My baby daughter now recognizes McDonald’s logo, every time she sees the logo she yells out ‘chips’ :)

yes, we should take her there less often.

I was reading Tim’s post which reminded me that I had implemented similar things with Romey. Basically because I was running Romey on a Mac Mini at home and didn’t want to make it accessible over the internet I created another way to create transactions in Romey. It was done with a POP account at my ISP, ruby script running by cron on the Mac Mini. I stopped running the cron job since I changed ISD but having read Tim’s post I am thinking about reactivating the service again and extending it to involve Twitter as well. I already have written ruby scripts that post updates to Twitter (this and this) before. I think it’ll be cool if Romey could post to twitter when certain condition is triggered, e.g. going over budget.

After that I just need to have a mobile phone plan with internet then I can create Romey transactions anyway by sending an email and receive notifications from Romey via Twitter.

I am interested in wiki. So when I saw the new Merb wiki I naturally wanted to check it out. One problem, it’s on github and I don’t have git yet….

So I finally got off my lazy butt and installed git. The process was painless. Now I am all gitified to version 1.5.5. Yeeeha gitty up~~

I recently installed rb-appscript gem, which is way cool and I wanted to have a look at its implementation. So I used my ‘pushdgem’ shortcut which basically does a gem which and extract the path of the gem. But to my surprise it said ‘Can’t find rb-appscript’

I knew for a fact that the gem was installed, because TextMate’s RubyAMP (how this all started) depends on rb-appscript. But I double checked anyway running gem list rb-appscript which did contain the expected result.

hum.. I was puzzled, doesn’t matter I knew gems are installed (you can get it too via Gem.path) so I got to the rb-appscript gem in the end.

During playing with rb-appscript, a new version of rubygems was released (version 1.1.1). After I installed the update I started wondering why gem list and gem which behaved differently on the same gem.

Again my curiosity got me to have a look inside rubygems. With previously experience working with rubygems, it didn’t take long to find my way around the place. It turns out gem which command is really searching for the file that you want to require in the $LOAD_PATH. e.g. when you say require ‘hpricot’ gem which hpricot let you know exactly which file was loaded. Whereas gem list is based on the specs.

The difference means you could have a file called foobar.rb nothing to do with any gems in one of the directory in $LOAD_PATH such as /Library/Ruby/Site and run gem which foobar and it will return /Library/Ruby/Site/foobar.rb. It’s counterintuitive but I guess it is more important to know which file your program will load instead of finding out which directory the gem is installed.

A while ago, I was unable to login to RubyForge due to proxy issues. Thanks to Tom, he fixed it so I could start publishing romey releases again :)

I’ve had a chance of thrashing one at Eastern Creek. Let me just say when I floored it on the main straight…. WOA~~~~ the acceleration sent me firmly to the seat.

Very very nice car indeed.

I’ve discovered something interesting… on average each grocery item we get costs about $4.

I actually looked to get started git a while ago. Even got myself a github repos but I couldn’t be bothered to install git back then.

Fast forward to now, it is still not as easy as I would like but I can deal with it.

The main reason I want to get git is to make it easier to stay on edge rails.

I haven’t felt that I really need distributed SCM. With no experiences with using DSCM I am not ruling it out. Just need to find time to get to try it out.

• git
• a functional language, probably Haskell. Pity uni taught Miranda for my year and switched to Haskell the next year

romey nows run on edge rails.

It started with me trying the scope_out plugin as suggested by Ryan Bate’s awesome railscasts, episode 76. Then I read about named_scope from Ryan Daigle. named_scope is previously known as the has_finder gem so I decided to give the gem a go. After I started using it I decided to pistonise romey with edge rails to save myself the trouble of migrating from has_finder to named_scope when the next version of rails is released.

I can say that named_scope has been a huge help in paying back a lot of the technical debt in romey, particularly in making models fat and controllers slimmer.

All in all, it was a great experience cleaning up romey and going back to development on edge again. You can read about some of the new features coming soon here if you are not already following it via rails trac.

update: I should do another release of romey soon.