1. Install Cordova 2.0.0
   1. Download from http://phonegap.com/download
   2. Unzip the file into ~/pg2.0
   3. Double click on the ~/pg2.0/Cordova-2.0.0.pkg to begin the installation
2. Create a new project from the command-line tools – you will have to grab the assets from this new project
   1. TEMP_PROJ=~/temp_project2.0
      ~/pg2.0/lib/ios/bin/create $TEMP_PROJ com.temp_project2.0 TempProject
3. Copy the www/cordova-2.0.0.js file from the new project into your www folder, and delete your www/cordova-1.9.0.js file
   1. $EXISTING_1_9_PROJ=~/dev/iphone/myapp/  #Set this to the path of the folder that contains your app’s www folder
      cp $TEMP_PROJ/www/cordova-2.0.0.js $EXISTING_1_9_PROJ/www
4. Update the Cordova script reference in your www/index.html file (and any other files that contain the script reference) to point to the new cordova-2.0.0.js file
5. Copy the “cordova” folder from the new project into your project’s root folder (if you want the project command-line tools)
   1. cp -r $TEMP_PROJ/cordova/ $EXISTING_1_9_PROJ/www
6. Add a new entry under Plugins in your Cordova.plist file (under the Supporting Files group) – the key is Device and the value is CDVDevice
   1. Edit Cordova.plist, to include Device/CDVDevice like so, (or edit the file in Xcode)
      <key>Plugins</key>
      <dict>
      <key>Device</key>
      <string>CDVDevice</string>
      <key>Logger</key>
7. Remove Cordova.framework
   1. Select Cordova.framework in Xcode then Edit -> Delete, then select Remove Reference
8. Remove verify.sh from the Supporting Files group
   1. Select verify.sh in Xcode Select in Cordova.framework in Xcode
9. Select the project icon in the Project Navigator, select your project Target, then select the “Build Settings” tab
10. Search for “Preprocessor Macros”, then remove all “CORDOVA_FRAMEWORK=1″ values
11. Locate the CordovaLib folder that was installed in your hard-drive under your home folder’s Documents sub-folder.
12. Locate the CordovaLib.xcodeproj file in the CordovaLib folder, then drag and drop the file into your project – it should appear as a sub-project.
    1. Drop CordovaLib.xcodeprojon top of your project to include to it in as a sub-project
13. Build your project, you should get some errors relating to #import directives
14. For the #import errors, change any quote-based imports in this style:

    #import "CDV.h" 

    to this brackets-based style:

    #import <Cordova/CDV.h> 

    and remove any #ifdef wrappers around any Cordova imports, they are not needed anymore (the imports are unified now)

15. Build your project again, and it should not have any #import errors.
    1. You will still have build errors, they will get cleaned up shortly
16. Select the project icon in the Project Navigator, select your project Target, then select the “Build Phases” tab
17. Expand the “Target Dependencies” phase, then select the “+” button
18. Select the “CordovaLib” target, then select the “Add” button
19. Expand the first “Link Binary with Libraries” phase (it should already contain a bunch of frameworks), then select the“+” button
20. Select the libCordova.a static library, then select the “Add” button
    1. Select libCordova.a from the dialog
    2. When these steps are complete, it should look like the following
21. Delete the “Run Script” phase.
    1. Click the X to the right of the Run Script section title and confirm deletion
22. Select the project icon in the Project Navigator, select your project Target, then select the “Build Settings” tab
23. Search for “Other Linker Flags”, and add the values -all_load and -Obj-C
    1. Modify the flags by clicking the + at the bottom and adding both flags separately
24. Expand the “CordovaLib” sub-project
25. Locate the “VERSION” file, drag it into your main project (we want to create a link to it, not a copy)
26. Select the “Create groups for any added folders” radiobutton, then select the “Finish” button
27. Select the “VERSION” file that you just dragged in a previous step
28. Press the key combination Option-Command-1 to show the File Inspector (or menuitem View -> Utilities -> Show FileInspector)
29. Choose “Relative to CORDOVALIB” in the File Inspector for the drop-down menu for Location
30. Build your project, it should compile and link with no issues.
31. Select your project from the Scheme drop-down, and then select “iPhone 5.1 Simulator”
32. Select the Run button

NOTE 1:
If your project is not working as expected in the Simulator, please take a note of any errors in the console log in Xcode for clues.

