OK… I was just watching twitter this morning, and this came across, and I just started giggling:
Wil is a character. Smart, funny, witty, but a character that is totally unafraid of calling out someone or some company. It's nice to see it, as so many of the tech community has enforced biases, and that's not really doing anyone a service.
Funny, funny, tweet.
This morning we once again had a series of production problems caused by Salesforce.com - this time, it was that a class had been deployed to the production instance and the permissions hadn't been set properly. How I figured this out - I don't know. I mean, I know how I figured it out - I looked, but to look was a stroke of luck.
I certainly believe in things we can't see and touch, so I'm not against divine intervention, but I just have no idea why He'd want me to figure this out so quickly. In any case, all the calls to updating the merchant data were failing, and the error was not the same one as I'd seen previously, so seeing no one in the Salesforce support group in at 7:00 am, I decided to start digging and see if I could find the problem.
Thankfully, I remember the support crew checking these in the last go-round, so I thought I'd give it a go. Turns out I was right. Still took me until 9:00 am to get everything re-run for the day. Nothing I could do about it, but without checking on their part, and them coming in later, there's not much else I could do.
I just saw a tweet and immediately started to giggle:
I hit the link and started reading. The changes are OK, but nothing substantial like keeping things open and allowing image sharing. Then, at the bottom of the article, they said:
We’ve made a bunch of other improvements to the app and many more are on the way. Thanks everyone for your great, constructive comments. We’re listening. We’ve also made the old version of Skitch available for those that want it. Stay tuned, our app to help you communicate and share your ideas visually is just getting started.
HA!
Evernote looked at the horrible ratings on the App Store, and they relented to leave the older version up. I immediately downloaded it on my MacBook Pro and it fixed all the configuration issues I've been trying to get around. This is excellent news!
Now, all I need is to set up a decent WebDAV server, or just leave it as FTP and I'm good to go. Also, I have CloudApp and that works as well.
This morning I spent all morning struggling with some production issues. The runs didn't complete, and I had to dig into the logs to find out why. Here, again, the way a lot of the Ruby devs function really hurts maintenance. This optimistic coding is something I've fought for a great number of years, and it seems that it's really systemic, or maybe endemic to the industry. People want to think "This works… and if it doesn't then it's not my fault". This might be true, but that doesn't make it right.
So first thing was figuring out what was wrong with the data. It seemed to be a data problem, so that's where I started digging. Pretty soon, I realized that the source of the data - Salesforce.com, wasn't returning the data - saying that the HTTP GET was invalid, but a POST was acceptable. I looked at the code, saw where we were doing GETs and figured out that we had the ability to do POSTs as well - changed them, retried, and still no good.
Got onto Campfire to explain the situation and try to find help. Clearly, something with Salesforce.com changed overnight and it was now no longer accepting the calls that were working yesterday.
After a lot of failed attempts, I was finally able to convince myself that there was nothing wrong with our code - that it was Salesforce.com that was simply refusing the API calls we had made yesterday. I was able to confirm this with one of our Salesforce support guys, and he thought he knew the problem, but not the solution. So off he went to figure it out.
In the end, Salesforce requires that when you deploy code, you have to manually recompile everything - or manually run all the tests to activate all the URLs in the code. Interesting.
Once that was fixed, the calls worked and everything was able to run. I finished the production runs at about 11:00 am.
What a morning.
Well… I got to thinking this evening on the train ride home that getting Skitch 1.x working again might be nice. After all, I was able to use it on my work laptop and save an image to the Skitch.com servers, and that gave me hope. Well… honestly, it didn't hurt that the reviews for the latest version weren't looking too great on the Mac App Store:
…clearly, the vast majority of the people buying the app aren't buying the changes. So I thought Maybe they'll turn around? OK… so I'm a hopeful romantic.
In any case, I was able to fire up Skitch 1.x and then try to save something and it asked me if I wanted to use my Evernote account, or try the 'old school' login on my Skitch account. I put that in, and presto! I was logged in. As long as I don't go to the Preferences panel, I'm going to stay logged in. That's great news!
I'm still not going to get too attached to it - but maybe it's possible that Evernote is going to look at this feedback and see that they need to back off what they are doing.
