards and why they matter. In this case, my arguments made a perfect business case for the managers of a particular project.