NOTE 2:
For the unified #import headers to work, the build products should build into the same build directory. You may need to set the preference “Xcode Preferences -> Locations -> Derived Data -> Advanced…” to “Unique”

PostgreSQL

About a year ago I posted about installing Postgres 9.0 on my Mac. We’ll since then I lost a hard drive and am just re-installing Postgres now. This time 9.1. Here’s what I did:

1.  Download postgres for Mac

• Don’t sign up for enterprise db crap, the download will start in a sec

2. Install postgres

• This may require reboot to set some syscontrol settings (it did for me)
• I created the “postgres” user with “postgres” as the password (so I could remember it)

3. Start postgres to create the defaults in the data directory

4. Modify Postgres to use “trust” authentication, so we don’t need to supply a password when connecting to the database.

4.1 For each entry, change METHOD “md5″ to “trust” (this should only be done on your developer machine!)

5. Restart postgres to pick up the conf changes

6. Beer time!

This setup requires you to su – postgres whenever you want to restart the database, but for now it’ll work.

Here are some notes from my installation of it on my Dreamhost account:

1) ssh to your host

2) a simple ‘gem install refinerycms’ just hung & I didn’t feel like waiting around so a quick Google search came up with this answer:

In your tmp directory, create a temporary Gemfile with the following contents:

then run ‘bundle’

The bundle command failed for me, even though ‘gem list’ showed it was installed. So I ran ‘gem install bundle –no-rdoc –no-ri’ which installed a newer version & also setup the binary so I could successfully execute ‘bundle’.

3) Next thing to do is delete the temporary Gemfile and cd to your home directory.

4) From your home directory, execute the following (using your desired [sub]domain name):

5) Then, create a new subdomain in Dreamhost via http://panel.dreamhost.com (same as above, I called mine cms.olore.net), click the checkbox for ‘Passenger (Ruby/Python apps only):’ and let it add ‘public’ to the end of your web directory – this will point to the public directory of the rails app that you just created.

Give Dreamhost a minute or two, then hit your site with a browser. You should see the initial screen for RefineryCMS asking you to create a new user.

Possible problems … with solutions!

a) When first accessing your site, you may get a Passenger error about rack versions. You may need to modify Gemfile.lock to use rack 1.2.1. If you make this change, simply ‘touch tmp/restart.txt’ to tell Passenger to restart, then hit the URL in the browser again.

b) When first accessing your home page you may get a 500 error. I resolved this by running ‘RAILS_ENV=production rake db:migrate’ followed by ‘touch tmp/restart.txt’

Good luck!

I used Titanium Mobile which I’ve played with in the past.

The goal of this app is to teach my kids the positions on the baseball field.

Here it is in all it’s glory

To get around this problem, in windows explorer, click on the D: (or wherever your CD/DVD is) and then right click on the .exe file and select “Run as administrator”

This solution was next to impossible to find on the Google, so I am hoping this helps someone!

PostgreSQL

1.  Download postgres for Mac

• Don’t sign up for enterprise db crap, the download will start in a sec

2. Install postgres

• This may require reboot to set some syscontrol settings (it did for me)
• I created the “postgres” user with “postgres” as the password (so I could remember it)

3. Add stuff to your ~/.bash_profile

4. Execute the profile

5. Modify Postgres to use “trust” authentication, so we don’t need to supply a password when connecting to the database.

5.1 For each entry, change METHOD “md5″ to “trust” (this should only be done on your developer machine!)

6. Restart postgres to pick up the conf changes

7. Beer time!

All of the above was done solely so I could run some ActiveRecord tests, so here’s how we do that:

SUCCESS!

