Finally!!!

Finally I was able to get the new box from LayeredTech. I pretty much spent most of the last 3 days configuring the box. Finally got the DNS working and the name resolution for tingoo.com seem to be working fine.

Next stop Haaarlem! I'm thinking I should put a web 2.0ish signup here with pastel colors and beveled corner image thingies up there.. just to assure people how cool its gonna be when it hits the world

or maybe I could put a static site or at least an 'about' site. Right now its just a vanilla rails page on port 3000.

oh well.. 1 step at a time. I'm pleased with the progress I've made in the last 3-4 days..

I wish

I could sue these nicotine gum companies.

Seriously. They show people smoking cigarettes on TV with impunity. You CANNOT show people smoking, except of course in anti-smoking ads.

I sometimes wonder if Nicorette is owned by a cigarette company. I smoked for 14 years. Quit for 2.5, started again, and been smoke free for a couple months again.

Every time I see these stupid "helpful" commercial, I get cravings. Not too bad, but the trigger of watching someone smoking can be very strong.

I wish I could sue these bastards.

look ma! no hair!

Those who would sacrifice liberty for security...

From Insomnia - Journal of Mark Kraft

Alberto Gonzales spoke before law students at Georgetown today, justifying illegal, unauthorized surveilance of US citizens, but during the course of his speech the students in class did something pretty ballsy and brave. They got up from their seats and turned their backs to him.
To make matters worse for Gonzales, additional students came into the room, wearing black cowls and carrying a simple banner, written on a sheet.

Enough Said.

"God Bless Canada!"

-- Stephen Harper, Primer Minister in Waiting Jan 2006

Camping, A "Micro" Framework

Why has released his MicroFramework called "Camping". This was enough for me to download and play around with almost all day. I just think its really awesome what Why has been doing with webpage and markaby and now camping. cool cool shit!

I this could be real helpful in prototyping web applications. I'm amazed that he has a whole blogging engine written in around 200 lines of code complete with authentication and whatnot.

Very Very interesting indeed! I love the "architecture diagram". Lightweight, and hilarious to boot! Talk about agility and joy going hand in hand!

Aww fer cryin' out loud. Now he's gotta picture of a dead lady under the funny picture... shitzz.. I don't get why sometimes.. Why? Why?

Macbook "Pro" and the real coup!

Apple's release of intel based mac book pro is the latest news all over. Varying opinions on whether its a good thing or a bad thing. Would these notebooks be any better than the PPC based ones? Is it really worth all the fuss and marketing hype created at the moment?

I'm not sure. Apple needed faster cpu's for their notebooks. Great!

I think the real coup is going to be the fact that now x86 based OSX is poised to compete directly with the Windows Long horn. Bulk of the work has been done to port the OSX to intel. With the next release of OS X (post Tiger) Apple and M$ maybe going head to head (especially if there are native emulators for windows apps provided with the upcoming OS X release.)

Markaby Baby!

Somehow I really liked the simplicity of the prototype webpage.rb thing in Why's tryruby.hobix.com tutorial. Then Why came out with the webpage, son of web page , and now, we have a plugin which allows you to represent html markup in Ruby.

This is awesome!! AFAIC. because I think most of the time it will be me writing the stuff and the ruby syntax makes it way easier than the ERB stuff which I find a bit busy and hard on the ole eyes.

So, thanks to Why and Tim for bringing us: Markaby!

some example code:

html do
  head do
    title action_name
    stylesheet_link_tag 'scaffold'
  end

  body do
    p flash[:notice], :style => "color: green"
    self << @content_for_layout
  end

end

Personally, I like it better like this:

html {
  head {
    title action_name
    stylesheet_link_tag 'scaffold'
  }

  body {
    p flash[:notice], :style => "color: green"
    self << @content_for_layout
  }
}

Simply brilliant!

Head First thingies

I got a chance to check out the "Head First" series of books. I was tempted to get the Head First Patterns book, but then I decided to hold off. Same for the Head First XHTML, CSS etc. etc. Book.

Actually its quite good and quite different from the other such books out there. Especially good for the beginner like moi! The CSS section seemed to be excellent. This would make and excellent book to learn the ropes of HTML design and to dunk yourself in the CSS waters. I also happen to have Eric Meyer's "~ on CSS", but that is more for experts.


