Sublime Text 2 Guard Plugin Updates

Just dropping a quick note to all that follow my blog. Last night I made a numeber updates to the Guard Plugin for Sublime Text 2. Most of these were in direct response to feedback that I got from users after making the initial release on my blog, I think, two days ago. The modifications I made are enumarted below:

1. The biggest addition is RVM detection and integration. The plugin is now intelligent enough to detect if you have RVM installed and detect if you are using a Project specific .rvmrc and of course respond by calling Guard appropriately depending on the case.
2. Another relatively small fix is a vertical only auto-scroll. Before, if Guard output went to the right past the width of the pane it was auto-scrolling to the right and then bouncing back to the left at the next line. Now, it always scrolls down the left most column of the output basically making it auto-scroll vertically.
3. Third I added some output preprocessing that strips out the Terminal Color Codes so that the output is a bit cleaner.
4. I also added a lot of descriptive output and error handling and output to let the user better know what is failing so they might be able to debug the situation a bit better.

As always if you have any feedback (feature requests, bug reports, etc.) you can simply create an issue for the project at the projects GitHub Issues Page.

If you are new to the Guard Plugin for Sublime Text 2 you can find installation instructions and document on the GitHub Page.

For instructions on upgrading please checkout the GitHub Page.

Sublime Text 2 Guard Plugin

Hi all. I know it has been a while. Please forgive me. My life has been a little crazy. I am still in the process of buliding my house. I also recently became engaged so I am trying to deal with wedding planning. Beyond that I am still trying to get all my development work done for RealPractice, my side company, and all of my open source projects.

Anyways, I needed a break for serious projects and decided it was time for a small fun project that would potentially help me develop the more serious projects more efficiently. A while back I started using a new text editor called Sublime Text 2. Basically it is what TextMate 2 promised (and failed) to be and more.

So, since I have been using this for a while and I have been developing Ruby and Rails apps lately using BDD and TDD I decided it was time to remove the annoyance of having to switch to the terminal after each little development iteration to check Guard's output to see why my tests are failing. Wow that was a run on sentence. Oh, well it is 2 am and I just finished the plugin so bare with me. Anyways. Therefore, I decided it was the perfect opportunity to build a Sublime Text 2 plugin that integrates Guard into it.

It is available with its documentation on GitHub at http://github.com/cyphactor/sublime_guard. Please don't hesitate to go grab it, use it, extend it, contribute back, report bugs, or throw me new feature requests.

Sod in Backyard & New Pocket Door

I know its a been a while since I made my last update about the progress on my house. I have been super busy with the house and a few other projects I have going on, not to mention my full time Job, :-). However, this weekend I manage to get quite a bit done. Probably, the most significant thing was the fact that I dug up over 4 inches of dirt for the entire backyard and put new soil down with furtilizer and laid some fresh sod down. My backyard actually is starting to look like a backyard. It feels so much better.

Secondly, I ripped out a wall, reframed it, and framed in another White Lami Pocket Door in the front bedroom. Hence, the closet now has a White Lami Pocket Door and so does the bathroom that is connected to the front bedroom. Seeing, the two White Lami doors hanging side by side helps me realize that my vision for this room is finally coming together.

Beyond, those feets I have been spending some time looking at fixtures for the bathroom that is attached to the front bedroom because the next step is really putting the plumbing for the fixtures in. Once, that is done I can drywall and tile the bathroom and the bedroom and put the fixtures in. Anyways, its coming together and I was definitely happy with the progress I made this weekend.

If you are interested in a short video update from me on this weekend please check it out below.

Installed Closet Pocket Door & Put Sod In Backyard from Andrew De Ponte on Vimeo.

House Update & Merry Christmas

Hey all,

I know it has been a while since I posted an updated on the house and I finally felt like I had a moment to breath tonight so I am going for it.

I was lucky that this year my family was doing Christmas at my Sister and her husbands house because it meant that my parents came out a bit early and they wanted to help with my house. So on the one day they came over, my Mom (I think of her as a master of mud) started cutting drywall to patch all the holes in the living room that I had to create to fix the gas lines and replace the electrical. While my Mom was doing that my Dad and I repiped the kitchen and got it hooked up to the new copper water system I put in the attic a little bit ago. My new dishwasher was delivered right around 7:00 pm so we called it a night.

The next day my Dad came over for a couple hours and we redid some of the electrical in the kitchen so that my new dishwasher would have electricity. After, that we installed my new garbage disposal and then install the new dishwasher. Oh, and when we repiped the kitchen we also ran cold water to the fridge which didn't used to exist before so now I have a fridge that has water and can do cool things like make ice!

Once we stopped working it was time to clean up and get ready to go see some family for Christmas eave which was nice. I learned about a very interesting iPhone/iPad game called Osmos. It is a very interesting game centralized around a gravity simulation. Then today I woke up and went over to my Sisters house and spend time with her and her husband, their kids, my parents, and my sisters husbands parents. It was a nice to spend time with them. I feel like I have been so busy lately that I haven't had a chance to see anyone except for people at work.

Plus its always nice to get presents, :-). This year was amazing I got clothes that I needed. Beyond that I got some other very practical things that I can use such as worm drive circular saw and a rolling tool chest. Anyways, thats my update I think next thing to tackle on the house is to repipe the laundry in the garage with copper. Once, that is done then I can repipe the existing bathroom, the one I am currently using, over a weekend. Once, those two things are done I will no longer be dependent on any galvanized water pipes and I can get rid of all of them, including the old tanked water heater which is still hooked up to them.

So, I hope you all had as nice of a Christmas as I did. I will try to post soon with another update on the house.

Archaic - Archived Chats & Dev Helper

So for those of that don't know, I lead of team of software developers. For a long time now I have noticed a number of gaps in the industry with respect to software development and team collaboration. One area that I always felt was missing some love was group chat.

Sure, there are a large number of different chat protocols and applications that implement them all. However, they generally miss an archived history that has full text searching. Beyond the group chat is prime location to distribute push notifications when Git repositories that the team is working with have changes pushed to them. Because of these two issues and number of other that I really don't want to get into at this point I have started a new open source project called "Archaic".

Archaic is a Rails application that provides archiving of IRC channel chats with a full text search interface as well as general developer helpers. It is composed of two pieces, an IRC Bot and the Rails application. Technically they both share the rails environment as the IRC Bot should be run with rails runner. You can checkout the project at the following: http://github.com/cyphactor/archaic

I plan to keep the master branch functional so feel free to use the master branch. It currently has the following features.

• IRC Chat Archiving
• Full Text Chat Archive Searching with Context (to expand context simply click on resulting match)
• Week number helper (when anyone in IRC channel types "weeknum" it replies with current week number)
• Ticket number helper (when anyone in IRC channel types "#\d+" it replies with link to that ticket) 

This is the initial introduction to this project and I am sure it has numerous directions that it can and will grow into. I very much welcome your thoughts, suggestions, feature requests, bug reports, testing, etc.

I believe that having a good central place of communication for a team even if they are working in the same office helps at least as a mechanism for keeping your devs notified about repo pushes close to real time.

Anyways, enjoy!