Eliza Brock

As cheesy as this is, it’s so true

runningastartup:

When someone cancels a meeting at the last minute and I find myself with an unallocated hour, I’m like

Unveiling the Grand Plan for RailsThemes.com

This weekend (and by weekend, I mean Tue.-Thur) we dominated our product creation goals.

Also, I learned to use the Healing Brush tool in Photoshop.

It was a damn good weekend.

P.S. A quick teaser of the logo (we’re not done yet!):

Unveiling the Grand Plan for RailsThemes.com

This weekend (and by weekend, I mean Tue.-Thur) we dominated our product creation goals.

Also, I learned to use the Healing Brush tool in Photoshop.

It was a damn good weekend.

P.S. A quick teaser of the logo (we’re not done yet!):

Sponsor of Nashville Global Day of Code Retreat

Eliza Brock Software was an official sponsor of the Nashville Code Retreat (part of the Global Day of Code Retreat) this year.

It was a great event and I was happy to be a part of it.

Speed up Heroku spin-up

This is a wee little tidbit I hadn’t noticed before-

You can tell Heroku to ignore entire directories when creating the app slug.

So, if you’re like me and have a ton of test and doc files, you can slim down your Heroku slug by adding the following in a .slugignore file in your rails root:

feature
spec
doc

See also: the heroku docs for ignoring files.

How To Determine If A Binary Is Available On Heroku

I’m adding spell-checking to a rails project.  Naturally, I want to avoid writing my own spell checker, so I immediately thought of using Aspell or similar.  However the app is deployed on Heroku, so I wanted to be sure that aspell was available on Heroku before I included it as a dependency.

To determine if a binary is available on heroku:

Run the Heroku console for the app you have on Heroku:

cd my-app-directory
heroku run console

Once the console runs, you can shell out to which to determine if a binary is present:

`which aspell`

If it returns a filesystem path, the binary is present.  If it returns an empty string, the binary isn’t present.

Binaries can be added to your application both through the bin directory in your application or through native extensions to a gem (see also: stack overflow discussion)

Terminal-style Navigation in OS X Finder

When you’re in a finder window, type cmd+shift+g to get a sweet tab-completable field for navigating the file system.

I learned this yesterday from Caleb Cornman.

Create your own brew recipes

Run:

brew create <url to tarball>

Which, through pure magic, will figure out how to compile the given package and create a brew recipe for you. 

It will open up in your editor of choice.  Just write the file and then run:

brew install <the name of your package>

And voilà, it’s installed.

I’m told it’s also very easy to fork the project and submit your formulas back to the community using this method, as well. However I haven’t had occasion to do that yet.

See also, the docs.  But they don’t mention the magic or the fact that this is actually faster than downloading and compiling it yourself!

Thanks to Brian Dunn for showing me this this morning!