Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Data flying everywhere

Warning: this is going to be of absolutely no interest to anyone but me.

If I post to del.icio.us, that ends up on my blog, which ends up posting it to my LJ.

Also when I post to del.icio.us, it ends up on my other blog on Tumblr, which then gets imported into my Facebook notes.

Posting directly to Tumblr eventually gets sucked into Facebook; posting directly to my blog gets sent to my LJ.

If I make a tweet on Twitter, it also gets imported into Tumblr, and from there into Facebook.

I’ve just now changed things to that instead of posting directly to my tumblelog, my posts on del.icio.us get aggregated only to my regular blog, and then that gets fed into my tumblelog. Meaning, tumbl.ariffic.com is now the endpoint for basically everything I post (and, by extension, so are my Facebook Notes). That anything ends up on LJ at all is pretty much a triviality at this point.

tl;dr: (((del.icio.us -> blog [-> LJ]) + twitter) -> tumblr) -> facebook.

This doesn’t even take into account services that I don’t have aggregated anywhere, such as: posts on Wowhead, RSS feeds of my Google Calendars, and things of that nature. I also have a feed or two that I haven’t made public, and a couple defunct blogs whose feeds don’t update because, obviously, I’m not updating them anymore. In theory I also have a blog on IGN and a blog on Destructoid but I just don’t use those. If I did, they’d probably also end up being pulled into Tumblr, simply because Tumblr allows me to import random feeds.

Oh, and posts I do on RE. But there’s not a lot these days; it’s pretty busy here, and I never think about blogging when I get home.

April 17th, 2008 · Tags Internet, Technology, Webapps | Comments Off

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

Links galore

  • Mr. Gosling, why did you make URL equals suck?! A useful warning to Java developers - using URL.equals may be considered harmful, because apparently it does a blocking lookup to the IP address of the machine.
  • No Shredder in TMNT? Peter Laird, series creator of our favorite heroes on a halfshell, suggested the change. The villain is now a more generic ‘monsters and space aliens.’ Maybe it’s this guy, even though he didn’t really come from outer space, per se?
  • The world’s most indispensable Firefox tab: Ctrl-Shift-T (or Cmd-Shift-T on the Mac) will re-open the most recently closed tab. Hallelujah!
  • Slain trees haunt loggers. My coworker’s response: “heh, ent ghosts.”
  • Find out your Windows Vista Experience number. Sort of like a compatibility rating between your computer and Vista - is it love at first byte, or is Vista simply too high-maintenance for a down-to-earth machine like yours? (Pardon the pun - I had to.)
  • O’Reilly Media launched Hackszine.com, an online companion to the Hacks series of books gracing bookshelves for quite a while now. This is already in my RSS reader.
  • MAKE Blog: Do it yourself grassroots media sites using NewsCloud. Twenty bucks a month gets you a Debian install and NewsCloud; I think they handle hosting. Or you can just do it yourself, it’s open-source.
  • Dear God, it’s the Woot-Off that won’t die. The offer as I type this: a 37″ Sova widescreen HD-ready LCD monitor for $649.99 plus $5 shipping. I wish I could afford this monster.

That about covers it. I’m sort of like a bargain basement Weekend Update. (Obvious pop-culture references linked for my friend Sandra’s sake, who recently revealed she has no idea what movie features the songs “Danger Zone,” “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feeling,” and more. Or, for that matter, has never seen SNL.)

February 1st, 2007 · Tags Computers, Development, Gadgets, Internet, Microsoft, News, Science, Shopping, Software, TV, Technology, WTF?, Windows, lol | Comments Off

A moment of unfettered materialism

Last year there were a number of things I wanted to purchase; several of those goals were achieved, most notably the Nintendo Wii. Cellphone-wise I owned (and still own) a Blackberry 7100g. I also wanted to get a laptop; I ended up settling for the Toshiba Satellite A55-S1063, and was bitten - hard - by the results of trading performance for low price. (I’m looking to get rid of the damn thing, actually.) This year, however, there are a whopping two things I want to own, and my goal is to have both of them by the end of the year. What are they?

Read the rest of this entry »

January 6th, 2007 · Tags Computers, Gadgets, Mac, Shopping, Technology, Wishlist | Comments Off

And lastly, several stories in one go

Put YOUR slogan on someone’s lower back with ImageChef (via Lifehacker).

Spell your name in alphabet soup. Turn your slogan into a neon sign. Give your loved one a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. These are just a few of the cool images you can cook up with ImageChef.

image courtesy of Lifehacker

Then, if you think YOU’RE a Mac fanboy or fangirl, check out this guy’s OS X Dock pillows (via MAKE’s blog).

Dock pillows

I particularly like the Finder one, myself. Next up, China manages to kill off the white dolphin after twenty million years (via CNN):

An expedition searching for a rare Yangtze River dolphin ended Wednesday without a single sighting and with the team’s leader saying one of the world’s oldest species was effectively extinct.

The white dolphin known as baiji, shy and nearly blind, dates back some 20 million years. Its disappearance is believed to be the first time in a half-century, since hunting killed off the Caribbean monk seal, that a large aquatic mammal has been driven to extinction.

And last but not least, someone’s killing English hookers (also via CNN):

Police in eastern England are combing through rural areas hoping to find out who is behind the suspected killings of five women — all believed to be prostitutes — that may be the work of a lone serial killer.

Prostitutes were on Wednesday warned to stay off the streets of the Suffolk city of Ipswich, fearing the killer or killers could strike again.

“I’m not sure what starker message there can be at the moment: Certainly three of their peer group have been murdered, now potentially another two,” Chief Supt. Stewart Gull of Suffolk police said.

“Clearly it’s not safe, they need to stay off the streets.”

A Jack the Ripper wannabe? Maybe!

December 13th, 2006 · Tags Animals, Internet, Mac, News, Sex, Technology, Uncategorized | Comments Off

Prepare for the inevitable uprising

No, I don’t mean the inevitable uprising here or anywhere else. In fact, I don’t mean anything to do with humans at all. I’m talking about the robots, because the Japanese have finally invented a robot that thinks we taste like bacon. From the article:

Upon being given a sample, he will speak up in a childlike voice and identify what he has just been fed. The idea is that wineries can tell if a wine is authentic without even opening the bottle…

But when some smart aleck reporter placed his hand in the robot’s omnivorous clanking jaw, he was identified as bacon. A cameraman then tried and was identified as prosciutto.

Well, now we’re screwed. Thanks Japan! Between the people-eating robots and the attempts to create new universes, they’ll do us all in yet. (CERN isn’t helping, either.)

November 10th, 2006 · Tags Food, Robots, Technology | Comments Off