Note this is for emergencies only development will suck up tons of RAM, expose errors/system paths, amongst other undesirable effects.

stop the app

mtr stop [appname]

set development mode

mtr set_option [appname] environment=development

start the app again

mtr start [appname]

debug your app (and fix it, woop!)

stop the app, set productin mode, start the app again; done!

There’s a good introduction to using WebORB for Rails in Web Developer and Designer’s Journal. It gives a basic overview for the uninitiated while also highlighting some lesser know features such as retrieving Rails session objects and authentication (setCredentials), the latter being a fairly recent addition to WebORB.

Sephiroth have a couple of useful plug-ins for Firefox for debugging Flash. One is FlashTracer which will output any trace actions in a SWF. The second is Flash Switcher which let’s you switch between Flash Player versions.

Go get’em.

As depressing as voting ‘irregularities’ are, don’t let it stop you from voting.

If you’re on the fence here are the congressmen who voted for and against Net Neutrality, a law that prevented broadband providers from treating some Internet sites differently from others (the ‘NOES’ are the bad guys). Here are the senators, as it was blocked in the house it never made it to them but the link shows their intent.

More shenanigans…

How to hack a voting machine.
Utah county has 947 registered voters, 4 more than the county’s entire population!
FBI looking into possible Va. voter intimidation
Robocalls calling people repeatedly day and night.

An Ohio woman, who did not leave her name, called The Washington Post in tears yesterday, saying she could not keep her phone line open to hospice workers caring for her terminally ill mother because of nonstop political robo-calls.

How hard is to build a voting machine that dosen’t crash as soon as you turn it on?

Voting Problems Crop Up on Election Day

I guess all the half-decent developers are doing web dev :P

I’ve been using CSSEdit for the last couple of months and it’s sharply increased my productivity when working with style sheets. Today MacRabbit released version 2.0 (of course) and it is jaw-droppingly good, TextMate good.

There are five major new features but my favorite so far is ‘Overridding’ which as the name suggests give you the ability to override live website styles. As it can overide live sites you can do away with the edit>save>refresh>test method when making style sheet changes on a dynamic site. Changes can be previewed without even saving the style sheet. In the screen shot below I’m changing the a:link color of the blog with the color wheel.

Overriding extracts the style sheets from the live site so all you rip-off artists can extract style sheets even faster than before! :P

Another cool new feature is ‘X-ray’ which let’s you select page elements such as a divs margin and padding. The page elements are listed hierarchically (html>body>div#container>div#sidebar>div#links) so you can easily select a parent object.

A new feature I know I’ll be using a lot is ‘Milestones’ which are similar to Photoshop’s history and layer comps, you can set a milestone and then proceed down different roads without fear of losing your original style if you make a mess of things.

Version 2.0 is much snappier than the old version and it looks great too, it makes use of newer Apple interface elements you’d see in the latest iTunes and the Pro Applications.

If you do web design/development on a Windows box, and TextMate wasn’t enough of a reason to dump your fugly PC and even worse OS, you’d be crazy not to switch after using CSSEdit.