Got stuck; Solved; Sharing...

CommandT vs CtrlP

2012-05-14T00:00:00Z

For almost a year, I was been using Command-T plugin with hapiness. It’s a good plugin, but when your project starts to grow, your files will also, naturally. And the problem begins. The first load of Command-T reached 10 seconds, so I thought that it’s time to move.

So I found CtrlP, which promises to do the same job. And the speed problems was been solved. Really. Even VIM boot time becames much faster.

The main difference between these plugins is that Command-T was written in C, exposed via Ruby to VIM, by ruby bindings. On the other hand we have a full vimscript plugin. No extra binding.

For both plugins I’ve wrote a extension for finding and selecting a filetype to be set using setfiletype. For Command-T, I’ve sent a pull-request, but it seems that the owner isn’t much interested in it.

For CtrlP, I’ve wrote a standalone plugin, you can just install it using pathogen.

You can check out my entire VIM configuration here. Enjoy!

Use Ruby on Google Code Jam

2012-04-07T00:00:00Z

Google Code Jam is an international programming competition that happens every year, since it was released, in 2003.

Programmers must read the problem, and write the algorithm to solve it, using the given input file.

So let’s take a look on a problem given on Qualification Round Africa 2010.

Problem: Reverse Words

Problem: Given a list of space separated words, reverse the order of the words. Each line of text contains L letters and W words. A line will only consist of letters and space characters. There will be exactly one space character between each pair of consecutive words.

Input: The first line of input gives the number of cases, N. N test cases follow. For each test case there will a line of letters and space characters indicating a list of space separated words. Spaces will not appear at the start or end of a line.

Sample input:

3
this is a test
foobar
all your base

Sample output:

Case #1: test a is this
Case #2: foobar
Case #3: base your all

Let’s solve it!

Every problem you’ll have to read the input file, and write the same output file format. So you’ll copy and paste! Not!

The inputs are easy to parse, but googlecodejam make it even easier. The same for outputs.

Each input line must be solved with the same algorithm. It’s exactly what this gem expects you to do.

To solve the “reverse words” problem, you need just to create a class with a method called ‘run’, accepting a String as argument.

# reverse_words.rb
class ReverseWords
  def run(line)
    line.split(' ').reverse.join(' ')
  end
end

Having the input file (.in) and the source file (.rb), you can now generate the output, by running:

googlecodejam -s reverse_words.rb  -i B-small-practice.in

So you’ll see the following output:

Running...
Output written in: "B-small-practice.out"
Finished in 0.000712ms.

And that’s all! Have a nice hack'in!

Fancy search box using Bootstrap 2.0

2012-02-16T00:00:00Z

Bootstrap is awesome. I really enjoy using it.

In the links below I demonstrate a live example of the following simple search box with embedded button:

View source for Bootstrap 2.0.2

View source for Bootstrap 2.0.

The best part is that Bootstrap is so easy to customize. You can make it larger if you want to.

Hope you liked it!

Create your custom social summary in seconds

2011-10-12T00:00:00Z

Socialoud is a ruby gem created to allow easy setup for your custom social summary, that updates automatically, keeping your custom look and feel, because we are free, isn’t it?

Deploy it in seconds

Take a look how simple is to setup your custom social summary, like this live example.

On your own server

You just need to clone the socialoud-default repository at Github.

$ git clone git://github.com/endel/socialoud-default.git
$ bundle install
$ thin start

And it’s done. Go to http://localhost:3000 and it will be there. You should now customize your configuration file, HTML and CSS.

Configuration file is simple like this:

Deploy on heroku

On the same directory that you cloned the default app repository, do the following.

$ heroku create my-awesome-social-summary
$ git remote add heroku git@heroku.com:my-awesome-social-summary.git
$ git add .
$ git push heroku master

The default app already caches the single-page result for a while. It is extremely recommended that you keep caching, or just change the interval, because of heavy requests for social services.

Hope you enjoy. Please leave a comment if you have any suggestion or opinion.

Ensure UTF-8 string from any source with Ruby

2011-08-01T00:00:00Z

Sometimes, when you need to download an html web page, it can be interpreted as a wrong encoding, causing errors with accents, and special characters.

You can avoid those problems converting to UTF-8. As follows:

And just calling ensure_utf8 function:

Hope it helps.

Tip - Omit auto-increment values using mysqldump

2011-06-25T00:00:00Z

If you want to export just the records, omiting the auto-increment id column, you should do this trick:

There is NO native way to do that only using mysqldump. So, enjoy.

Note: For Mac OS X users, use sed -E instead of sed -r.

Auto-linking tweets in Ruby and Javascript

2011-06-09T00:00:00Z

So, you are retrieving tweet messages, and want to build links for urls, mentions, and hashtags. Using any programming language it will looks the same to do that. The point here is the regular expression used.

Ruby version:

JavaScript version:

You can port it to the language you want to. And that’s it, hope it helps.

Removing duplicated rows from a MySQL table

2011-05-17T00:00:00Z

This tip is a simple query to remove duplicated entries from a MySQL table.

DELETE FROM table1
USING  table1, 
       table1 as table2
WHERE  table2.id > table1.id
AND    table2.unique_param = table1.unique_param

Here I’m using a virtual copy of table1 to check whether it has uniq_param’s after the first ocurrence of the id, and then delete it.

It will only works if you have a sequencial ‘id’ column. You can do a select before really deleting to check if it will do the proper thing.

Inspiring Web Navigations: Parallax And Scrolling

2011-05-02T00:00:00Z

It’s just HTML5, Javascript and imagination. Well done.

Take a look at these examples:

Hobo Lobo of Hamelin

A infantile storytelling website. Uses parallax and horizontal scrolling.

Ben The Body Guard

Creative hotsite for a “phone data protector”. Uses vertical scrolling. It looks even better on the iPhone.

20 Things I Learned About Browsers And The Web

Browse and animate pages like a real book, has a nice summary. It was created by Hakim El Hattab, who has some nice HTML5 and WebGL experiments on his website.

Nike Better World

Another creative hotsite, created by Nike. Uses vertical scrolling and parallax effect. Not so cool on the iPhone, but it still navigable.

Parallax give to the user a much immersive way to scroll the page. But it surely have to be well-designed.

You can get started from this example, made by Brett Jayolr. He uses CSS and pure Javascript to create a simple background parallax effect.

Have a nice coding!

Noise is good

2011-04-25T00:00:00Z

Recently, I’ve noticed something cool when was surfing the web: noise-based backgrounds.

Real examples

Surely most of this examples uses shadows and light effects, but the noise avoids a silly solid color.

Twitter

Posterous

Tumblr

Instagram

So, the tip is: if your background with solid color looks pretty unsightly, you can just use a noise, and voilà! It can be so nicer right now.

This blog has a noise-based background too, what did you think about it? :)