Here’s a sampling of a few to get you started:

• Testing of private class methods in Ruby
• Ruby Gem of a library for finding an optimal control strategy for Conway’s Game of Life
• Vim for irb
• obj.send available in Ruby 1.9 despite reports

She’s also got a post on getting syntax highlighting up and running on Blogger as well as a quick Git alias tip.

All this in less than a week? Will be interesting to see if she keeps up this pace.

The main changes are:

1. New visual theme (pretty obvious to anyone who visited before)
2. Homepage now shows a little “About me” and my latest blog post / latest three tweets instead of just dumping you into the blog directly
3. Tweets are now clearly separated from blog posts. Blog posts remain on /blog while Tweets have now moved to /twitter. There are also separate RSS feeds for each now. If there is demand, I will make a combined feed, but as of now one doesn’t exist.
4. (coming very soon) I am now hosting a photo gallery on my site. This will more or less be a portfolio of my work. You can still go to Flickr as always to see the latest stuff, but the photos here will be more hand picked and showcase my better ones.
5. Bunch of backend management pieces + tons of automation
6. Moved the site from Dreamhost.com to Bluehost.com. While Bluehost’s cPanel installation is completely horrid, their performance is so much better than Dreamhost it’s not even funny. On average, pageload time is an order of magnitude faster, but there has been times it’s been two orders of magnitude faster. I’ve had an account on both for quite a while, so will see which works best long term and adjust accordingly.

I’m pretty excited this is now live and hopefully more changes will be coming very soon. I have tested with all browsers that I care about personally (aka not IE6), but if you see an issue with your specific browser please let me know in a comment and I will be sure and take a look.

Enjoy!
-Jeremy

var myObj = function() {
    // private instance variables
    var foo = 33;

    // pseudo static initializer
    var staticInitializer = function() {
        // do some code here, will run only once
    }();

    // private method
    function foobar() {
        // do something
    }

    // public api
    return {
        publicMethod: function() {
            // do something
        },

        publicVariable: 42,

        publicMethod2: function() {
             // do something
        }
    }
}();

None of the above was new to me, but I had never seen it put all together like that. I liked it enough that I’ve adopted it as my preferred pattern for JS code going forward. Now, once I get the PHP code looking respectable I can finally sleep a little better at night!

Update:
Yes, the Eden team is the same team which is developing myM, and no, I won’t get you an invite (not this year at least).

Being a newb so to speak in Objective-C it wasn’t an easy path to go down. Unfortunately Apple’s documentation leaves a lot to be desired, especially in regards to documenting what methods are inherited from parent classes. Thankfully I have a few OSX developer buddies who were able to come to my rescue a couple times. One really kewl tool I learned about in the process is called F-Script. It allows you to introspect applications as they are running and run scripts poking and prodding deep inside an application. This combined with class-dump provided me with the information I needed to be able to make my modifications.

Thankfully I knew a bit about method swizzling and how that works from a couple other previous pet projects I worked on. It’s still something I consider a black magic hack, but at least I was comfortable enough with the concept to know what to do. I’ve seen several ways of implementing method swizzling before, but I found the one inside ForgetMeNot and SIMBL’s documentation to be the simplest, so I used it instead of what I used previously.

The first thing I needed to do was figure out what created the URL that Safari used to load up the search results for a specific query. Digging around for a while using F-Script Anywhere, I found that was done by the URLWithSearchCriteria method of the GoogleSearchChannel class. I started off by writing a simple wrapper method which NSLog’d the input of the function as well as the output. After I learned what it did fully, I then wrote the following replacement method:

- (NSURL *)_jj_URLWithSearchCriteria: (NSString *)searchCriteria
{
NSURL *yurl = [NSURL URLWithString: [[NSString stringWithFormat:@"http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=%@", searchCriteria] stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding]];
NSURL *url = [self _safari_URLWithSearchCriteria: searchCriteria];

