Posted by Paolo
Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:47:00 GMT
This morning I struggled a bit to find a decent encoding converter for osx… from time to time I get stuck on encoding issues so I wanted to have something ‘friendly’ to handle this kind of problems…
I found Cyclone based on Apple Text Encoding Converter (look for TEC) but it kept failing in some strange ways (It gave me weird messages about converters creation). After googling for a while I gave up. It seems there are no good-free-GUI alternatives on the net…
Sometimes the solution is closer than you think and the good old iconv rescued me in a snap:
[paolo@fingus]$ iconv -f UTF-16 -t UTF-8 utf16_file.txt > utf8_file.txt
you can list the available encodings with:
[paolo@fingus]$ iconv -l
The cool part is you can use it in conjunction with TextMate’s Filter Through Command feature thus enabling in-editor lightning-fast conversions.
The only missing part was discovering the original file’s encoding, in order to pass iconv the correct -f option. The not-so-reliable way I used was to open the file with Firefox and inspect the encoding using the View -> Character Encoding menu item.
That’s it, problem solved.
If you know better ways to do this… let me know!
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Posted in Tips & Tricks | Tags encoding | 1 comment | no trackbacks
Posted by Paolo
Mon, 25 Feb 2008 16:26:00 GMT
The Rails Widgets plugin is our most successful open-source effort so far. Lately its development has been put a bit aside and hasn’t got the love it surely deserve. This is mainly because this little piece of software is pretty stable and just suits our needs.
But of course it could be improved, more widgets could be added and the code could be refactored. Why should our own needs stop its development? There are many people on the Widgets Users Mailing List who come up with great ideas about its development so we finally decided to open up the repo and let this plugin find its way through the community!
The repo is now officially hosted on Google Code at http://code.google.com/p/rails-widgets and a brand new Developers Mailing List has been set up to coordinate the development efforts.
We’re willing to find new committers who share our vision about the plugin and help us take it to the next level, so if you’re interested, feel free to join us!
Hope you enjoy it!
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Posted in Ruby + Rails | Tags tabnav, widgets | 1 comment | no trackbacks
Posted by Paolo
Sat, 16 Feb 2008 23:07:00 GMT
After examining the poll results at www.railsworkshop.it, it was pretty clear that the workshop location wouldn’t be that far from our office this time…
A lot of people voted for Padova or Brescia, and a timely coincidence made possible to have a gorgeous conference room at Quadrante Servizi in Verona, right in the middle of those two most voted locations, not that far from both of them.
So everything is set up. Next RailsWorkshop will be held in via Sommacampagna, 61 on Wednesday, March 12 for your and our pleasure.
Expect it to be a great event! The workshop has been upgraded to cover all the new stuff introduced with Rails 2.0, and will be exciting like never before! You’ll find all the informations you need at www.railsworkshop.it, or just feel free to drop us an email. See you there then :-)
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Posted in Ruby + Rails | Tags railsworkshop | 1 comment | no trackbacks
