While researching a way to create fullscreen apps in Cocoa, I came across an article by Matt Gallagher written about a year ago that described the process in detail. I’ve been experimenting a lot lately with MacRuby, Apple’s Ruby implementation built on top of Objective-C and LLVM, and I decided to port Matt’s code to use Ruby instead of Objective-C.
Since writing about Ruby configuration objects a few months ago, I’ve
done a bit of hacking on my original Config class. My main issue with it is
that it’s basically serving as a wrapper for a Hash, but it’s a foreign
interface. In other words, if you hand a Config object to another developer,
he’s going to have to look up the API before he can use it. But that defeats
the purpose for writing it in the first place.
In many Ruby applications there exists a global “configuration” object that is used to store application-wide data. For example, Capistrano uses an instance of Capistrano::Configuration to load recipe tasks and keep track of recipe variables. Rails also uses a configuration object in the ActiveSupport module that takes the form of a glorified Hash.
CentOS is a great Linux distro with possibly the worst selection of up-to-date packages. I love the ease of use of CentOS and the close ties to RedHat, but using it often means that I need to compile the libraries I need from source. When setting up a new VPS recently, these are the steps I took to install the latest version of Ruby.
I have been publishing articles and links rather intermittently on this site for just over a year now. While I’m not the most prolific blogger, I do try to make sure that the stuff I post here is of good quality. I won’t ever post something here that I don’t think will be of some use to me personally in the future. I am currently in the process of learning how to manage my time so that I can post content more regularly. The goal is two-fold: 1) I’d like to increase my readership and 2) I’d really like to improve my writing skills.
I’ve always found it a bit inconvenient to have the scrolling panes at the top of the window when browsing the documentation on ruby-doc.org, especially when using my laptop’s built-in display instead of an external display. When using an aspect ratio of 4:3 or 16:10 (which is what I’m using most of the time) the limiting factor is height, not width, and the scrolling panes at the top of the window just make vertical space even more scarce.