Autonomous Machine

Adds support for OAuth. To install:

$ git clone https://github.com/dr4g0nnn/gist.git
$ cd gist
$ gem build gist.gemspec
$ gem install gist-3.1.0

Hopefully at some point the official repo is brought up to date, but in the meantime, this will allow for command-line Gisting.

So far I've seen Yehuda Katz's and Aaron Patterson's, both of which I would recommend.

Also note that audio-only downloads are offered, which I find convenient as a frequent podcast listener.

Very useful stuff. Some of the most useful are IE9+, but I doubt many will find that surprising.

One of the hardest to find but most useful GitHub features.

Useful for debugging anything that makes POST requests. Just point it at RequestBin.

I've been using this library for my own dotfiles for the last year. I packaged it up and released it today to see if others would find it useful.

Install on top of Mac OS X 10.7 and Xcode 4.2.

Performing find and replace operations across a project is something I used to do regularly in various editors, but I never took the time to learn how to do it in Vim. I finally learned how to do this today, and it turns out it's easy.

The article goes into more detail, but here are the basic commands:

:args paths/to/search/*
:argdo %s/value_to_find/replacement/ge | update

The first line sets up what files to perform the search against so it can be scoped to a certain parts of the project. %s performs the substitution, and update saves all modified files after performing the replacements.

I don't know why this isn't built into Photoshop at this point, but if you need to work with ICO files, this plugin makes it painless.

Andrew Hitchcock's tutorial on how to grant an AWS IAM user access to a single S3 bucket saved me a lot of time today. I am in the process of adding image uploading via S3 to Forkchop, and I want to have a seperate bucket and corresponding user (and therefore credentials) for each environment.

I started using SourceTree a week ago to as a GUI to local Git repositories. I'm comfortable using Git from the command line, but I find a GUI helpful when looking at history or selecting which parts of the current working tree I want to commit.

It's currently free, but I would pay to use it.

James Edward Gray II wrote a seven-part series of articles on character encoding in Ruby a few years ago. It is just as relevent today, and it covers just about everything one would need to know about how character encodings work in both Ruby 1.8 and 1.9.

TL;DR: don’t run bundle exec before rails command, rails already checks the presence of Bundler through the Gemfile and sets up everything according to it without the overhead of bundle exec. rails command is the only exception to the rule.

script/rails is the way to go.

A nice post by John Nunemaker on designing the public APIs for Gauges. I like his approach to serializing data using serialization objects.

I like all of the advice in this article, except for the part about Jeweler (the emphasis is mine):

With the exception of experienced cutters, or those who want or need to have complete control over every line of code, there are gem authoring tools that can automate the majority of the manual work required, and avoid amateur mistakes, when publishing gems for the first time.

The biggest of the gem authoring tools at the moment is Jeweler (RubyGems, GitHub), which aims to provide a set of wizard based gem automation tools. It has tasks to manage releasing, versioning, dependencies, executables and Rake tasks all out of the box; it can be a real time saver in the long run for frequent or beginner gem publishers.

In my experience, Jeweler makes developing a gem more complicated and error-prone than it would be without it. I think that developing a Rubygem with Bundler is a better way to go for new libraries. Bundler has some helpful info, too.

I haven't used it, but gem-release may also be useful.

I'm also a user of oh-my-zsh, but I too have had the problem of zsh's auto-correct functionality identifying many of my intentional commands as incorrect.

Here is a way to get taps-like functionality for apps that use MongoDB.

The library supports pushing and pulling data to and from MongoLab, MongoHQ, and custom servers. I was able to clone a production database from MongoLab down to a development workstation on the first try.

It's surprising how many useful tips I find posted as Gists.

Includes how to fix the asset pipeline when upgrading from Rails 3.1.0rc4 to 3.1.0rc5, both locally and on Heroku.