Sanity, Inc.

From time to time I receive bug reports for the libraries I've written. Some reports describe genuine bugs (and I'll be the first to admit I'm not perfect), but far too many others demonstrate a missed step in the submitter's "bug assessment" mental process.

Here's a neat Ruby trick for fans of Symbol#to_proc.

Wonderful things happen when smart people discard limitations that everyone else has been taking for granted, and two recent examples in the online world illustrate this beautifully.

Ever quickly sent a skype message, only to immediately notice a typo? You can fix it using the following trick.

'less' is a great tool for browsing Rails log files, though you might not guess it if you try to view your "development.log" with it.

I often hear the proponents of vim and emacs discussing which is better, usually pitting emacs' extensibility against vi's archaic yet arguably effective and tendon-friendly scheme of editing modes.

But why choose?

Our big celebrity charity news site runs on Rails, and I've just switched all the view code from erb to haml. I cut the total number of lines of view code from 2370 to 1788, which makes for a saving of 25%.

I'm a big fan of grid-based layouts, particularly using CSS frameworks like YUI. For all their apparent conflict with the ideals of semantic markup, these frameworks save a ton of time.

My current favourite is Blueprint CSS, which I used for the recent redesign of our celebrity charity news site, and I found a neat way to toggle the positioning grid on and off with a bookmarklet instead of by changing the site's HTML templates.

I'm happy to announce that my db_console plugin for Rails has just been added to Rails Core.

Interacting with git from within emacs is a pleasure, thanks to the official git-mode and Christian Neukirchen's fantastic gitsum mode. Here are some convenient bindings for running git-svn from emacs.