Archive for the ‘Lazyweb’ Category

Reading and writing (and reading some of my writing)

Some of you might not know, but Scribd (it’s like Youtube for documents) is having the Most Interesting Hard Drive contest, wherein they’re searching for some of the best as-yet-unpublished stuff submitted by their users. The prizes are fairly sweet, and I’m doing ok - #35 as of this morning. However, I’d like to win. This is where you come in.

These are my documents. Everything counts for the contest except the pictures. If you’d go and look at them - maybe several times, maybe over the course of the next few days? I’d appreciate it. But I wouldn’t expect you to do me such a big favor for free. What kind of a friend would I be? No, I have a deal to make with you.

If you leave me a comment with a topic to write about (or a writing prompt?) on any of the blogs that this ends up on, I will write a 200-to-300 word original piece for you and toss it onto Scribd, on the condition that you give it as many views as you can. (Maybe talk some friends into it too. I dunno, you decide.) I promise it will be an actual original piece; I won’t reuse anything I’ve already written (in fact, pretty much everything I’ve written that’s not a blog entry is now on Scribd, which is sadly little because I can’t find my backup of everything I did in college) and I won’t respond to your request for a review of Iron Man by writing “Awesome!” 200 to 300 times.

Alternately, if you’d like to tweet a suggestion at me, you can do so - my Twitter username is macanima.

I don’t ask for favors often, but this is one favor I really hope I can pull off. Thanks in advance!

May 14th, 2008 · Tags Blogging, Contests, Internet, Lazyweb, Writing | 1 Comment »

Soliciting suggestions

Are you familiar with Neighborhoodies? No? Go on, check it out, I’ll wait.

…

…

Okay, you’re back. Good. Now: what should I put on my hoodie? I need a new one. I’m open to suggestions. I’m also out of ideas. :(

January 18th, 2008 · Tags Clothing, Lazyweb | Comments Off

My search-fu has failed me

I think already know the answer, but: does GTA: San Andreas for the Xbox still support custom soundtracks when played on the 360?

No, playing music on the Dashboard and then booting San Andreas does not count for the purposes of this question. I’m talking use of the in-game custom music radio station.

December 11th, 2007 · Tags Lazyweb, Microsoft, Music, Video Games, Xbox 360 | Comments Off

PC question

An idle thought: anyone ever heard of problems caused by a hard drive that was on the same IDE chain as the primary hard drive, but not connected to a power supply?

I replaced my PC’s old clicky 30 GB Maxtor hard drive (from my IBM desktop circa 2001) with a new Western Digital 160 GB 7200 rpm hard drive on Sunday, and also added an extra 1 GB (2 x 512 MB) of RAM. After that, I would periodically have complete freezes of the OS. Today they’ve been especially pernicious, sometimes not letting Windows make it past the boot screen.

I tried running a RAM diagnostic on the memory but after 6 passes it found no errors, so I figured that wasn’t the culprit. Just to be sure, I completely took out the new RAM (still froze up) and then put back in the new and removed the old (still froze up). So I figured, well, heck, it’s probably been about a year and a half since I installed Windows on this thing. Time for a refresh.

Rebooted, started the XP reinstall process, deleted my old partition, added a new one, formatted it, aaaaand… froze up copying Windows files to the hard drive. So that got me thinking. My IDE chain setup was as follows:

  • Chain 1:
    1. Hard drive, WD 160 GB, jumpers set to ‘cable select’
    2. Hard drive, Maxtor 30 GB, jumpers set to ‘master’ but no connection to power supply - so technically the computer shouldn’t even realize it’s there
  • Chain 2:
    1. DVD+RW drive, some random brand
    2. Empty

It’s currently three or four steps into the install process, so there’s no saying it won’t freeze up again, but I was wondering: has anyone ever heard of a PC having problems due to an unpowered hard drive on the IDE chain?

October 23rd, 2007 · Tags Annoyances, Computers, Lazyweb, WTF?, Windows | Comments Off

The lazyweb pays off

So back in April, I posted a request looking for some free icons that Matt Ball had made available for application developers, but which had since disappeared off the ‘net for reasons unknown.

I did manage to contact a different blogger who had a copy of them on his hard drive still, and so now they’re kicking around on mine (or were, until recently, when my laptop’s hard drive suffered a head crash - luckily my baby’s in repair now), but last night I got a comment from the artist himself.

Turns out Matt Ball now has an online portfolio. As far as online portfolios go, it’s pretty simple (in a good way!) and snazzy, and I like his icon work. I also applaud him for not using Flash. Dear online portfolio-havers: Flash is not appropriate for anything, unless you are a Flash developer.

June 11th, 2007 · Tags Blogging, Development, Icons, Lazyweb | Comments Off

Lazyweb: looking for icons

Alright, internets: find something for me.

This page on cocoadev.com links to a zipfile of royalty-free (and, apparently, free-as-in-beer) icons by Matt Ball. The problem is that this zipfile has disappeared completely from the Internets, and the site that was hosting them is French, and the user’s site is gone altogether. (Yes, two of those links are 404s.)

So after a little searching, I managed to find where a different blogger was hosting them on his site, except… you guessed it, 404. They’re gone altogether. They are, in fact, the only thing missing out of his wp-content/uploads folder for the month of March. How odd, and what a frustrating coincidence.

Anyway - does anyone out there happen to have a copy of these icons? I need them for an app I’m prototyping. Thanks!

404

April 3rd, 2007 · Tags Annoyances, Development, Icons, Internet, Lazyweb, Mac, Software | 2 Comments »

Weird Rails crap: help me, lazyweb

Ugh, I’m about to give up on using Rails other than at work. As much as I like Ruby on Rails, it seems impossible to do what I want to do with it on my hosting provider. And no, I’m not switching hosts. I like it here. I’ll just go back to doing something instead of Rails.

Here’s the problem: does anyone know how the hell to tell Rails to run as a FastCGI daemon? If I were still using Django, all I’d have to do is:

./manage.py runfcgi method=threaded host=127.0.0.1 port=3120

However, I can find no similar capability in Rails whatsoever, and running Mongrel or WEBrick on that port obviously does no good because they’re not FCGI daemons, they’re webservers.

Details on the setup: Basically, in the public HTML directory of the site I want to be FCGI’d, I have an htaccess file that contains:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://localhost:8080/ulrichp/$1 [P]

Near as I can tell, FastCGI is running as a daemon on port 8080, and is looking for my FastCGI process to be running on port 3120. Which is why my above code for Django works just fine: it starts serving my app itself on port 3120, and responds directly to requests passed to it via FCGI. However, I can’t find any way to do the same thing using Rails.

March 20th, 2007 · Tags Annoyances, Internet, Lazyweb, Ruby on Rails, Technology | Comments Off