For a while now I've been presenting using Safari and S5. I don';t actually use the Plone S5 product I wrote a while back anymore, all my presentation are written in .rst, checked into Subversion and run through docutils to generate a wonderful looking Safari S5 presentation.
Note: if anyone wants to update Plone S5 to the latest version of S5 that would be a good idea.
Compared to the bad old way of using PowerPoint or Open Office this is a wonderful change. All the presentations are checked into SVN. They are in plain text and so diffable. If I want to change the look and feel I change the CSS. I have a few different skins, default and default-big. The latter is styled on Paul Everitts approach of large text with small 3-4 word sentences. PDF's are generated by clicking the print to PDF button in Safari and I've covered every possible base.
This really hit home the other day for Seattle when I wanted a simple thing, I wanted to syntax highlight all the code in my slides. Ugh 200 slides, thats a lot of syntax highlighting. So yet again the JS syntax highlighter came to the rescue. All I did was include a peice of Javascript to kick onload and run through the presentation syntax highlighting elements. Admittedly since its the same code for Clouseau, PloneSilverCity 2.0 and this blog, I knew where I was going. But in the end 200 slides were syntax highlighted in around 10 minutes.
The one thing that was missing was the ability to have a clicker for my slides so I can wave my arms and walk around. I used to use a blue tooth wireless mouse, but I have a bad history with these things and gave up. I really wanted to use the remote for the Macbook, but couldn't figure out how to get at the Front Page API to script Safari. In the end there's no need Remote Buddy is well your buddy and gets added to those must have apps (like TextMate, Quicksilver, Megazoom etc). It allows you to control a whole series of apps, including Safari, from the remote.
So I can now fire up my presentation, wander around and click through the slides using the remote. Probably not as cool as a blue tooth phone, but hey its got the better than 50% success rate I';ve seen from presenters with phones and if I drop my remote down the toilet, its a $30 replacement. If the app or controls aren't there you can build up a series of actions or Apple script from the Remote Buddy builder. That turned out to be a bit of a pain and I haven't figured out how to from the remote, jump to my bookmarks, scroll through my presentations and start showing a presentation. But I'll get there.
Since we've sold our DVD and CD players, the Macbook is now our major focal point of household entertainment and as such we use the remote a lot. Remote buddy allows us to access iTunes when Front Row doesn't quite come up to scratch. All in all, nice app.
Moved all the services off my venerable old Pentium 1, 166 thing that is held together by duct tape (literally) over to a dedicated server. So hopefully the site and services will be nice and fast now, too.
Since I used Ubuntu I quickly upgraded Wordpress as well to version 2.0 which gives me access to many nice themes for the blog.
I get annoyed by the Plone instance that installed using the OS X installer starting automatically. I'm now at the stage of having 5 Plone instances, 3 Zope versions and they all run ZEO which doesn't start up automatically, leaving Zope wedged. Fortunately I only restart the once a month or so when my MacBook freezes or the next BIOS patch comes in. It's fixed by removing: /Library/StartupItems/Plone-2.5. In fact I found a few other things in there I didn't want and removed too.
Are a bit of a mess. If you want an easy life assume that your app is only going to be ever run in one timezone and go to environment.rb and set: ENV['TZ'] = 'GMT'
The problem I had is that it seems rails is doing a cast of the date. I set a date as GMT, put into the database, a timestamp with time zone field. Then when you get it out it casts into my local timezone:
>> sa = Thingy.new
>> sa.datepoint = Time.gm(2006,12,13) => Wed Dec 13 00:00:00 UTC 2006
>> sa.save ..
>> zz = Thingy.find(:all)[1]
>> zz.datepoint => Wed Dec 13 00:00:00 PST 2006
If you are having similar problems try trawling through the following posts on this issue.
Simple little JavaScript product to add in a "Table of contents" that serves as a useful navigation through a large page. For example if you've got a large document, that has more than 2 or 3 headings, this will appear. It automatically adds in "return to the top links" on every heading field.
