Martian Wabbit Productions

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Sun, 11 Dec 2011 16:25:52 -0600

Mew: Windows Markdown Editor

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 14:37:14 -0600

So for some mysterious and unknown reason I am selling a windows markdown editor. It’s called Mew, and you can get it for $8 at codecanyon.

Mew, as you’d expect from a markdown editor is pretty simple. I built it for myself using C# and the awesome .net framework. I was basically forced into building it since, there wasn’t a nice markdown editor for windows available. I worked on polishing it for a couple of weeks and now here the end result:

It has built-in snippets, color themes and a live-preview, among other things.

I am fairly happy with the results. It provides a simple, yet customizable enviorment, it’s fast and really simple. I’ve tried to create an editor that doesn’t get in your way and that actually tries to help you. It was built for my needs so, these are addressed completely. I might add more features in future versions if anyone requests them since, I want it to be good editor for everyone.

I have a small list of things I’ve been considering to add so, we’ll see how that ends up working. Hopefully I’ll get somewhere with it and, even if it’s not a good seller, I did enjoy building it, working with C# is entertaining and pretty cool so, it made the whole process a nice experience. If I don’t make a single sale for a couple of months I’ll open-source it since, it’d mean there’s no commercial potential for it.

The Virtues of a Programmer

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 19:54:24 -0500

Laziness

The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful, and document what you wrote so you don’t have to answer so many questions about it. Hence, the first great virtue of a programmer.

Impatience

The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. This makes you write programs that don’t just react to your needs, but actually anticipate them. Or at least that pretend to. Hence, the second great virtue of a programmer.

Hubris

Excessive pride, the sort of thing Zeus zaps you for. Also the quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won’t want to say bad things about. Hence, the third great virtue of a programmer.

These are really cool, so I wanted to have them around to prevent me from Googling them in the future. I don’t really know who wrote them, I believe it was Larry Wall but, these being all over the net means I can’t know for sure.

Daydreams

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 11:12:31 -0500

Sometimes I daydream that my algebra teacher will come to class with a extreme craving for flan. He then tells us that we’re not having class and that the first person to bring him some flan will have a 100 automagically.

Today they are giving away flan at college. I am hopeful he’ll ask for some when he comes into the class.

Being bored is boring AKA Introducing PHP Routs

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 20:45:00 -0500

I am probably the most bored person I know. What I mean by this is, that I am almost never entertained. Most of the time, I’ll be doing something for some 5 minutes before my short attention span takes me elsewhere. This has stopped me from finishing a lot of personal projects in the past, losing a lot of cool things I built halfway through.

Since, I almost never finish my projects, I’ve decided to start publishing them. Hopefully, just knowing that others are looking at my code my motivate me to continue developing something. I’ve finally started using my Github account to it’s fullest. I honestly doubt it’ll actually have a great effect on me but, any motivation I might get will prove useful. So, in conclusion, I’ll be releasing most of the stuff I do whenever I am bored on my Github account and I’ll be posting about it here, all in an attempt to keep me interested.

Introducing PHP Routs

Let’s move on to my actual project. Routs, is a small PHP library built to handle URLs. Some background: I was playing with Sinatra the other day and, just by reading the documentation I fell in love with how it managed URL routes (I later discovered I wasn’t the only since, there are a bunch of projects written in PHP following it’s example). So, I decided I wanted to do the same in PHP but, in a very simple way which, would allow me to easily implement it into any project by including a single file.

It turned out to be a lot easier than I expected. After deciding on the syntax I would like to use with plugin I made huge advances in just a couple of lines. This is what I have so far:

Let’s say I am building an simple one page site for some guy named Bob. Since it’s so simple, I want to have as much as I can in a single page. Routs allow me to do something like this:

In this example I am using Routs to handle all get requests to example.com/home using the homeFunction() function. The part about the template manager is whatever method you’re using, I’ll be creating my own soonish. Now, I added a form to my html page and I want it to be handled on the same page. My routs handler changes into this:

Which handles the the submitted form and so on. Basically, the possibilities are endless! :D So yeah, that’s it, have fun with it, fork it, tell me why it sucks, etc.

JustVector Social Icons Font

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 14:28:00 -0500

I’ve been pretty bored lately, so I decided to redesign my site and found an awesome social icon set by Alex Peattie (http://www.alexpeattie.com) to go with the new design. The set is minimalistic and really cool! Unfortunately, I wasn’t as happy to work with it as I would have liked to mainly because, I couldn’t decide on what size I wanted the icons on the new site and thus, I found myself opening photoshop and resizing them far too often. I eventually, as you might have guessed by the post’s title, decided that such an icon set would make an awesome font. So, I created a font file which included most icons from the set* . This would allow me to embed the font and get nice icons which, I can resize and recolor with css.

I am very happy with the results, I’ll be updating it soon as I wanna get rid of some of the icons I included and replace them for others that I might think are more useful. The whole icon set is huge. So I’ll keep all versions I make around just in case the icon you’re looking for is in one of them. The main ones (Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, etc.) will be on all versions of the set.

I’ve created a @font-face kit using fontsquirrel. So it’s pretty much ready to be downloaded and used as it is right now. You can check out Alex’s demos right here.

The font is distributed under the same license as the icons, the Free Art License which, allows you to pretty much do anything you want with it. Read the license if you want details.