Twitter Tools allowed me to modify my theme in such a way that I can get my tweets either as they happen, daily or a weekly summary… pretty slick. I wanted the “as they happen” option and I wanted them to show up differently, as quick blurbs (inspired by Gina Trapani’s Smarterware.org (where I think she is using QuickPost)) right in line with my blog posts.

After some monkeying around, I learned I could switch the theme based on which tags were used in the post. So I set up Twitter Tools to use the tag “tweet”. With that in mind I used the following code in index.php:

With that in place, tweets get rendered with post_tweet.php and everything else with post_normal.php. Yeah my post_tweet.php needs some love… I’m getting there….

But in the mean time – victory is mine!

Thanks to Google’s new image search option for “labeled for reuse”

@NYBadDrivers image courtesy of Leo Reynolds (via Flickr)
@CTBadDrivers image courtesy of Daniel Case (via Wikimedia)
@NJBadDrivers image courtesy Mr. Matté (via Wikipedia)

Each account is re-enabled now, checking for any @replies to their respective account.

It’s really a pretty sweet tool. It generates all these reports and you can either ignore them or act on them. Not saying which of those we do… but that’s not important right now.

If you’ve used metric_fu you probably ran into the NaN error. Good ol’ “Not A Number”.
Generally the output looks something like this:

This particular error has cropped up several times for us, each time we do the same google searches, look at the same metric_fu sources, and slowly dissect which tests are causing this problem. Hopefully this post will help expedite debugging this error for you and your friends.

The NaN error is the result of an Infinity/Infinity calculation in metric_fu. How Infinity gets in there in the first place is left as a reader exercise. Ultimately the problem resides in the fact that the scratch/rcov/rcov.txt output file does not contain the expected output. In fact, in our case, it contained a failing test.

At this point, running rcov by itself (outside of metric_fu) would result in expected output – everything worked and there were no failing tests!

So we ran metric_fu again with all tests disabled except for rcov (by editing our rake task).
Metric_fu failed in the exact same place. Great – at least now it is narrowed down (even if it does take a few minutes to run).

Taking a look at the failing test nothing stood out, until we dug a little deeper.
This test class was overriding a cattr_reader with a cattr_accessor so it could change the value for testing.
No big deal, it worked fine when run by itself ….

Turns out that this wasn’t the only test class that was modifying the class variable.
Metric_fu loads up all of the tests (functionals & units) and runs them together.
We had one unit test class that was modifying a class variable (and not setting it back!) and
a functional test class that was making assertion based on the expected default value of that class variable.
We had indirectly made our tests order dependent.

The reason we never saw it in our normal tests was that our functional and unit tests run separately (via rake).

Summary:

1. Look in scratch/rcov/rcov.txt to find a failing test
2. Look for usage of class variables or constants – namely the changing of them (and not setting them back).

Our Solution:

Our solution was to only temporarily change the class variable, and only do it when we need to:

A better solution would be to get rid of the class variables…
Another solution would be to change metric_fu to handle a failing test more gracefully

In the end, we are left with this rule:

Don’t change class variables in tests!

… or better yet …

Don’t use class variables!

Friends don’t let friends use class variables.
Partnership for cattr-free coding.

Ruby Versions and Implementations  – David

http://ruby-versions.net/ – David’s home for ruby versions & implementations for learning & historical reference

Ruby version manager – http://rvm.beginrescueend.com – lets you install several ruby versions/implementations and easily switch between (including your own custom compiled version). Suggestion – don’t install as root, even though it is allowed.

