Jacken's Blog » Programming

My favorite commands in .bash_profile on Mac OS X

Jacken — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 00:30:58 +0000

Here’s some additions to my .bash_profile for making life easier. I especially like that completion now ignores case. Makes navigating the file system so much faster. Givem a spin.

export HISTCONTROL=erasedups export HISTSIZE=10000 shopt -s histappend set completion-ignore-case on

Arduino, a good way for kids to learn how to program

Jacken — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 21:34:05 +0000

My twelve year old son want’s to learn how to program. My first idea was to teach him Ruby or Python, but I decided to go with Arduino. It’s C-based so that’s a good start I think. Were currently planning a couple of projects but so far he’s managed to get some LED’s blinking. A good start.

Rating with stars and why it sucks

Jacken — Sat, 02 May 2009 22:00:37 +0000

I’m been working on an application lately where we need to have some sort of rating. Almost instinctively one thinks of using stars to let the user choose how much they like something. But I soon realized that stars with 1-5 rating does not work. Well, let me elaborate, it does not work like a scale. Most fill them in like a boolean value. If they like it, they put four or five stars, and 1 if they don’t like it. If the product does not create an emotional response, they don’t put any stars at all, because most people only rate something they really like or hate. It would be fun to have a star rating system that actually put you up against the wall when you fill something in. You’ve just watched one of Hollywoods latest money making machine movie, and you liked it well enough. A good time waster. So you put four stars. The system then asks you, “Are you sure that you think this is as good as Deer Hunter?” Most sane persons would realize that they made an error in judgement and lower the score. And then stop using the rating system, because who want’s to be corrected by a computer?

Download all files in RSS feed using Ruby

Jacken — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 17:26:33 +0000

I’m working on learning Ruby on Rails and one great resource that I find myself going to is RailsCast. But as I really need to learn Ruby I wanted to write a quick program to download all the episodes to my harddisk and watch them using Plex Media Center. There’s probably a million different utilities (or podcast managers) that can do that, but using them I won’t learn to program Ruby that way. There’s probably a better way of doing this, but hey, do it and post a comment. [cc lang="ruby"] require ‘rubygems’ require ‘hpricot’ require ‘open-uri’

doc = Hpricot.XML(open(“http://feeds.feedburner.com/railscasts”))

(doc/”enclosure”).each do |para| filename = File.basename(para[:url]) puts “== Found a file #{filename}” open(filename,”w”).write(open(para[:url]).read) end [/cc]

iPhone will increase Macintosh software

Jacken — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 11:32:32 +0000

Nobody talks about the fact that all the companies that will now start making programs for the iPhone will first learn how easy it is to program with Cocoa. Then suddenly you have a lot of new programmers that know how to program for the Mac as well. Yes, it’s that similar. What would stop them, now that they have inhouse knowledge to make a Macintosh version of the software? Nothing…

Yes, please apple, kill AppleScript

Jacken — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 22:45:27 +0000

Everytime (well, last night actually) when I need to do something with Applescript I shudder with horror. The syntax is actually something you forget all the time. There must be better alternatives for Apple to use as a scripting language. I agree with this article, but Python or Ruby would be a better alternative I think.

Ruby on Rails Beginners

Jacken — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 22:03:20 +0000

After reading Agile Web development with Rails, I still didn’t feel I had a grasp on how Ruby on Rails worked. It didn’t go into detail on how everything worked made it harder to learn. I don’t feel I was ripped off when buying this book, but I looked for a better one. And I found it. Ruby on Rails: Up and Running is a much better beginners book. Following the examples really helps you get to grips with all the ins and outs of Rails programming. Highly recommended.

JackenIAX with multiple lines support

Jacken — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 14:16:41 +0000

I finally completed a new version of JackenIAX. It now has up to four lines support. I also added a searchable call log. Lot’s of other small improvements as well.

JackenIAX and multiple lines

Jacken — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 18:12:19 +0000

I finally have a version of JackenIAX that supports multiple lines. I have added so you can choose to output background music for the calls on hold. There’s a lot of testing, and I also have to rethink the user interface to be able to handle multiple calls. But i think it’s going to be cool.

Adding new features

Jacken — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 22:21:09 +0000

Every time I answer the phone (yes, I’m using JackenIAX), I have to pause iTunes before answering. So today I added an option so when you answer or dial, iTunes pauses automatically. It will be in the next release (within a couple of days) I had to rewrite a large section of code for some other features that I have planned. I’m getting a bit more comfortable with Cocoa programming, and discovers old code full of brain farts. And the code is getting smaller with more features. A step in the right direction…