* I didn’t include all icons because, fonts have limited glyph spots available and I wanted to support as many keyboard layouts as possible by only including icons in common keys. For example, I didn’t use any of the accent keys I have access to because, I know most English keyboards wouldn’t support them. (I have a Spanish keyboard)

Download Font Kit

Update: V1.2

I found the first font a little hard to navigate so, I created a second version in which icons are now arranged alphabetically (mostly) and empty spaces where no icons could go were filled in with additional icons. This font version has less glyphs than the first version because it only uses letters and numbers. If you need some of the additional icons you can use the first one.

Download Font Kit (v1.2)

Tips

When you use these icons add a text-shadow. It’ll make the images smoother. Something like: text-shadow: 0 0 1px #000; would do the trick.

My first thoughts on Rails

Fri, 11 Feb 2011 23:05:00 -0600

I must say that I am truly impressed with rails. How easy everything is, makes working with it such a nice experience. Even a newbie like me can create a project with it in a couple of minutes and be happy with the results.

My first project was a small site to keep track of Jenga scores for my Jenga league(There is no actual Jenga league, sorry). It took me around an hour but, I am pretty sure I could have done it in around 15 minutes if I had known what I now know.

It might be because of my php background where, I code everything mostly from scratch but, rails felt almost like something I’d use to prototype an app. Everything was so easy and for some reason the command line read my thoughts and created exactly what I wanted automagically. I typed a couple of command and tada! Everything was ready to be published (which was also very easy thanks to heroku). All I needed to do was create a couple of scaffolds and I was ready to handle user input then, I added an authentication gem and I could handle users, everything was brilliantly easy. When I was done with my small jenga app I was completely disoriented, it had been so fast that I felt I had just finished creating a protoype and that now I was supposed to get started with the actual development. After a couple of minutes I realized I was actually done with my app which, left me with a great sense of awe towards RoR.

I plan to continue trying rails and see what it can do but, I think I’ll be sticking with php as my main language for the web I guess, that after all this time working with it my mind just thinks php feels right. I wanna try django next and choose between RoR and it to stick with and become completely fluent with it as well, I need more tools in my toolbox and any of them seem like a good addition. I’ll be posting whatever my findings are.

My Epic Move

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 16:20:00 -0600

My Epic Move

Why I am starting to love Ruby on Rails

Sat, 29 Jan 2011 15:32:00 -0600

I recently (about two weeks ago) started learning ruby and last week I picked up ruby on rails (RoR). I am loving it.

I started learning Ruby on Rails out of mere curiosity. After all, it is kind of the most trendy language at the moment. Everyone seemed to be having so much fun with rails that I kind of felt left out. So, I grabbed a book on ruby and got started with it. The whole process was incredibly painless. Ruby was rather smooth and my experience with other languages made it easier for me to get a grasp of how it all worked out.

I read the book and felt confident enough to start playing around with ruby. I had signed up with a heroku account a long while ago which meant I knew exactly where I was going to host whatever project I made up. Back then, when I signed up I had no idea of how powerful heroku was mainly because, I didn’t even understand how ruby on rails worked.

Now, I had ruby knowledge and a place to host rails but, back then I had no idea what followed. I made a question on forrst on how to get started using ruby for web development and got some awesome resources out of it. Namely, railcasts and rails for zombies. These places have been invaluable for my learning experience. I particularly enjoyed rails for zombies and even though it left a lot of things out of the tutorials (like how to actually install and be able to use rails) it was the most useful resource I had to actually get how rails worked.

Now, all I had to figure out was how to use rails. I didn’t really look very hard, I had read a long while ago some article at nettuts that explained how to get started with rails. It used this thing that looked like easyphp but for rails so I checked that article again to see what it was named and even though I discovered it’s name I ended up using something called the railsinstaller which was quite nice and made everything so much easier.

Now, I was all set, I had everything I needed in order to get started with rails. I started using aptana as my IDE. I usually use it when I am developing complex php apps because it makes it easier for you to be organized and studio 3 actually had ruby on rails support with meant I could continue using this one instead of going for my notepad. It took me a while to actually get the aptana terminal to play nicely with rails but all I had to do was reinstall the gem from inside aptana which vanished all of my problems and gave me a solid and trustworthy IDE to work with.

After all of that, I am an official RoR newbie and can (kind of) get myself around the whole thing. I, obviously, know rails in the lowest possible level so I am missing several months before I officially know rails at all. But, I am looking forward to it. I am not going to replace php for rails as my server side system of choice, for every tool has it’s place in my toolbox. I’ll, mostly be, developing in ruby for a while though, I wanna become an expert.

I’ll soon be posting about my actual first experience with RoR and how I felt about it’s workflow when I first started.

jQuery Quickbar

Sat, 29 Jan 2011 12:58:00 -0600

jQuery Quickbar:

This is the only jQuery plugin I’ve ever built. It might not be perfect or needed by anyone out there but, I would like to keep a reference to it.

My New Blog

Sat, 29 Jan 2011 12:53:02 -0600

So I’ve made a new change to my blog. I was tired of my old one. It was nearly as active as I would have wanted it to be. The content’s quality was bad and I didn’t like how it felt overall. I am now working in a different way and I wanted to express myself and what I am doing more actively than what the old blog allowed me to. Hopefully this one will work better with me. I’ve decided that I’ll use tumblr for this instead of the usual self-hosted wordpress blog I’ve always used.

I won’t be moving any posts from the old blog over here. If I feel the need to put some of the old content in here, I’ll just link to it.