supersonic feet

This would’ve been so useful to me when I switched from PHP to Ruby a couple of years ago: the PHP documentation with the Ruby equivalent described for each function.

Found via RubyFlow.

We’re starting to try out git at work to potentially replace Subversion. I’ve been using git for a month or so at home for personal projects, but that’s been on a Mac where git works natively.

At work I have a Windows PC, where git is less comfortable. Obviously if we’re gonna switch to git we all need to be able to use it, so a quick search for Windows clients led me to a couple.

git-cheetah is in development as a TortoiseSVN-style Windows Explorer plug-in. Here’s its readme:

“This is an explorer extension in its infancy.  Do not expect anything to work, unless you are fixing it…”

Not gonna be using that one then.

The other was more promising, msysgit. A quick download and install and while it didn’t manage to make git work in the normal command prompt as promised, its own mini terminal works just fine.

So now I can use git on Windows with only slightly less ease than Linux or Mac by having another console window open.

I just got driven temporarily insane by the advertising for Rockband on colleghumor.com. Like a number of entertainment/portal sites, they have ad deals where an ad effectively takes over the background of the page, around the outside of the content area. This morning it was Rockband.

Before getting to the detail, I should say I’d probably have just as much trouble with any of the other sites that run ads like this, assuming they do it the same way, but as I’ll mention shortly it was even worse on CollegeHumor due to the content of their pages and what happened on the Rockband site.

The core problem I had was down to the way I tend to browse, which in all possibility makes me a bit of an edge case. In short, I tend to click in the margins, or whitespace, of pages before scrolling to make sure the window is focussed. I think this probably stems most from me having a dual-monitor setup where the active window could be on either screen (hence the edge case bit). It’s also a bit of a habit from Photoshop to click in the background somewhere when ‘idle’ so that no layers are selected.

Unsurprisingly, I clicked on a bit of black background out of habit and it turned out to count as a click on the advert. Here’s a shrunk-down screenshot of the site:

As you can see, while the ad content takes up a fair bit of space, even on my 20″ display, there’s plenty of empty black space. Turns out that the entire background area of the page (everything outside the central content area) is a link for the ad. So even if you’ve scrolled down a couple of screens worth and can’t see any advert, clicking in that area will launch the advert target (see red area below).

At this point, it’s a really irritating type of advertising, drawing clicks when it’s clear the user isn’t intending to click on the advert (that they might not be able to even see anymore). What made it worse is that clicking the link takes you to a site that does something even more irritating: it resizes your browser window!

To have accidentally clicked an ad and have a new page load is annoying. To have a new page load that starts messing with your browser is just infuriating.

Now to why the College Humor site took this to the next level for me: it’s really hard to find areas of the homepage that aren’t links. Of course as I read on, I compulsively wanted to be clicking in empty areas to switch back to Firefox from Photoshop or whatever else and the target areas are tiny. Obviously according to Fitts’ Law, you want links to have a large enough target area that users don’t miss and the site does this, as many do, by having full blocks be clickable.

Here’s a screen with all the link areas highlighted:

On CH though, it meant I still ended up clicking in the black outer area because most of the content area is link blocks and launching the ad link again, resizing my browser. It was like a vicious cycle of my ingrained habits vs. Fitts’ Law taken to such an extreme it had gone the other way and I was clicking on all kinds of targets I wasn’t trying to.

Anyway, rant over; I just needed to write this all down.

The cool Git repository host and online interface, GitHub went officially live today. It does mean paying now for private repos, but I have no problem with that - it’s a great service and they’re adding cool features like comments on commits that can be pointed at specific lines of code.

I’ve been using GitHub for a few weeks on a personal project and so far it’s been very good. I’m sure I’d see more benefit from it when working with other developers on a project, but even as an external host for personal git repos it’s good for me.

It also has Lighthouse integration, which they’ve just made easier by handling it through the web interface rather than git post-commit hooks, although the 2 commits I’ve pushed since switching to that feature haven’t shown up in Lighthouse yet. I’ll wait a while and see if it’s just a lag on launch day.

Just upgraded to Wordpress 2.5 and let it go back to the default theme rather than the rubbish blank one I’ve been running until I can get around to doing a proper design.

I just bought an iPhone and so, naturally, being a web developer I’ve started looking at what can be done with iPhone apps. Having a look at one of Apple’s demos (iPhoneButtons) reminded me that of course you only have to develop for Safari on the iPhone and therefore can use some of the nifty CSS3 features that are already available in Safari.

Developing iPhone interfaces might be an interesting way to get to grips with a few CSS3 features where in a normal web project you wouldn’t want to use them yet.

A year ago, Marks & Spencer announced a 5-year plan to become carbon neutral. This was a good thing.

I have an M&S credit card, so every month they post me my credit card statement. The envelope is always quite thick, but not because of my statement - I rarely actually use the card - but because they invariably include at least 2 glossy leaflets for various other financial services like insurance and loans. This has been irritating me as a total waste of paper for the few months I’ve had the card (though I haven’t actually made myself call them to complain).

Today I received an email from M&S Money titled “Save paper. View your &MORE credit card statement online”. The content is basically as the title suggests - they’re asking if I’d like to stop receiving paper statements and just check online instead (a laudible plan, though I’m not sure whether to give up on paper records of something as important as financial information) in order to cut down on paper waste.

What I’d really love is an “I still want my statement, but forget the marketing nonsense and the return envelope which I never use” option. I’d choose that in an instant.

Reading about Thomas Baekdal’s cool new home office setup, one of the comments pointed to a cool app that lets you share your mouse and keyboard with other computers (Windows, Mac and Linux) called Synergy. You basically run a server on the computer that has the mouse and keyboard you want to share, then a client on the other computer(s) and it’s then as simple as moving your mouse off the edge of one screen and onto another.

I’d seen apps doing this just for Macs, but I have a Windows PC and an iMac, so this is great!

No more do I have to use the crappy Mighty Mouse or Mac keyboard (I know it has its fans, but it’s FAR too small for my liking). I was getting ready to order an extra Logitech MX Revolution and MS Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 for use on the Mac so as long as Synergy doesn’t fail me I’ve just saved myself a bunch of money.

Only thing I’ve noticed so far is that it tends to hang briefly every minute or two on the Mac (client), then catches up. Hopefully there’s a bit of config somewhere to help iron this out as that could get annoying.

EDIT: Forgot to mention: it also lets you copy & paste between machines too. Very nifty!

The entire bragster team is off to Austin, TX in early March for the South by Southwest Interactive festival. Should be fun!

The official Rails blog has the announcement that Rails 2.0 is done and great news that is too. Now I just need to find the time to eventually catch up on all the changes and start playing with it!