Download: ClearContents.0.1.zip.
Seemed simple enough. Problem is that the way it works is moronic. It grabs the HTML for page that you'd normally see in the browser, parses it using regex's (a XML or HTML parsing library would be too much to ask). And then tries to download every file it can find.
Only problem is that it will also include the svnindex.xsl file if you've set up nice SVN pages following something like this and for some reason blow up at that point. Looking at the code, it only follows relative links, so the answer is to change Apache to use a full path to the xsl, so from:
Because I installed this and I can never find it in Google again, here's the link for an email notification tool for svn:
http://opensource.perlig.de/svnmailer/
We are moving to England before Christmas for a couple of years. For anyone who has avoided the spam blast in the last few days... all friends are invited to our party a:
...pre-Christmas party,
"hooray, we've sold our house!" party,
"house cooling" party,
"goodbye we are moving to blighty for a bit" party,
"insert what you want to call it here" party! Location: 1425 Chamberlain Drive, North Vancouver, BC
When: Saturday, November 25, 12:00pm onwards.
Come anytime between noon and 8:00pm and stay as long as you can. We will be serving a selection of appies, desserts, and drinks all day.
Where I'll be living only ADSL is available it seems. For the last few years I've been running my own mail server, web server, svn server (including this blog) and so on. Fortunately Shaw have never cared less about me running all this on my account and rarely change IP's on me.
What I haven't found yet, apart from Virgin.net is an unlimited bandwidth cap. One of the highest rated ISP in the UK is I think madasafish.com, beating out all the others here. Ideally since I don't know whats coming and going, no bandwith usage limit would be nice. Is there a nice developer friendly ISP in the north west of the UK for a reasonable price, that somone would recommend? Mail me.
This release has a few ui fixes and a few minor bug fixes. It comes with auto-complete. As you type away you'll see the auto complete below the prompt area. Clicking tab will auto-complete the text. Makes getting to those key elements very quick and easy.
Remember, installing DocFinderTab will give you more complete tool tips. This will make Clouseau feature complete, now we have to push to a 1.0 release with lots of bug fixes and cleanup.
Download:Clouseau.0.6.zip.
Been building a ruby on rails app this week. Like most new technologies, its very feast or famine. I get a road block and get stuck for a while, get over it and get productive for a while, then hit the next road block. Actually probably most development is like that. I've got lots of posts in my head about it and Plone.
General thoughts so far are there are many good things in it, I like the environment separation, creation of unit tests and fixtures so I don't have to write SQL (yet). There are also many bad things in it, the templating is painful, it doesn't create any HTML for you (except through scaffold which isn't usable except for 20 min. screencasts) and waaay to much magic. It feels like Zope 2.
The one that hits me right now is introspection, I'm so used to going up to anything in Python and being able to do: type(something) will always give me a clue as to the type and figure out the api. In theory in ruby something.class should be same. Except it's not, because it doesn't always work. In my rails unit tests I can access one of my fixtures like this: timesheets[:foo] to get the foo fixture. But I can't iterate through it. I also can't do puts timesheets.class I get:
ArgumentError: wrong number of arguments (0 for 1)
Even using the ruby debugger (thanks to help from Geoff Davis) gives me:
(rdb:1) m timesheets
test/unit/timesheet_test.rb:24:in `__send__':wrong number of arguments (0 for 1)
Magic is bad. Not least of which it makes me feel stupid.
Simple little JavaScript product to add in a "Table of contents" that serves as a useful navigation through a large page. For example if you've got a large document, that has more than 2 or 3 headings, this will appear. It automatically adds in "return to the top links" on every heading field.
Download: 
This release has a few ui fixes and a few minor bug fixes. It comes with auto-complete. As you type away you'll see the auto complete below the prompt area. Clicking tab will auto-complete the text. Makes getting to those key elements very quick and easy.
Remember, installing DocFinderTab will give you more complete tool tips. This will make Clouseau feature complete, now we have to push to a 1.0 release with lots of bug fixes and cleanup.
Download: 