At least that's what I'm hoping for…
At The Shop we use Campfire for 'chat' as opposed to using IRC. I can see the advantage - it's very popular, it's already logging, and there's a reason to outsource those things that you don't offer a competitive advantage. There's a nice Mac OS X native app called Propane that allows you to have Campfire open in a nice app as opposed to a web browser. It's basically a simple WebKit view of the data stream from Campfire, but it's nice and slick, and there's several things it can do that are nice.
One of the nice things is that it can do is to offer call-backs to the image rendering so that we can modify the stream, and easily add additional CSS for the rendering. This was something I've been looking to work on as I don't really like the default font and size as well as seeing a few guys in The Shop having a nice call-back that adds the user's gravatar to the stream.
Here's how I did it.
First, you can get use copy this gist:
as the file: ~/Library/Application Support/Propane/unsupported/caveatPatchor.js
Restart.
That's most of it as it's got the gravatars now. Next, is to change the fonts of the main text and the fixed-width text in the chat window. In order to do that, you need to look in the directory: ~/Library/Application Support/Propane/styles/ and modify the file cf_chat.css to have:
tbody#chat div, tbody#chat span { font-family: Arial, "Lucida Grande", verdana, helvetica, sans-serif ! important; font-size: 0.8em ! important; } code, pre { font-family: Consolas, monospace ! important; font-size: 10px ! important; }
The first part is the main body chat, and the second part is the fixed-width text.
Restart Propane, and you're in business! Much nicer for me.
I loved Skitch when it came out. I paid for it (twice), I paid for the "Skitch Plus" service - all because I wanted to support the guys making great software for the Mac, and I didn't want them to get bought up and thrown away. This was all before it was even out of beta! And for a while, things were good. But no good deed goes unpunished…
I knew a while back that Evernote bought Skitch and I had a bad feeling about it. Skitch was perfect as it was - small, targeted, and perfectly worked UI for the task at hand. Now it was going to be some uber-thing part of this Evernote suite of products. I had a very bad feeling.
Still, for a while, things didn't change.
Then yesterday I saw this tweet:
and my heart sank. I had to read this blog post to get the real effect of the change.
Skitch is getting even better. Soon sharing in Skitch will go through Evernote so that you will be able to take advantage of Evernote's syncing, searching and sharing features. To do this, we are making a few very important changes.
Yeah, you're trashing it!
So I downloaded the Evernote app… made an account, and started the transition. What I found was that the concept behind Evernote is noble. The implementation is just plain nasty. As in crooked nasty. Selling stuff about me, nasty.
I want to pay for something simple. Something clean. I want to support the developers that make great products, but it's clear that far far too many of the devs for the Mac are really looking for the IPO Cha-Ching!, or the Facebook Buyout. They really aren't into sustainable development and pricing. So they do this.
I will admit that they cleaned up the web page a bit:
but they removed all the good URL links. Why?!
My feeling was they didn't want people hitting their servers for the images like Skitch used to allow. I'm not sure that this is the case, but it sure seems like it. For the time being, I'm going to have to live with this as I have at least found a work-around.
But I'll be writing to Evernote and asking for them to be re-instated. Also, can't they use some better URLs for the images? The image above has a URL that's about 250 chars! Gee whiz!
I'm going to have to start looking around for something else. Maybe I need to look at WebDAV and use Skitch as well, but then I'm a little high-and-dry if I loose something. Not really likely, but it's something to think about.
I really hate this kind of change… it's all about the money - not at all about the supporting users.
UPDATE: I tried very hard to post the images form Evernote to this post, and in every case, it failed miserably. I think the Evernote server is again doing this out of spite for the blogs, as the old Skitch site works well. I'm going to have to look at setting up a WebDAV server on HostMonster just for my Skitch usage. Crud.
UPDATE: I spent more than an hour trying to get WebDAV and SFTP working. I was able to get the server-side config working as Panic's Transmit was fantastic. But it's Skitch. Crud. So I sent off a note to Evernote/Skitch support. I sure hope I get a decent answer soon.
[9/12 4:50am] UPDATE: got this back from Evernote support:
Thank you for contacting us.
At this time, Evernote does not provide a direct link to an image for use in hot linking to other websites as it does not provide web image hosting capabilities like other services. You are able to share the URL of the image as it is stored on Evernote for viewing, which will bring viewers to the Evernote site.
