Jeff Barr

Here are the current free stories by Horror author Jeff Barr available at www.jeffbarr.com.

The Sorcerer – a humorous short-short about friends with a different kid of benefits.

Mr. Moak and Mr. Soames – Two Fine Old Gentlemen – Another humorous and gross short story about the less obvious dangers of the Epicurean lifestyle.

Jerry and Me: A Love Story – This was a fun, somewhat Christmas-themed story I wrote as part of an impromptu writer’s group who sometimes hangs around at WeBook.com.

Recently I ran into an issue trying to deploy to the Heroku Cedar stack for my (in progress) app, Mocknote. I developed the app locally with Sqlite3, using Sinatra and DataMapper.
Heroku complained about my Gemfile.lock missing the dm-postgres-adapter, but I was unable to install the gem locally. I resolved this conundrum by adding this to my Gemfile:


group :production do
gem 'dm-postgres-adapter'
end


I then ran this:

bundle install --without production


I was then able to successfully deploy to Heroku.

The tree command is, sadly, missing from Mac OSX – but here’s a quick and dirty way to replicate it on OSX. You could of course use MacVIm and NERDTree, but where’s the fun in that?

find . -print | sed -e ‘s;[^/]*/;|____;g;s;____|; |;g’

A while back I did a little experiment with building a ruby gem – the result was Regexhelper. You can check out the gem on Rubygems.org, or check out the source at Githu.com. Of course, you can install by by running ‘gem install regexhelper’ if you’re so inclined. As of now its been downloaded 45 times.

I used a the jeweler gem to help create regexhelper. Right now the gem is pretty empty, and probably very amateurish, but I plan on updating and cleaning it up as soon as possible.

vi .bashrc

is for current user only.

sudo vi /etc/bash.bashrc

is for all users – hence the sudo.

in .bashrc, add:

export PS1=”\e[0;34m[\u@\h \W]\$ \e[m”

to permanently change the bash prompt color.

List of Color codes:

• Black 0;30
• Blue 0;34
• Green 0;32
• Cyan 0;36
• Red 0;31
• Purple 0;35
• Brown 0;33
• Blue 0;34
• Green 0;32
• Cyan 0;36
• Red 0;31
• Purple 0;35
• Brown 0;33

Replace digit 0 with 1 to get light color version.

Just for the sake of remembering:
After installing MySQL via Macports (which installs mySQL to a different place than you’d expect), install the MySQL gem with:

sudo env ARCHFLAGS=”-arch i386″ gem install mysql — –with-mysql-config=/opt/local/bin/mysql_config5

I finally remembered after I found my bookmark for Mark Turner (amerine.net)’s post on installing Rails 3/Ruby 1.9.2.

While learning Rails, I’ve come across a fair number of really interesting subsets/addons to Rails. This is a list of the ones I plan to investigate in greater detail:

• Sinatra – Super simple and quick rails app setup – it doesn’t get much easier than this:
  

  require ‘sinatra’

  get ‘/’ do
  “Hello World!”
  end

  I love the way Sinatra does routing, and the erb :erbname syntax just makes sense right off the bat. Also is supposed to work well with heroku, though I haven’t goten that far yet.

• Refinery – Also super-quick and easy Gem, but builds out a bare-bones but extensible CMS/blogging engine. COWPU and Bend.rb are using it during the weekly hack night in Bend to build hot sexy pizza websites.

Coffeescript – Coffeescript is a kind of Ruby-ish language that compiles into javascript, and as of Rails 3.1 will come bundled with rails. I like coffeescript because I’m a dork who can’t type and I always mess up javascript, which is then just a PITA to debug.