NSLog(@"Search Criteria: %@", searchCriteria);
NSLog(@"Google URL: %@", url);
NSLog(@"Yahoo URL: %@", yurl);

return yurl;
}

I then needed to find a way to replace the placeholder text inside the SearchField with “Yahoo!” instead of “Google“. This unfortunately took a lot longer than I had hoped as I had trouble finding how to get access to the SearchField since it’s obviously not an easily accessible global variable or anything like that. Thankfully I finally was able to trace the stack and find it was defined inside _toolbarController in the BrowserWindowController class. I had already figured out how to set the text using F-Script, so it was a simple matter of finding a method to swizzle inside BrowserWindowController which would allow me to latch in. Viewing the class dump for Safari, I found my target pretty quickly, _setUpSearchField looked like a perfect candidate. Unfortunately I had trouble grabbing ahold of the private instance variable, but this was one of the spots where a buddy of mine was able to provide a solution. By using object_getInstanceVariable I was able to access it and thus could go on with my changes. Here’s the final replacement method which changes the “Google” placeholder text to “Yahoo!”:

- (void)_jj_setUpSearchField
{
// Call the "parent" first so it does it's business
[self _safari_setUpSearchField];

id _toolbarControllerObj;
object_getInstanceVariable(self, [@"_toolbarController" UTF8String], &_toolbarControllerObj);

// Now change the placeholder string from "Google" to "Yahoo!"
[[[_toolbarControllerObj searchField] cell] setPlaceholderString:@"Yahoo!"];

NSLog(@"Search placeholder string changed to Yahoo! from Google");
}

There are a few other spots which I could replace “Google” with “Yahoo!” (like the error dialog which happens when you press enter without typing anything or the toolbar editor), but I decided those weren’t important right now. If you would like to see the source code to this plugin, please go here:

http://safari-yahoo-search.googlecode.com/svn//trunk/YahooSearchPlugin/

You can also download the installer here (which also includes the source code inside the disk image):

http://safari-yahoo-search.googlecode.com/files/YahooSearchPlugin.dmg

Please note that while I work for Yahoo!, this plugin is not endorsed or supported in any way by my employer. Use is at your own risk and I make no guarantees it won’t blow up your computer, “eat babies” (stealing a term a coworker uses when an app does something bad), or generally cause you any multitude of different problems. You have been warned!

I’ll try and write up a good tutorial based on what I learned today in the near future. Please feel free to leave a comment with any comments, feedback, or questions and I will do my best to respond.

Update: This has only been tested on Safari 3.0.4 using SIMBL 0.82 on OSX 10.4.11 (aka Tiger). I will do my best to test this on Leopard as soon as possible.

Update: Since DreamHost is having serious performance issues today (first time it has been really bad for me, despite what others have experienced with them), I decided to copy the source code and download location over to Google Code. The URLs above have been updated above accordingly, please use them going forward.

After dividing them up into groups, I’ve found several general “themes” emerge. A big shocker to anyone who knows me I’m sure (hint sarcasm), but the biggest theme this past year was photography. I found 16 books at home alone that I have read in the past year. Interestingly, of all the “themes” this category had the highest percentage of books I actually finished reading cover to cover (roughly 60%). Not sure exactly why photography books I am more likely to finish, but could be the writing style or the fact it’s a fairly new subject for me to be reading. Of the books, about half are Photoshop books (with a lean towards photography and not graphics design) with most of the remaining falling into lighting or composition.

The next largest group (14 books, none of which fully read) is programming and technology related books. These books range from three books on OSX programming, couple ajax books, a handful of compiler theory/design books, to general stuff like Asterisk (a linux PBX software package). Something I found rather odd was the fact I don’t own a single Flex/Actionscript book, despite the fact over the past 6 months that’s been my day job (and something I had minimal experience with previously). I guess that can be attributed to how easy the language is to pickup because I feel I can hold my own against many with what I have learned in such a short amount of time (definitely not an “expert” yet though by any means).

The next group of books (14 books) in line is related to religion, social responsibility, and other thought provoking topics. The religious books cover a wide range of religions, from Christianity to Sufism to Taoism to Hindu. Several books that are also loosely related are around meditation. Other books in this group include a book on dreaming, Bill Clinton’s book “Giving”, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”, “World Changing: A user’s guide for the 21st century”, “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” (a book I have been reading off and on for several years), and the classic “A Brief History of Time” which I reread in it’s 10th anniversary edition. This group also has the second highest fully read percentage hovering around 20% and the unique distinction of having every book had at least a few pages read.

The last group of books (11 books) are just what was left, a mix of random stuff. These include productivity books like “Getting things done”, to fictional books like the classic “The Time Quartet” (a collection of books from my childhood I wanted to reread), to general fact books like “What are the seven wonders of the world?” (a gift from my mother for Christmas last year). I also have a set of three books by Orson Scott Card, the “Ender’s” series, which a good friend suggested I buy that I haven’t had time to open yet.

