Carl Mercier’s blog

First time for me, here’s what is said (to me and 250 other people in the TO field):

As you all probably know Revver is a video sharing site much like Youtube, except that I get revenue for every person watching, essentially revver embeds an Ad into the video and everytime someone clicks on it I get 50 percent. Now im not necessarily encouraging you to click on the video, but if you are interested in the service go ahead.

–
Nicholai

I don’t know this person. Oh yeah, he even forgot to link to the video

As I recently blogged about, I had the pleasure to be part of the Montreal Tech Entrepreneur Breakfast a few weeks ago in Montreal. It was a great event and I only have good things to say about it. However, I was recently lured into going to a Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) (aka pyramid scam) presentation by someone who attended the breakfast with the apparent sole intention of collecting as many business cards as possible and try to lure these people in his scam. So far, at least 4 people (including myself) have been caught. Don’t become one of us.

I advice everybody to be extremely careful. I know you’re smart enough not to buy this BS, but you might want to be aware of the situation. It might save you some time, trouble and maybe even money (they’re very convincing!)

Here’s how it went for me… the person in question (of Asian descent, let’s call him Mr. D.) e-mailed me telling me that he was starting a business with his multi-millionaire partner and that they wanted me to join their team. He said that their business was endorsed and backed by a very famous multi-billionaire real estate entrepreneur. He also said that they were visiting him the next weekend to discuss business. That sounded serious and intriguing enough for me and I agreed to meet him (one on one) the following Wednesday at 7pm in Ville St-Laurent. Although he did not want to give me more details over the phone or email, it sounded like an exciting opportunity. When I showed up at the building where “his office” was supposed to be, I noticed a huge room where a MLM presentation was about to happen. I thought to myself… OMG, what kind of fools attend these meetings? Then Mr. D. arrived, and I realized I was going to be one of them…

I should have realized it was a scam earlier, but I didn’t.

I have also been told that his European partner in crime (Mr. H.) has tricked people into attending the same meeting in Ville St-Laurent (held a few times a week I think). They reportedly use different “baits” for everybody. So, if an Asian or European guy wants to meet you in Ville St-Laurent, make sure you know exactly what the meeting is all about if you don’t want to waste your time like we did. It’s a scam, nothing else.

I’ve been using this technique to color my Rails test results for quite some time and I absolutely love it. It really makes it easy to see if a test failed. However, when I ran my tests in TextMate (CMD-R) with colors enabled, I got garbage similar to this: ‘[1m [37m3 [0m [0m [37mtests [0m, [1m [37m3 [0m [0m [37massertions [0m. Not very pleasant!

I asked on IRC if there was an easy way to convert the color codes produced by the ‘color’ gem, but apparently, there wasn’t. I was adviced to disable coloring but that was not acceptable for me. I still want colors when I run my tests in Terminal. I’ve also been told to modify the Ruby bundle to disable colors only when TextMate ran the tests (since TextMate adds some basic coloring on its own). I wanted to keep the same color layout, regardless of whether I was in Terminal or in TextMate, so I decided to hack TextMate.

Since the test results are displayed as pure HTML, it was easy enough to write a parser that converts color codes to simple HTML. It involved editing a single file in TextMate.app so an upgrade is installed, you’ll have to do it again. Luckily, it’s a very simple hack…

1. Open /Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Support/lib/escape.rb in your favorite text editor (TextMate!?)
2. Change the last line of the htmlize method for colored_htmlize(str.gsub(”\n”, “<br />”))
3. Add the content of this file at the end of escape.rb. Your escape.rb file should now look like this.
4. That’s it! TextMate will now convert every “colored” string it it encounters into HTML.

If anyone knows how to make this work without editing files inside TextMate.app, I’d appreciate your comments, but from the debate we has on #textmate, the way I did it is probably the best, until the RubyMate team integrate my hack into the core code.