Codedrop™ Weblog

The beauty of ruby makes it simple to add some colorful syntax highlighting to log messages that are displayed in your capistrano scripts.  Here’s a chunk of code I added to my utility.rb file that is included by my capfile that performs the magic. def colorize(text, color_code) “#{color_code}#{text}\033[0m" end def red(text); colorize(text, "\033[31m"); end def [...]

After having utilizing TIBCO’s Designer product for a number of months, several blaring deficiencies come to mind.. .here’s a list of my top complaints.  I expect I’ll be adding to this list as I continue to discover new ‘features’ within the product. Unable to open 2 versions of the same project at the same time.  [...]

Neat way to pre-initalize something in capistrano before a task is run on :start do verifyParametersAndInitialize()end callback options: :before, triggered before a task is invoked :after, triggered after a task is invoked :start, triggered before a top-level task is invoked via the command-line :finish, triggered when a top-level task completes :load, triggered after all recipes [...]

After working in a rails environment for the past year I found it terribly difficult to go back to traditional database deployment / upgrade practices. Migrations are a beautiful way to properly version, co-ordinate and apply the changes you need to your various database environments.  I never knew of a way to do this in [...]

Gmail’s great… and who doesn’t have a gmail account nowadays. One thing I’ve always wondered was how to search for all unread messages, and not just those on the current page?… Who wants to seatch backwards page by page looking for unread messages anyways… Well after years of using it today I finally found the [...]

Setting up trac on dreamhost isn’t a very well documented process.  The one-click install does setup a project, but your left with bare bones install and no help on getting the initial admin account created.  I found the dreamy-trac installation script worked well.  Beyond this and the basic config changes you have to do I [...]