Stay Hungry

GMail can handle MAILTO links, it's simple

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 10:48:00 -0500

It’s extremely frustrating when I click a mailto link and Mail.app starts to open. This is one of the most annoying things on my Mac (which I otherwise adore).

But I just found a way to make GMail in Chrome handle mail links…

Open a GMail tab

[from that GMail tab] Open a javascript console with CMD-OPTION-J and paste in the following:

navigator.registerProtocolHandler('mailto', 'https://mail.google.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s', 'Gmail');

Hit enter and accept the popup in your browser.

:-]

Will you be my code-valentine, Chrome?

Jobs, IBM, middle finger. Good for him.

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:05:33 -0500

Jobs, IBM, middle finger.

Good for him.

Photo

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:35:38 -0500

"[8:26pm] • doyleRules this is the part of the day where we communicate by changing our nicks in..."

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 15:39:32 -0500

“[8:26pm] • doyleRules this is the part of the day where we communicate by changing our nicks in irc
[8:28pm] wick: I am going to tell you all a beautiful story.
[8:28pm] wick is now known as Sean_John_Combs.
[8:28pm] Sean_John_Combs is now known as Puff_Daddy.
[8:29pm] Puff_Daddy is now known as P_Diddy.
[8:29pm] P_Diddy is now known as Diddy.
[8:29pm] • Diddy and that is the story of my name
[8:29pm] Diddy is now known as wick.
[8:30pm] • doyleRules wishes Tumblr had an IRC post option”

- I love this team. Was going to write a longer post about our launch of TouchPlay today and how awesome the team is that put it together. Instead, you get a little glimpse into our IRC.

If you find that snippet funny and want to code and/or design Shelby.tv, please get in touch. If you don’t find it funny, you’re normal. If you don’t find it funny, but you want to, come join one of the greatest teams on Earth.

Getting Rails SSL right on Nginx w/ Passenger

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 16:32:37 -0500

400 Bad Request

The plain HTTP request was sent to HTTPS port

It bugged me for an entire day. ”Please send HTTPS stuff to HTTPS and I’ll be perfectly happy,” said nginx. ”Fuck you, I do what I want,” said the oAuth callback from Twitter. So I started digging…

Maybe I could just tell nginx to re-direct the request. It knows what it wants; it should be able to satisfy itself…

error_page 497 https://$host$request_uri;

Nope. But if this did work, it would only treat a symptom, not the problem itself.

So I needed to find out *why* the oAuth callback_url was being set to “http://shelby.tv:443” instead of “https://shelby.tv”. A little digging into OmniAuth and I found the full_host method which ultimately makes this determination based on request.url. An additional line of logging and I discovered that reqeust.url had the http scheme, not https.

I’m running Rails w/ Passenger on nginx. But nginx likes to keeps secrets from Rails (specifically, it doesn’t let on about SSL). So you just ask nginx to let Rails in on the secret and boom, everything “just works” (thanks to the excellent work on the Rails core team and OmniAuth, behind the scenes).

passenger_set_cgi_param HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO https;

That’s it. Threw that one liner into my ssl-enabled server{} block and Rails’ request.url was fixed, allowing OmniAuth correctly built the callback_url. :-]

—-

FYI: I spent almost a full day researching this problem (to no avail), during which time I learned a shit tonne about these technologies and code bases. I then made a smart move: document my progress and go home. Came in the next morning and hit the fix in 20 minutes.

Work is a much better version of school.

An Engineers Laptop

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:13:00 -0500

I’m bringing a new lappy online completely fresh (as my last one was stolen) and setting up my dev environment. It’s nice to get a clean start, a blank system, without all the crud that builds up around apps you’ve stopped using. So, here’s a running list of the bigger things I set up:

Chrome Dev Channel - I’m not stable, why would I want a browser that is?

XCode - Apple should install this by default.

rvm - The lightweight and perfectly powerful Ruby Version Manager. Don’t run Ruby without it.

git - I’ve gotten into a good habit of habitually branching and pushing my branches to github regularly. This means ~0 lines of code were lost in the burglary.

Spice up your shell prompt for git (~/.bash_profile):

And why not add some color (~/.gitconfig):

TextMate - Although vim doesn’t kill you, it doesn’t make you stronger. TextMate works really well, makes it easy to read/write/navigate code, and it’s keyboard shortcuts are now muscle memory for me.

