jro.codegrinder.com

I caught this Ruby Inside post about using ruby as an applescript replacement earlier today, and started reading the associated links, and searching for something I could try to do with ruby and applescript that might actually make my life a little easier.

Thanks to my friend Dave, I’ve been giving twitter a 2nd chance. So, I created a tiny script to let me tweet from the command line. It’ll either take arguments and use them as the input, or standard input. I’m sure I could have done it without using applescript or the wonderful Twitterrific, but that wouldn’t have been as much fun. This way I get Twitterrific’s niceties, and besides I always have it running anyway.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'rubygems'
require 'appscript'

str = ARGV.join(" ")
if str.length == 0
 $stdin.each {|l| str << l}
end

Appscript.app('Twitterrific').post_update(str[0..139])

Usage:

jro@fireant:~$ tweet Having a great old time
jro@fireant:~$ tweet @someone that sounds like fun!
jro@fireant:~$ uptime | tweet 

Every ruby nerd in the world will be blogging about this. I’m no exception. Ruby on Rails 2.0 is out and represents a mountain of progress. Many thanks to the rails core team and everyone that’s assisted in bringing this to us, the masses.

• Riding Rails
• Ryan’s Scraps
• 37 signals blog

Peter Marklund has put together a mammoth 341 slide presentation to introduce you to Ruby and Rails. Get it here [pdf] or at his slideshare. I haven’t flipped through it all yet, but, so far, it looks like a great resource.

If your working on RedHat enterprise 4, trying to install rmagick and you get an error like this ::

Magick::ImageMagickError (unable to read font `/usr/share/fonts/default/Type1/n019003l.pfb'):

try installing urw-fonts. That is all.

Have you ever been hacking away at an idea in irb, only to have to dig through your history so you can transcribe it into your project? Or worse, you’ve quit and realized that you can’t remember some brilliant snippet of code? Some quick hacking on top of wirble’s history functionality is letting me retrieve previous sessions from irb.

my .irbrc

     1  # load libraries
     2  require 'rubygems'
     3  require 'wirble'
     4  
     5  class Wirble::History
     6    #override original save_history
     7    def save_history
     8        path, max_size, perms = %w{path size perms}.map { |v| cfg(v) }
     9  
    10        session_time = Time.now.to_i
    11        # Get current history buffer
    12        current_lines = Readline::HISTORY.to_a
    13        
    14        # Get original history from file
    15        real_path = File.expand_path(cfg('path')) 
    16        if File.exist?(real_path)
    17          old_lines = File.readlines(real_path).map { |line| line.chomp }
    18        else 
    19          old_lines = []
    20        end
    21        
    22        # tag our current session onto the end and truncate if necessary
    23        lines = old_lines
    24        lines << "##begin## #{session_time}"
    25        lines << current_lines[old_lines.size - 1,current_lines.size]
    26        lines << "##end## #{session_time}"     
    27        lines = lines[-max_size, -1] if lines.size > max_size
    28        
    29        # write the history file
    30        File.open(real_path, perms) { |fh| fh.puts lines }
    31        say 'Saved %d lines to history file %s.' % [lines.size, path]
    32      end
    33  end
    34  
    35  
    36  # start wirble 
    37  Wirble.init

That should write your irb sessions to your .irb_history file with ###begin### and ###end### delimiters. That alone is pretty handy, but if you want to take it a step further you can throw together a script to dump the sessions.

wirbstory

     1  #!/usr/bin/env ruby
     2  require 'optparse'
     3  
     4  real_path = File.expand_path("~/.irb_history")
     5  
     6  OptionParser.new do |opts|
     7    opts.banner = "#{}: [options]"
     8  
     9    opts.on("-l","--list", "List available history sessions") do 
    10      sessions = [] 
    11      File.readlines(real_path).each do |line|
    12        sessions <<  if line.match(/^##begin##\s(\d+)/)
    13      end
    14      puts sessions   
    15    end
    16    
    17    opts.on("-s","--show SESSION", String, "Show session SESSION") do |s|
    18      lines = File.readlines(real_path)
    19  
    20      first = lines.index("##begin## #{s}\n")
    21      length = lines.index("##end## #{s}\n") - first - 1
    22      
    23      puts lines[first+1,length]
    24    end
    25  
    26  end.parse!

Check it out:

    jro@fireant:~$ 
    jro@fireant:~$ irb
    >> class LOLcat
    >>   def self.url?
    >>     "http://icanhascheezeburger.com"
    >>   end
    >> end
    => nil
    >> LOLcat.url?
    => "http://icanhascheezeburger.com"
    >> jro@fireant:~$ 

    jro@fireant:~$ ./wirbstory -l
    1189572695
    1189572708
    1189574852
    1189575163
    1189575590
    1189658461

    jro@fireant:~$ ./wirbstory -s 1189658461
    class LOLcat
      def self.url?
        "http://icanhascheezeburger.com"
      end
    end
    LOLcat.url?