Web Development Screencasts

I like learning web development skills by watching screencasts. They allow you ton see what’s being changed as its happening and you can pause and rewind as much as you need to.

Here’s a list of some really good screencasts sites and some specific screencasts that may be of interest:

Sites

ASP.net

CSS

General Web Development

JavaScript

PHP

Ruby on Rails

Wordpress

I’ll try to keep this post updated as I find more good screencasts.

ActionMailer Timeouts

Using action mailer on my rails application, I was getting Timeout::Error messages in my phusion passenger logs when sending email through SMTP. However, testing the application locally on my PC, the emails were being sent without a problem. I came across this post in the Site5 forums which suggested changing the actual address in my SMTP configuration to localhost which fixed the issue.

A Rails Searchable API

Available from RailsAPI.com, you can either browse it online or download it and open it locally in your web browser. Fantastic stuff.

Learn Rails Quickly with the Flitter screencast

The Flitter screencast series by Eric Berry (Teach Me to Code) is perhaps one of the best screencasts for learning Ruby on Rails quickly. It is a 6 part series and goes through the entire process of creating a Twitter-like clone in Rails. Perhaps the best thing about the screencast is that it is largely unedited so you can see Eric’s thought process as he develops the application.

Fonts

Software Development Fonts

Consolas is my favourite development font. It is also the one that Jeff Atwood uses. Also check out his article on Programmer Fonts for some other good development fonts. Consolas comes with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005+ but who’s going to install that to get a font? You can get the font here.

Bitstream Vera is used by Gnome and is a really good family of fonts.

Why worry about fonts for programming? Happy with Courier New? Have a read of this.

Microsoft TrueType Core Fonts

These are the core fonts used by Microsoft Windows and include:

  • Andale
  • Arial
  • Comic Sans
  • Courier New
  • Georgia
  • Impact
  • Times New Roman
  • Trebuchet
  • Verdana
  • Webdings

The unaltered .exe files for these fonts can be downloaded here. The Cabextract RPM package for Linux systems can be downloaded here. This is available from the CoreFonts SourceForge project.

Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Windows Vista Fonts

Font Libraries

JAVA_HOME Sickness

While attempting to install Grails on Windows, I kept getting the following error when running grails:

C:\Users\praj> grails
ERROR: JAVA_HOME is set to an invalid directory: C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jdk1.6.0_17\

Please set the JAVA_HOME variable in your environment to match the
location of your Java installation.

I had the JAVA_HOME variable set as a system environment variable (and it was pointing to an existing JDK installation). However, it turns out the problem was the trailing slash in my JAVA_HOME directory! Pretty obvious but anyway. So I changed it from:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jdk1.6.0_17\ to
C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jdk1.6.0_17

Closed the current command prompt window and opened a new one, verified my JAVA_HOME:

C:\Users\praj> echo %JAVA_HOME%
C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jdk1.6.0_17

Note that when I quoted the path like this:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jdk1.6.0_17"

I kept getting the error Files were unexpected at this time so if you have the same problem, trying dropping the quotes around the path.

Starting and Stopping Processes with a Batch Script

This post explains how to write batch scripts in Microsoft Windows to start and stop a particular program. This can be really handy if you want to schedule a program to start and stop at particular times using the Task Scheduler.

The following batch script will start a program in a given directory in minimised window mode:

@echo off

echo.
echo Starting «ProgramName»
echo.

start /D"C:\Program Files\«ProgramDir»\" /MIN /B «ProgramExec.exe»
  • Replace «ProgramName» with a description of the program that you are starting. This is for informational purposes only.
  • Replace «ProgramDir» with the directory your program is installed.
  • Replace «ProgramExec.exe» with the executable program.

The following batch script will stop a particular program executable by killing the process (this is done forcefully).

@echo off

echo.
echo Stopping «ProgramName»
echo.

taskkill /F /IM «ProgramExec»
  • Replace «ProgramName» with a description of the program that you are starting. This is for informational purposes only.
  • Replace «ProgramExec» with the executable program that you want to stop.

The key to these two batch scripts is:

  • Using the start command to start the program. Type start /? in a command prompt to learn more.
  • Using the taskkill command to stop the program. Type taskkill /? in a command prompt to learn more.

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