Jeff Barr - Horror/SciFi/Fantasy Pulp Fiction Writer, Coder, Hacker, Musician » Jeff

3 Free Short Horror Stories

Jeff — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 23:27:55 +0000

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.

Muxnote – Twitter-auth based TODO list for movies and books

Jeff — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 23:10:47 +0000

Muxnoteis my extra-lightweight todolist that only cares about books and movies. At some point I will add more to it, though not much as I want it to be as lightweight as possible.
It represents my first foray into responsive design, using the Skeleton framework, as well as Sinatra. I use Omniauth to authenticate via the Twitter API. You can browse, fork, etc at the Muxnote github repository.

GTD

Jeff — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 09:52:50 +0000

It’s important to remember that GTD is not an immutable concept – you are free to delete items, knowing they will return to your inbox if they are important enough.

Sinatra, Sqlite, Postgres, Heroku

Jeff — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 00:41:33 +0000

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.

Unix tree command on Mac OSX

Jeff — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 23:31:48 +0000

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’

My First Ruby Gem – regexhelper

Jeff — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 23:24:13 +0000

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.

Bash configuration notes

Jeff — Thu, 12 May 2011 19:44:13 +0000

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.

Rails Beginner: Mac OSX, Macports, RVM, MySQL 5.1 – Y U No Work?

Jeff — Wed, 11 May 2011 03:58:27 +0000

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.

Rails Beginner: Interesting technologies based on/around Ruby on Rails

Jeff — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 20:54:51 +0000

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.

Beginner Rails: Heroku

Jeff — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 09:28:52 +0000

Heroku is pretty cool: a free host for your rails apps that also works really well with git/github. Since my current hosting has some pretty odd hosting for rails, I’ll be using heroku to host my demo apps. While adding a demo app, I received this error:

heroku keys:add …/custom_require.rb:36:in `require’: no such file to load — readline (LoadError)

According to dirk.net, this error is due to missing libraries after installing ruby from source.

The provided fix worked just fine for me:

sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev
sudo apt-get install libreadline5-dev

After that, I cd to where I unpacked the Ruby source and ran:

ruby extconf.rb
make
sudo make install

heroku keys:add worked fine from there. Thanks to dirk.net for the fix.