Dealing with Emoji
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Someone recently pointed out that Cheddar doesn't support Emoji that well. After lots of banging my head against the wall, I figured out some simple solutions. Here's what I learned.
Note: currently only Safari support emoji so the examples might be a bit confusing if you're using a browser that doesn't support emoji.
Cheddar's server uses Ruby on Rails. It turns out that there is a bug in ActiveSupport::JSON::Encoding that doesn't encode high UTF-8/UTF-16 characters correctly. (More information on this bug). There's a simple solution that monkey patches ActiveSupport to use the actual character instead of trying to encode it.
Using People
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The number of people that talk to me only when they want something is decently high. This bothers me a lot. If the only time you talk to me is to ask a programming question, to ask if I know some you can hire me to make something for you, or to ask me to fix your iPhone, it's kind of a slap in the face.
I don't mind doing any of those things for friends. If we haven't talked in 5 years and message me on Facebook with 2 sentences asking me to solve your problem, don't expect a positive reply.
My Grid System
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There's a lot of people using responsive CSS grid systems these days. Twitter's Bootstrap and Nathan Smith's 960 Grid System are two really popular ones.
I've never really been a fan of grid systems. Having tons of divs with classes that correspond to layout all over the place just feels wrong and makes your code look ugly. Anyway, I have a really basic way of doing things that I guess is technically a grid system, but I don't like to think of it like that.
Here's the basic layout:
Part of RubyMotion Open Sourced
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This is really amazing to hear.
After much thought and deliberation, we decided to open parts of RubyMotion. We believe that this will make it even easier for the community to contribute to and extend the RubyMotion platform, leading to a better RubyMotion for everyone.
Today, we are opening the “lib” directory of RubyMotion, which contains the build system, project Rakefile, the configuration object and also the project vendoring system. Check out the HipByte/RubyMotion repository.
I can't wait to see the community start improving this already growing platform.
Having Less
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When I left my last job a few months ago, I decided to simplify. Partly to save money to pay for my expenses and partly to just have less stuff.
Currently, the only furniture in my apartment is my desk, bed, and table. I'll also most likely be selling my table when I move out of my current apartment. Having almost nothing is fantastic. No TV to distract. No couch to lounge on. Focused.
I spend most of my day working at my desk or outside riding my bike. It's been really great for keeping me focused on Cheddar.