Joe Merante's Blog

This month I learned that this year I learned to keep a New Year's resolution alive, that documenting everything is usually a good idea, and most important, to relax and have fun during the holidays. Happy 2015!

Over the summer, I decided it was time to learn a client-side Javascript framework. I chose to start with Ember , mostly because it felt more like Rails and I kept hearing about the combination of an Ember app with a Rails backend. While I usually jump right in and try to build something, I had enough other coding   side projects going on at the time (and it was summer!), so I joined the Ember Weekly mailing list, attended a few of the NYC meetups and kept a loose eye on things... which have been moving along quickly ! By November, it was time for another look.

From the Unfinished Business department: At the Books in Browsers Conference hackathon in October, I worked with a few others to port the Readium Chrome extension , an in-browser epub reader, to Firefox. The core team had already been working on a branch which we didn't notice before diving in. Oops. However, it seems like they ran into the same issue that prevented us from going all the way: working with the user's filesystem from the extension.

Last fall, I finally got around to moving joemerante.com, a Drupal site, to a new host. It was getting a little ridiculous that I had no way to ssh into the hosted space and couldn't simply git push origin master or similar to deploy (no need for anything fancy given the traffic and simplicity of the site - see my previous workaround here ). Why didn't I just quickly redo the site in Sinatra or Rails? Mostly because it works fine as-is, I like Drupal (the nostalgia factor of being the first web framework I learned well, also it's a great CMS and community) and jumping around between different environments keeps you sharp. This post rolls through a few things I came across while moving the site, maybe it'll help someone out there.

By August I wanted to get out of the browser and learn something entirely different! Although my journey began in anticipation of iOS 8's September release and the introduction of Swift in June, after reading tons of comments and discussions about whether to learn Swift, I decided to stick with iOS 7 and Objective-C at first to gain a better understanding of the entire iOS ecosystem.

Getting close to the end of the year.. will I make all twelve TMIL posts? Let's see how far we can get as things might start to take on a "best of 2014" flavor. Here are some command line favorites I've noted and usually forget, mostly around searching: List the first ten items in a directory ls | head -10 Show only the human-readable sizes of all xml files in a directory ls -lSah *.xml | awk '{print$5}' Sum the sizes of all zip files in a directory (notice there's no -h flag to ls, this way you sum only bytes, then later convert to kilobytes then to megabytes) ls -lSa *.zip | awk '{ total += $5}; END {print total/1024/1024 "Megabytes"}'