AckMate - Better full-project search than TextMate’s built in grep. Also updated my ~/.ackrc file for some additional filetypes I want searched.

Javascript Lint - Automatically link my js files on save in TextMate. This isn’t the bundle I used to use, but so far it seems okay (does require you to install node.js).

iStat Menus - To know what my system is doing with a quick glance. Love this thing (and glad I was able to find my old serial number).

Colloquy - b/c Shelby <3 IRC

F.lux - Warms up my screens at night. The cool blue of my anti-glare screen is fine during the day. But at night it seriously causes eye/brain hurt.

Backblaze - Yep, I’ve been backing up for years, rationalizing that “$50/year will seem super cheap when I lose all my data.” Most of my work is in the cloud, but most of my personal stuff is on Backblaze. It helped take the sting out of the loss.

Dropbox - Pretty good for communicating with consultants. I would prefer github for everything like this, but git isn’t for everybody. And in theory, I can use dropbox on my iPhone/iPad to view some stuff (I haven’t, yet).

OS X Settings

Trackpad: tap-to-click
Keyboard: fast key repeat w/ short delay (I get really annoyed using computers that don’t have this set)
Terminal: “pro” scheme
N.B. holding down the command key, you can drag items in the menu bar.

And finally, Vagrant, for a virtualized Shelby dev environment. It’s really nice to just download a box, run a couple of scripts, and Shelby is up and ready for hacking.

Beware; vagrant has more than it’s fair share of land mines. One of our newest engineers recently tackled this project, so watch the Shelby blog for an informative and useful guide to vagrant in the coming weeks.

That’s all for now. I’ll update this if I left anything important out.

i would take such good care of a loch ness pet monster

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 20:47:46 -0500

i would take such good care of a loch ness pet monster

"I don’t often fight the status quo, but I always ignore it."

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 10:14:08 -0500

“I don’t often fight the status quo, but I always ignore it.”

- Spinoza

The Count on #censoredshelby is amazing… /via onshelby...

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 19:23:34 -0500

The Count on #censoredshelby is amazing… /via onshelby Nick Ruffilo http://shel.tv/tN2GCz

There are 10 types of people: those who understand Girl and those who don't.

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 12:31:30 -0500

thelaurenproject:

And Lo, it was at 10:10am on 11/10/11 that Lauren found herself on the 10th floor of a building marked 110 in New York City (10010). It was noted that this was, like, so totally binary, and the brogrammers of Shelby.tv smiled upon her and saw that this was good.

#Brogramming commandment #11: Start every day with...

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 09:17:59 -0400

#Brogramming commandment #11: Start every day with “Sail” by Awolnation

It makes me so happy when a product just works. I’ve come...

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 10:02:25 -0400

It makes me so happy when a product just works. I’ve come to expect that from everything (thank you, Steve). And Shelby.tv just came through in a big way…

I “read later” most everything I find interesting (almost 100% of avc.com) and now I’m able to watch later just as simply. I never tried our bookmarklet in GReader before, but when I clicked “Add to Shelby,” it just worked.

Great work team.

One of the greatest users of technology the world has ever seen....

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 14:53:38 -0400

One of the greatest users of technology the world has ever seen. If there’s a heaven, I can’t wait to see what he creates up there…

Welcome, Mark Johnson

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 11:16:00 -0400

Hiring is straightforward; you need to find a great person who is passionate about building your company, fairly smart, and meshes well with the team (then let them loose!). But hiring is difficult; finding these people (at the right time) is not often easy.

It took me 6 years to hire Mark Johnson. While that’s a bit of hyperbole, I have known since graduating with Mark as Computer Engineers from Brown in 2005 that I wanted to build a startup with him. He’s a phenomenal engineer. Nobody pushed me harder in college. And looking back, I’m still impressed at so much of what we built.

But we built that stuff for our professors. Now we get to build for ourselves, and I couldn’t be more excited.

