http://brian.maybeyoureinsane.net/blog The personal blog of Brian Donovan, a web developer interested in Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, Politics, Biology, and a lot more. Wed, 21 May 2008 06:37:53 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Here's a fun bit of JavaScript inspired by Yehuda Katz's [jspec][jspec]. It lets you call a function with a particular scope, making it ideal for calling functions that depend on a particular scope, but for whatever reason you don't want to set up that scope statically. [jspec]: http://github.com/wycats/jspec/tree/master function callWithScope(fn, context, scope) ... http://brian.maybeyoureinsane.net/blog/2008/04/05/dsls-in-javascript/ **Update**: I'm ditching Sake for [Thor][thor]. These tasks have been ported to thor and are available [on github][thor-git]. [thor]: http://github.com/wycats/thor [thor-git]: http://github.com/cypher/thor-git I've started using [Git][git] as my SCM of choice for Subversion projects over the last several months and have found that, while I don't want to use Subversion anymore, there are ... http://brian.maybeyoureinsane.net/blog/2008/01/30/git-sake-tasks/ [Git][git] is split up into a whole bunch of executables like `git-commit` and `git-status`, but you can also run them by doing `git commit` and `git status`. Cool, right? But it doesn't work with your own scripts, so you can't just put `git-wip` in your PATH and have it work. ... http://brian.maybeyoureinsane.net/blog/2007/12/21/make-git-play-nice-with-custom-scripts/ Now that I've had Leopard for a while I think I've settled the dispute between [Time Machine][tm] and [File Vault][fv]. Time Machine won out. [tm]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Machine_%28Apple_software%29 [fv]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FileVault The problem was that FileVault works by setting up an encrypted disk image that is mounted in the /Users directory, rather than /Volumes where things ... http://brian.maybeyoureinsane.net/blog/2007/12/19/time-machine-vs-file-vault/ I upgraded to [Leopard][leopard] over the weekend after borrowing a friend's copy, since I just couldn't wait for mine to arrive (thanks Coda!), and it's been overall a Good Thing. Leopard has brought us new versions of just about every app in OS X. The most notable ones, for me, ... http://brian.maybeyoureinsane.net/blog/2007/10/30/inbox-zero-ruby-spaces-and-3rd-party-apps-on-leopard/ Firstly, one feature that Mobile Safari on the iPhone has is the ability to double-tap a portion of the page to have that take up the whole screen. This is really great for reading articles on blogs and other news sites, and I thought that it would be a great ... http://brian.maybeyoureinsane.net/blog/2007/10/09/iphone-suggestions/ I've been away for the last 10 days or so on a well-deserved vacation. Here are a few updates that all have to do with money: 1. The Fed lowered the [Prime Rate][prime-rate], and [ING Direct][ing] lowered their interests rates the next day 2. [Helio][helio] finally gave me ... http://brian.maybeyoureinsane.net/blog/2007/09/24/money-matters/ I finally found, after about two months, a couple things I want the iPhone to do that it doesn't do: 1. Upload to Flickr 2. Play music over an Airport Express The first may be taken care of with a third-party app, like Pushr or iFlickr. The latter is ... http://brian.maybeyoureinsane.net/blog/2007/09/24/iphone-feature-requests/ Having recently dealt with Apple in buying the iPhone and having to continually deal with Helio to [give me my money back][refund], I thought I'd compare and contrast the experiences I've had with them. [refund]: http://brian.maybeyoureinsane.net/blog/2007/05/31/fuck-helio/ Helio hasn't refunded the money *they owe me* when I've been asking for it for the ... http://brian.maybeyoureinsane.net/blog/2007/09/17/apple-vs-helio/ I was a little disappointed by Apple's decreasing the price of the iPhone by $200 so shortly after it came out. That's 33% off, quite a big discount and, for some early iPhone adopters, a slap in the face. I felt like this: I was willing to pay for it ... http://brian.maybeyoureinsane.net/blog/2007/09/06/thank-you-apple/