<SOAPBOX>
Speaking of tech books, I think more and more, we need to have 3 types of books for the same subject:

1. Extremely short intro and tutorial to get you going
2. Reference
3. In depth, explanation

or a combination there of. I'm just starting to get a little ansy [sp] looking at all these 900 page books. And what bothers me more is taht these books are pumped out in astonishingly short time fames.

Again, I go back to K&R. I was able to do C just fine and write a simple compiler Minix drivers and whatnots during my college C days (seems like ages ago) armed with just that knowledge. That only tells me that a concetrated and NO-BULLSHIT dose of information is much better than pages and pages of rambling garbage just make the boo fatter.

</SOAPBOX>

Again, I shouldn't be mixing my critique of crappy books with my impressions re: the Head First XHTML and CSS book. That one, actually, I learned something. I think it would have been money well spent if I had bought it, but I think I'll try to get it from either amazon or from another chain rather than enriching Indigo.

Anyhoo, Just flipping through the pages, I was able to pick up a couple of things about CSS (me being new to the whole web design by CSS thingy on account of me being an architecture/infrastructure guy and not necessarily a web progr'mr)

TextMate

I think I'm starting to understand the excitement which DHH and the others have been expressing regarding TextMate.

For onething, its just super easy to use. I like vi, but I don't have anything against ease of use. So I think I might just shell out for this. Even though for a while I thought JEdit could do it for me, but it has a tendency to crap out after a while.

After playing around with the snippets and commands capabilities, I'm starting to find that I can make it do things. I've added some more snippets for the ruby side of the house (flash[..] isn't on the .rb side so I couldn't do it if I wanted to use the f thing in a controller.rb file for example).

I don't think there is a hot market of various bundles out there because its easy enough that people can create their own quick macros on the fly. Even though I think that it would be great.

Man, this would make life soooo much easier. Its not even funny.

The Mighty Lighty

Okay, so finally I got around to installing lighty and mysql bindings on my iBook.

here are some links:

1. Rails wiki page which helps with the mysql problems I was having (gem install crapping out).
2. Lighttpd install on osx (article by NubyOnRails)

Both these items are fine but there is some tweaking which needs to be done. For (1), I had to do the following to install the mysql gem:

sudo gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-dir=/usr/local/mysql

For Lighty, I followed the method described by NubyOnRails (topfunky)

sudo port selfupdate
sudo port install fcgi
sudo port install lighttpd
sudo gem install fcgi

But there still was a problem with the last command. Again, I had to tell rubygems where the fcgi include files etc were:

sudo gem install fcgi -- --with-fcgi-include=/opt/local/include --with-fcgi-lib=/opt/local/lib

And script/server seems to start lighty just fine now.

Dream of Al-Andalus

Chris Lydon over at radioopensource.org has an excellent episode on Al-Andalus about a multicultrual, multi-faith society in the heart of Spain, an era when Maimonides wrote his Guide for the perplexed.

This is why it is offensive to see the comical caricaturing that goes on in the "media" these days. Good on Chris Lydon for being one of the very few voices of reason in a cacaphony of same-old same-old.

Backpackit Widget

A really cool widget which brings your backpackit lists to your OSX desktop.. Excellent!


Meanwhile, the django team has released the videos of Snakes Love Rubies conference. Interesting stuff.

You started it in your Garage? Really?

I think the whole "We started our startup in a garage/apartment/homeless-shelter" thing is getting a LITT-TTUL old! Every time I turn around , one of the thousands of so called bare-bones startups is claiming how they used to walk 60 miles in the 20 feet snow to their primary schools fighting dragons etc.

Even though the number of such claimants is increasing as the total number of startups grows, what I find dissappointing is that most of them _DO_ have funding, most of them Do have hundred of thousands in the kitties and they still like to project this image that they're just a bunch of joe-six-packs (the uber-smart ones nonetheless) who got this neat idea one day and now its just taken a life of its own and they're just riding the wave etc. etc.

I don't know. Its getting harder and harder to distinguish betwee the real bare-bones startups from a crowd whose members increasingly profess to be "garage-startup-Steve-Wozniak-clones"