We apologize for this inconvenience,
Jerks. They are purposefully shutting down the Skitch.com site and leaving on this non-functional replacement. Great.
[9/12 7:19am] UPDATE! Success! What I can do is to make a generic, insecure, FTP account and then put that into Skitch, and it will then properly use it. Yes, I'm not happy about FTP versus say, SFTP, but there's not a lot I can do about that. It appears that the code used in Skitch doesn't match up the SSL keys properly, as the log indicates. This means that all I can do is FTP, but at least then all the images are on HostMonster, and that's perfect!
This morning I was getting tired of the pretty lame syntax highlighting of YAML files in Sublime Text 2 - and I know it could be better. So I started digging. The first thing I looked at was the tmTheme file that I can cloned of the Eiffel theme in the standard release package. It's close… white background, nice colors, but it's not perfect, and I wanted perfect. So here's what I found out.
The matching of the language is really in the tmLanguage files in the packages. These are a bunch of regexs, and it's fine, but each pattern match then pins the color to use to some "classification" - a dotted-notation similar to a Java package. The idea is that if you specify only the first part or parts, then the last parts are up for specialization.
For instance, if you want to have a numeric constant style, it makes sense to build them hierarchically: constant -> numeric -> yaml, this leads to the classification: constant.numeric.yaml. But if you want all constants to be a certain style (by default), you can simply specify the constant style in your tmTheme file.
Alternatively, if you want all your numeric constants to be a certain style except those in java, you make a style for constant.numeric and then a new one for constant.numeric.java. Simple. But certainly not simple to figure out by looking at the files.
So I realized that for YAML, I didn't want the 'Embedded source' to have a colored background. So I added:
so now it's got a white background. Nice.
The next thing was to notice that I didn't like that the keys in YAML were red like almost all the text (strings, constants, etc.) so I wanted to make those keys blue:
and now the keys are a nice blue. Much better!
All this is just in my clone of the Eiffel theme in the Packages/User/ directory in the Application Support for Sublime Text 2. Very nice.
UPDATE: I realized it should be easy to do the same for PHP - which has the annoying background color, and it was! You simply have to look into the tmLanguage file and see the tag name that's used and place it in the string in a simple comma-delimited list. Very slick!
UPDATE: I noticed a few more that I wanted to add - all from the HTML syntax highlighting. The code became:
I decided that I needed to take the plunge and upgrade by VoodooPad Pro 4 to VoodooPad 5 - primarily to support Flying Meat, but also to get the latest features, etc. There are always a few things you want in an upgrade, and this time there certainly were.
Once I got the app downloaded (bought it directly) and the license key installed, I updated my VoodooPad docs very cleanly and easily. No problems there. Then I decided that I'd like to be able to really sync this one Dropbox. So I simply:
$ cd ~/Dropbox $ mkdir Work $ cd Work $ ln -s ~/Documents/Work\ Info.vpdoc .
and the link will be sufficient for Dropbox to mirror it to all my other machines. On the flip side, I can do the symlinks as well, but I don't really need to - it's just my main box that has the docs in the "original" locations that needs the link.
I'm digging Dropbox for sure, and I can't wait to see how I can make use of it for more things like this.
I've been talking to a few friends about editors on Mac OS X, and one editor that's getting a lot of press lately is Sublime Text 2. It's supposed to be a variant of Vim, and that's always a plus - it's even got a vintage mode to make it mimic the command and insert modes of Vim. It's got an amazing speed profile as well as an incredible Python-based extension library. And there are a ton of things that have been written for it.
So this morning I decided to give it a try. I'm glad I did. It's an amazing platform for coding. I can "open" a project - basically a directory that is my git repo, and then with the "Find Anything" command, I can load up a file very simply. Amazingly so. This is my major concern about BBEdit - opening files in a ruby environment is really a pain - as there are a lot of them.
There are so many nice things that it's just too hard to know where to start. There's a GitHub package for dealing with Gists - one of my favorite places to store snippets of code. This guy even gets the file names so you don't have to know the Gist number beforehand.
There is a legacy Vim mode, and a legacy Ex mode. Both are really nice for old school Vim users like me. Also, the app works on Windows, Linux, and OS X.
I'm looking forward to hammering on this and seeing where it takes me. Very excited.