Till today I used some self written scripts to check our systems. Nobody told me that there was a perfect toolchain for this problem already existing: Maatkit. Maatkit offers a few commandline tools that help you to keep the slaves in synch with your master.

Install it using brew:

Check tables for differences :

And after you found differences you can even use Maatkit to repair those tables:

Besides repairing damaged tables Maatkit helps you to check if the slave replication is still working. Mk-heartbeat updates a heartbeat table in the master database and checks if the slave database has been updated. I have written a small script that wraps the heartbeat check and sends a mail if the slave replication has stopped.

More documentation can be found here and a few examples in this presentation.

And yes, using couchdb would make this toolchain obsolete .

If you know events in the Cologne area (including Düsseldorf and Bonn), feel free to leave me a Note.

First day of switching from textmate to vim. Let’s see if I still use macvim next week . Updated my dotfiles: http://bit.ly/bFuAoi

Today I am still using Vim. Am I a better developer now? Hell no. Choosing the best editor for your work is important. A craftsman has his hammer, we developers have our editor. You can hammer a nail in a wall with an average hammer. Nothing wrong with that. Maybe not as fast or as good as with the perfect hammer, but good enough. Am I a happier coder? Not quite yet. Will I stay with Vim? Yes, I think so.

For the last few years I used Vim only for editing stuff on my servers. It was okay, but I never thought of using it as my main editor for my desktop. A few months ago ruby developers in my twitter timeline startet to migrate to Vim. Some because Textmate2 looks like the new Duke Nukem, some because they just wanted to try out another editor. A lot of them where happy about the switch and started to advertise it very aggressively. Last week I had enough. I wanted to find out why all of a sudden everyone is happy with Vim.

The first thing I did was to look at my current vim configuration I had and to compare it with the configurations others where using. After two days(!!) of rewriting it and adding of a few plugins, I was able to start going. And since then I only used Textmate for a few minor things.

What I hate about Vim:

• Bad defaults, you have to rewrite tons of stuff
• You have to add a lot of 3rd party plugins to get it usable
• Copy and paste is hard. Even when using MacVim with it’s mac keyboard shortcuts its harder than what you are used to (But you can activate Shift-Selection)
• After I configured everything in MY way, nobody else is able to use my Vim and code on my desktop unless we all agree on a certain configuration

What I love about Vim:

• You can extend nearly everything and rewire nearly everything
• A lot can be done without the mouse. Opening files, switching directories, copying and moving files between directories
• You use the same editor on the remote server
• It is very fast

If you want to start using MacVim, you should definitely look at my dotfiles or at least look at my vim delicious bookmarks.

But is it the ideal editor? No. Not for me. But it’s close enough. What would my ideal editor look like? Something like this:

• Command line mode to open/edit files without touching the mouse
• Everything extensible : syntax highlighting, code completion, directory browser, command line commands, shortcuts
• Fast and easy script language for the extension system. V8 comes to my mind here
• Good default shortcuts for copy and paste and other standard operations. E.g. copy and paste should behave like in every other app
• Good default for all other stuff. I don’t want to configure my editor for two days to get it usable.
• Easy way to record and replay macros
• FAST ui. Redcar feels really slow compared to Textmate and MacVim. Using the JVM is a really bad decision in my opinion.
• A real desktop app that has an own menu and stuff. Terminal windows are okay for servers, but my editor should have its own Icon and its own menubar on my desktop.

So what would it take to get my ideal editor? Sadly I am not good enough in writing Cocoa Apps, but if you are, please write a thin Cocoa editor layer and put a good V8 extension system around it. After that I would love to help you code the extensions needed!

Sadly I couldn’t find a gem that could do that. John Nunemakers scrobbler gem is very outdated and does not use the new authentification api. After searching through all available forks I made the decision to create my own fork of the old scrobbler gem. That fork is called rockstar.

I tried to made it compatible with the old scrobbler gem and added a few new features. For example now it’s possible to get a list of events for a certain location:

If you are missing a certain api call just write me, I will add that asap.

You should update the Adobe Unit Types to a newer version that includes 64bit binaries. The latest version can be found here:

http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/516/cpsid_51615.html

As a user you usually want a good experience using a service. If it wasn’t good for you, complain. It’s your right to do so. And you should. As loud as you want. But if you do, please use a way that opens the possibility for the other side to answer your problems. If you rate an app in the iphone store, the vendor of that app can’t reach you. Your complaint is lost. Never to be answered. Maybe the vendor needs some data from you to fix your issue. Or you just overlooked that important setting in the options pane. And please mention exactly what your problem is. “Doesn’t work” just shows that you’re a fucking idiot. And if the vendor helped you after you tweeted your problem, you should inform your followers that the issue is resolved. Be nice and thankful, don’t behave like the grumpy old fuck from next door.

I had a lot of great chats with support people after sending a short mail and explaining what the problem was. And a lot of them took my complaint seriously and fixed the problems or showed me how to get what I wanted. Sometimes you even get stuff for being nice and helpful. Early Betas to test, some goodies or information about coming features.

You can still rate that app in two days and say that the customer support is awful. But at least you have more to write than “this is shit” .

And for god’s sake don’t use #fail for minor mistakes. I have seen a lot of “the button xy in that app is on the left, not on the right #fail”-kind of stuff in my twitter feed. That’s not even close to be a #fail.

• Homebrew installs packages into their own isolated prefixes and then symlinked into /usr/local.
• It uses the libs that are already installed, no need to compile another perl, openssl or x11 and other stuff that can be found on your mac. Don’t waste time and disc space.
• Way better command line user interface
• Homebrew and it’s installation scripts are hosted at Github
• The installation scripts (aka recepies) and Homebrew itself are written in ruby.

Moving from MacPorts to Homebrew sounds a little bit scary. MacPorts has tons of compiled stuff on your system. But you can do this. Trust me .

First, uninstall MacPorts:

Second step: remove everything that is left from MacPorts:

After that you should remove the /opt/local/bin from your $PATH.

Now install Homebrew:

Yeah! You can now start install packages like wget with

There is only one little catch: if you have installed ruby gems that depend on libs from your MacPorts directory, you have to recompile them. I had to recompile my rmagick gem because it used the now deleted ImageMagick from MacPorts.

If you want to use redgreen and have a working autospec, you should change your .autotest file to this:

Railscast theme

The theme I am using at the moment is the Railscast Theme by Ryan Bates. You can find it in the about section of his Railscasts. Dark background and nice font colors. When you look at the code the whole day, it should look good . Don’t forget to download the Bitstream Vera Font.

Ackmate

Ack is one of the greatest scripts I know. Grep for coders. Fast, easy to use and very good defaults when searching for code snipplets.

If you want to use it within Textmate, you should try AckMate.

ProjectPlus

Need better project support including features like git? Use ProjectPlus.

Github Bundle

Speaking about git. What about github? Yes, there’s a bundle for that . DrNic’s github bundle.

Ruby On Rails Bundle

Dr Nic’s most important Textmate bundle is the Ruby on Rails Bundle. With it you can easily navigate between controllers, models and other files. Besides that it adds tons of shortcuts. Whatever you will need for RoR development, you will find it in there.

If you want to keep track of all chrome extensions I use, you can subscribe to my links on Delicious tagged as Textmate.

Sadly I could not find one, so I had to write it myself.

You can install it with:

The progressbar can’t do very much at the moment. If you want to add more features, feel free to fork it.

A small example for the gem: