Promoted Repos

GitHub

GitHub (Photo credit: Irish Typepad)

I use Github all the time. You should check out my profile on Github at https://github.com/adhithyan15. I love the super awesome explore feature in Github which shows the most starred and forked repositories. But that could also be used as a revenue maker. I suggest introducing a new feature called “Promoted Repos” in which organizations and individuals can promote their repos  so that they appear in along side organically curated results. I am pretty sure that organizations like Microsoft and Google will love such a feature because it will bring more developers to look at their open source projects and also has the power to bring in more contributions from developers.

Chocolatey – Homebrew/Apt-Get for Windows

Chocolatey is a new package manager for Windows. It is very similar to Homebrew or Apt-Get and it is super awesome. You can install Chocolatey by opening your powershell prompt and entering

 @powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy unrestricted -Command “iex ((new-object net.webclient).DownloadString(‘http://chocolatey.org/install.ps1′))” && SET PATH=%PATH%;%systemdrive%\chocolatey\bin

It will take a little bit of time to install and once you have completed installation, you will have access to cinst command. You can use the cinst command to install packages. The list of available packages is listed at http://chocolatey.org/packages

Go check out Chocolatey!

I-9 Tip

I was helping someone fill I-9 form the other day and a question came up. In Section 1, you will have noticed the following section

I attest, under penalty of perjury, that I am (check one of the following):

_ A citizen of the United States

_ A non-citizen national of the United States

_ A lawful permanent resident (Alien #:_________________)

_ An alien authorized to work (Alien #:/Admission #: ________________)

What category should I check?

I researched this information and I came up with the following information

If you are H1B, F1 or J1 visa holder, you are legally considered a “non-resident alien”. So you should check the alien authorized to work check box. If you are H1B holder, please provide your I-97 expiration date in the admission no column. If you hold F1 visa (with no EAD), please use your I-20 expiration date in the admission no column. If you hold F1 visa with EAD, enter the EAD expiration date in the admission no column.

For all the other categories, please visit http://iservices.iupui.edu/employment/I-9/index.html. I found that URL to be really helpful.

Simple Jquery Timepicker Plugin

jQuery UI provides a wonderful datepicker but I needed a simple extension that could provide support for picking time alongside the date. The only requirement that I had was that it needs to work with a Rails 3.2 app. I first saw Trent Richardson’s popular Timepicker plugin. I spent a lot of time getting it to work with my rails application without any success. I don’t blame my struggle on the plugin but to my unfamiliarity to work with complex jQuery plugins. I looked for a simple to understand jQuery plugin that achieved what I wanted. I found a plugin by the same name “Timepicker” at http://jonthornton.github.com/jquery-timepicker/ which achieved exactly what I wanted. I just looked at the source code of the hyperlinked webpage and download the source of the plugin and added it to the assets directory of my rails application. It works like magic. It is mainly designed to help users pick time but had support for date picking along with time picking. The documentation is good enough to help you get started. But I will write a detailed tutorial about this plugin later. Please give a try to the plugin and let me know about your experience.

Sublime Text 2: Error Trying to Parse Settings

I love using Sublime Text 2. I was working on my rails application yesterday in sublime text and suddenly there was a power outage. I have a Dell PC with no backup power supply. So all of my unsaved data was lost. When the power returned, I booted my computer to continue my work.  I tried opening Sublime Text 2 and it gave me an error message.

Error trying to parse settings: Expected value in C:\Users\xxxx\AppData\Roaming\Sublime Text 2\Packages\Default\Preferences.sublime-settings:1:11

Note: Notice the 1:11 at the end. Yours error message might show some other numbers in that place. The first number 1 gives you the line number in the file “Preferences.sublime-settings” in which the parser is having trouble  and the second number 11 indicates the column in which there might be an error. Before trying the steps listed below, try editing the  ”Preferences.sublime-settings” file to see whether the error message disappears. If not, follow the steps below. 

It seems like the sudden power loss corrupted the preferences file for Sublime Text 2. Fortunately, it was an easy thing to fix. I will show you what to do for windows 7 or older here. But, follow http://www.sublimetext.com/docs/2/revert.html for Mac and Linux.

Go to task manager(Ctrl+Alt+Delete) and stop any instances of sublime text 2 that is running. Even though it gave you an error message, sublime text didn’t exit out after displaying the error message. Go to start and click on computer. Type “%APPDATA%\Sublime Text 2″ in the address bar and it will take you to the folder in which sublime text stores all of its preferences. Go back one level to the “Roaming” folder and then delete the “Sublime Text 2″ folder from the roaming folder. Deleting the Sublime Text 2 folder will revert the settings of sublime text 2 to default settings that were provided after a fresh installation. If you open sublime text 2 after this, it should open without any problem. You can configure all of your preferences again through the preferences tab.

The links below might be useful if my post didn’t solve your issue