So that said, based on the above books (and solely the above books) what do you think that says about “who I am”? I’d be interested in hearing your comments (either publicly on the blog or sent personally to me).

One another topic which has kept me insanely busy (sadly, I am still behind on), I’m also writing a book for WROX Press (the company with the red/yellow books, you know the ones) on PHP. Yet another book on PHP you say? Yes, yes, but at least the one I am writing has a little twist which makes it different than most (but not all) PHP books already in print. The book is very much an intermediate / advanced programmer book (you won’t find any history of PHP in the opening chapters) which takes you on a journey through building a community website from start to finish. I heavily cover best practices on various topics which are important to sites which might grow into something really big (aka, what many independent coders dream about, being the next Yahoo! / MySpace / Facebook / <insert name of site with lots of traffic and many users>). Having written the codebase (along with a handful of other gifted engineers) to a significant Yahoo! property with billions of monthly pageviews (sorry, can’t be specific obviously), I hope I can impart some of the knowledge the reader of the book will need to scale their sites appropriately. We of course knew from the beginning (since it was an existing site we rewrote from the ground up) how much traffic to expect, but many of the principals remain the same whether you start out big, or grow big. Two other areas which get significant coverage in the book are security and internationalization. I won’t go into all the details here (I want you to buy the book after all), but with any luck it will be worth the wait and something you will enjoy and learn something from.

In final parting is something I stumbled upon today which hopefully will be useful to others. I have been constantly trying to find a good solution to organizing the endless amount of email I receive as well as always have it available on all my devices (Mac Pro desktop at work, Mac Book Pro laptop when away from desk, Powerbook at home, and iPhone for the remaining times). While this isn’t an all encompassing solution (only covers part of the first problem), it definitely is a good step in the right direction. Check out this blog post on Daring Fireball which talks about a simple Applescript which automagically moves your read (but not flagged) email to your Archive folder. Yes, I know the script isn’t revolutionary, but sometimes its the simple details which make a big difference. Be sure and tell me what you think!

You can get a list of albums (including album meta information), a list of photos in an album (including image meta info), have the ability to create new albums, and the ability to upload images to your online gallery. I am also implementing a proxy server which will allow you to upload via Picasa to Flickr, Y! Photos, or Gallery. I should have that part online so you can download it in the near future.

http://www.jeremyjohnstone.com/maps/routing-example.html

Right now, the map is just an example of doing routing/directions display. Look for some impressive things to come in the future now that I know what all is possible.

http://www.jeremyjohnstone.com/maps/work-apt.html

Look for new and cool map things coming soon from me. The posibilities are limitless, time is the only bottleneck!

http://www.jeremyjohnstone.com/code-gallery/

you can now see my code gallery. The Code Gallery doesn’t use any DB backend (parses XML files for the info), and isn’t the prettiest thing in the world, but it serves my needs. Right now it only includes the Gmail Parser code (PHP5 only) and the Code Gallery’s code itself (quick and dirty PHP4 code), but I plan to add additional items as time permits. Please feel free to share your opinions either via the comments system or in an email to me.

Just wanted to make a post on the upcoming Zend/PHP Conference this fall from October 18th-21st, 2005. Based on the inside scoop I have heard, it will be quite the conference to attend in the US this year, so if you’re involved in PHP in any way I would highly advise you make plans to attend now. I have several proposals pending for talks at the conference, so with any luck you might see me there as a speaker. If not, there is a chance the company I work for (www.cerberusweb.com) might have a booth there. At the very least, I should be there myself, so look me up if you do go and I will be happy to buy you a beer or something. For more information on the conference, click here: http://zend.kbconferences.com.

Now that we are passed that part, next comes a series of posts about the conference and my trip in general!

As the developer who wrote Hotscripts.com, the leading web script repository on the Internet, I had to overcome many challenges to having a 100% dynamic site with it’s traffic level. In this talk I will teach others how to optimize site design for speed and ease of adding new features based on my own hybrid MVC pattern. I will also highlight on common security concerns and how to overcome them.

For more information on the conference, visit the conference’s website at http://www.phpconference.com. I look forward to seeing you all there as it should be a very good conference and lots of fun for all who attend.