The Shelby team was already fucking awesome - returning from 10 days off the grid in Cyprus gave me even better perspective on that. And now we get to add Mark to the formula (VMWare had him pushing too many pencils). There’s so much more I could say, but I think this picture of Mark at our brand new west coast engineering campus says it best:

FAIL: Your name is invalid. (Ruby UTF-8 regex)

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 09:00:06 -0400

Often times you’ll want to validate users’ names (or nicknames) in your web applications. Although I’m not fundamentally opposed to using all the wonderful Unicode (UTF-8 in particular) characters under the sun, it does make it easier to use and understand an app when user names are at least recognizable to you. If an app is global (like twitter) this may not be the case. But you get there organically, and it doesn’t make sense to open the floodgates right now. So we started with

validates_format_of :nickname, :with => /\A[a-zA-Z0-9_\.\-]+\Z/

Allowing lower and uppercase letters, numbers, dot, hyphen and underscore. A pretty standard start. But we saw some validations fail when user names were copied from 3rd party services (twitter, facebook, tumblr) including some letters with accents over them.

Fortunately we are using Ruby 1.9 (with Rails 3.1) and validating with unicode is straightforward. We added support for all the Latin extensions with just two tweaks. First, we need this at the top of the file with the regular expression so Ruby interprets it correctly

# encoding: UTF-8

then we add from code point U+00C0 to U+02AE, chaning our regex to

validates_format_of :nickname, :with => /\A[\u00c0-\u02aea-zA-Z0-9_\.\-]+\Z/

Once we get bigger in countries that speak other languages, I’ll be adding some more characters sets to that regex.

Photo

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 17:15:48 -0400

"When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have..."

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 11:11:05 -0400

“When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.”

- -Steve Jobs in Wired, Feb 1996

Networks pander to the lowest *common* denominator. Video is asynchronously social (watch now, discuss later) and information dense, which makes it a very interesting form of communication. One that has been largely unexplored by people like you and me. The economics/tech of TV required broadcasting to a large audience. That common denominator is therefore very low.

YouTube, Vimeo and other Internet services have started the democratization of video and creating communities of their own. But this segment is still so young and under explored. I’m excited to see and help accelerate video on two fronts: real-time candid video and community driven meaningful video.

Real-time candid video is not live, but it’s close and it’s only the meaningful bits. It’s a rough edit of what just happened, the video equivalent of 140 characters. I bet it will change our world.

I don’t watch and don’t care to further the pace of dumb video (i.e. reality tv). But I do watch lots of TV and mostly focus on though provoking / horizon expanding historical or scientific shows. There is great demand for this material but it’s difficult for Networks to capture. If I can help to decrease the amount of time spent watching video, while increasing the amount of meaning derived from watching video, I will have succeeded.

First NYC hurricane miracle: Michael Jackson (jacket) reports...

Sat, 27 Aug 2011 18:53:41 -0400

First NYC hurricane miracle: Michael Jackson (jacket) reports weather.

First NYC hurricane casualty: 4 year old child tragically loses...

Sat, 27 Aug 2011 18:37:54 -0400

First NYC hurricane casualty: 4 year old child tragically loses hand.

Shelby does Fullscreen with a side of AirPlay

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 11:07:47 -0400

We launched a pretty big UI update today and people seemed to generally enjoy it. But we also launched a little gem that probably went under the radar: full screen mode (without Flash!). If you’re running Safari 5.1 (on Mac OS X Lion) the “expand” button in our player controls will bring you into true full screen mode with our full UI.

This functionality is supported in Lion via WebKit (the rendering engine behind Safari and Chrome). Although Chrome doesn’t yet support full screen, once it gets up to speed with Safari, you guys will get true full screen mode too. In fact, any browser on any operating system that supports the new HTML5 full screen spec will get the same fancy treatment from Shelby.

How do we do it? Pretty simple; here’s the actual code running in production:

$(“#app-holder”)[0].webkitRequestFullScreen();

document.webkitCancelFullScreen();

If you’re on an iPad, that’s cool too. You have to click the full screen button on the video element and our full UI won’t be there (due to limitations in the YouTube API and mobile Safari, respectively) but you’ll get big beautiful full screen video (despite Apple trying to hold HTML5 down!). And I almost forgot, AirPlay just works*.

*actually, YouTube HTML5 video AirPlay has been broken for a couple of weeks now. They broke it, not me. So once YouTube and Apple get that straightened out, AirPlay will be back.