Notes on a few of the existing options:

• MacRuby – interacts with Cocoa
• Rubinius – Ruby in Ruby
• JRuby – Ruby on JVM
• REE – optimized – created by Phusion Passenger team
• MagLev – built in object persistence, repository instead of files, smalltalk-ish
• IronRuby – Ruby on .NET
• URABE – ?

rvm allows you to compare performance between versions/implementation:

rvm ruby-1.8.6,ruby1.9.2 benchmark filename.rb

Why does everyone use 1.8 instead of 1.9?

• Same amount of people are using it as last year (like almost no one)
• Rails considerations
• 1.9 is not 100% backwards compatible
• 1.8.7 backported many of the features of 1.9, so people feel safer

Ruby Enterprise Edition has major memory and speed improvements

Highlights of changes between 1.8 & 1.9

• Enumerators
• Method parameters
• Block variable binding & scope
• Syntax changes

Discussion

• “Ruby 1.9 was plenty different enough to be 2.0″ – David
• 1.9.1 is currently the stable supported version and has been for about a year.
• 1.8.6 to 1.8.7 was a big jump – major backporting of 1.9 features into 1.8
• 1.8.7 was a safe harbor for those that wanted 1.9 features but were scared of 1.9
• rails3 + ruby 1.9.1 = segfaults    … works with certain revisions of 1.9.2 HEAD

Enumerator object – 1.9

• mixes in Enumerable
• you write the ‘each’ method
  • borrow from another object (can be lazy)
  • or
  • pass in code block on instantiation (via a yielder)
• once it knows how to ‘each’, it can do select, map, each_cons ….
• 1.8.6 – require ‘enumerator’ – Enumerable::Enumerator
• 1.9.x – no require needed – promoted to top level ‘Enumerator’

side bar: each_cons vs each_slice

Note to self: I need to memorize each/select/map/collect

What methods do I get with Enumerator that I don’t get with Enumerable (Array)?

Enumerator.instance_methods - Array.instance_methods
:with_index, :with_object, :next, :rewind

Method argument semantics
required args can now come after optional args
def m(a, b=1, c)
def m(a, *b, c)
def m((a,b),c)
required arguments get filled first

Block variable scope

• probably the most important/annoying/significant change
• breaks stuff in surprising ways
• but if it does break stuff, you were likely doing something buggy before

Example 1:

a = [1,2,3]
a.each {|x| p x}

x gets value of 3 when you are done

|x| literally assigns x ( |x=…| ), so it becomes available outside the block

Example 2:

a = 1
array.each { a = 2 }

does not change the value of a

• Matz said he wished he had done this from the beginning
• Unifies the parameter syntax between methods & lambas

1.9 Miscellany

• no more String#each
  • “Hello”[0] = “H”  #in 1.8 it returns 72
• new instance_exec is like instance_eval but takes a param to inject

JRuby – ask David about using ArrayList instead of [] in playpoker.rb

The Testing Landscape

Test::Unit is gone in 1.9
Test::Unit::TestCase -> Mini::Test::TestCase
Mini::Test has a new option: refute_match
require ‘shoulda’ – makes it more like RSpec without going full RSpec
RSpec is the defacto standard for Behavior-driven testing

Jeremy – wrote ‘context’ and ‘match’
Given/When/Then – cucumber is most popular
“Think in units of features rather than units of code” – Gregory
require ‘could’ – another tool – include feature test right in the same file as tests

Test data

• YAML/CSV – hard to maintain, csv is kinda nice because you can open in spreadsheet program (or rather your testers can)
• model_stubbing  http://github.com/technoweenie/model_stubbing
• Factories is the new hotness
  • FactoryGirl
  • Machinist – http://github.com/notahat/machinist
    • create shams & blueprints
    • “way slower” than fixtures
• mocking/stubbing
  • can extend a class to do it
  • can use OpenStruct to do it require ‘ostrich’
  • Jeremy likes using ‘rr’
  • RSpec has it’s own stubbing
  • flexmock
• Proxies
  • Proxies are like mocks & stubs & real code combined
  • Proxies are the Ken Jennings of mocks & stubs