I just signed up for Apple’s new “Ping” social networking service through iTunes (profile here). I followed a few artists that I like and when I started looking through it all I see is comment spam! Every single comment is some ridiculous pitch for a free iPhone. This is so lame! You would think that a company as large as Apple would have had the foresight to prevent comment spam. I am officially going to give Ping exactly 3 days to get straightened out, after that I am done if they don’t fix this.
Author:
Twitter Announces the TweetButton
Posted by – August 12, 2010
First the obligatory apology for not writing anything in ages…
via: Mashable
Twitter has announced the TweetButton, as seen at the bottom of each post here! Super simple to implement. I am thinking that I prefer Twitter over many other social entities. It is simple and allows for quick and easy communication. I feel like most other social tools are way too cumbersome and try to do too much.
Get your very own TweetButton here: http://twitter.com/goodies/tweetbutton
Installing tools for Rails development
Posted by – March 1, 2010
I have long been a fan of the various tutorials written by Dan Benjamin at Hivelogic for installing the various components of a Ruby on Rails development environment. Some of these articles are:
- Installing MySQL on Snow Leopard
- Installing Git on Snow Leopard
- Installing Ruby, RubyGems, and Rails on Snow Leopard
Recently, however, I have found a new way to install Ruby, RubyGems and Rails. This new method allows for a simple installation and switching between different versions of Ruby. Enter, Ruby Version Manager (aka RVM). Once installed and configured, installing Ruby is as simple as:
rvm install 1.9.1
I was introduced to this magical tool via a screencast from Ryan Bates on Railscasts entitled: Rails 3 Beta and RVM
Proposed Health Care Bill(s) Fails Californians
Posted by – January 12, 2010
I have been thinking, for quite a while, that we Californians get the short end of the stick when it comes to our participation in the United States of America. This idea has been most recently bolstered when reading an article about the Health Care legislation that is being debated in Congress now. To quote the article:
In addition, the House bill would extend Medicaid eligibility to 150 percent of the poverty line ($33,000 for a family of four), while the Senate plan lifts the threshold to 133 percent of poverty (family income: $29,000).
Now, read that again, Medicaid coverage will be extended to households of 4 that make less than $33,000. Why doesn’t Congress account for the widely varied cost of living when accounting for income levels? $33,000 in California does not go nearly as far as it does in rural Alabama. Why should we Californians be subjected to the same taxation rates if we are only going to be short changed on the benefits?
Google Earth, not so un-evil?
Posted by – December 3, 2009
When installing Google Earth today, I was presented with the following before I could use the program:
To continue using Google Earth, you must accept the new Google privacy policies and allow Google Software Update to run in the background on your computer.
This smells funny to me… I like most of Google’s products, but I don’t enjoy having extra stuff forced upon me. While I imagine that Google’s Software Update service is probably fine and will most likely not cause any problems, I would like to at least be presented with an opportunity to opt-out of this.
Ruby on Rails, Passenger & MySQL PATH issues in Snow Leopard
Posted by – September 8, 2009
I recently did a clean installation of Snow Leopard, which is great by the way, and I ran into some issues after installing MySQL and Ruby on Rails based on the instructions from Dan Benjamin at Hivelogic.
Specifically, when I would try to access a site in development mode I would get an error from Passenger that “Rails 2.3.4 could not be found”. I also noticed that on reboot my PATH wasn’t being loaded properly either so the system could not find MySql, Ruby, or RubyGems.
I tried placing the path information that, according to the instructions goes in ~/.profile into my ~/.bash_profile.
Now when I restart the system, MySQL and Ruby on Rail can be found! Passenger is working now as well. I am not sure if there was a change in the way Snow Leopard loads bash profiles or if there is just a problem with my installation that was preventing it from working when the PATH was specified in ~/.profile, but it’s all working now so hopefully this will help someone else.
Make OSX Terminal pretty
Posted by – August 31, 2009
I have always been annoyed with how a new tab opens in the OSX Terminal. I have my Terminal set to run “source ~/.bashrc” when the application starts. The problem with this is that it won’t run for new tabs, and I use lots of tabs (Rails development, web server, database, ruby console, etc…). And while I have been annoyed, it never really bothered me enough to look for a solution, until today.
As is usually the case, a quick search in Google led me to “Customizing the terminal prompt on Mac“. Apparently, OSX handles the terminal profiles a little differently than what I am used to. OSX uses profiles, where Ubuntu uses .bashrc. So, just add one line in your terminal profile to tell the terminal run the necessary command to load your .bashrc like so:
- First open up your ~/.bash_profile in your text editor of choice
- Add the line “source ~/.bashrc”
- Save and close ~/.bash_profile
Easy as can be! Now set your .bashrc to make your terminal as color-coded and informative as you want it to be. There are a lot of tutorials and information available for editing your .bashrc file.
Moving iTunes
Posted by – June 16, 2009
-
I recently purchased a Drobo to move some of my larger multimedia files off of my iMac as it was running short on storage. The process for moving an iTunes library from one location to another can be daunting, so here are the steps I took. (Mac OSX specific).
- Copy files from drive A to drive B
- Make a backup of “iTunes Music Library.xml”
- Open “iTunes Music Library.xml” file on drive A in a text editor
- Find all references to drive A and replace with drive B
- Make a backup of the “iTunes Library” database file
- Delete the contents of the “iTunes Library” database file
- Open iTunes
- Get a beverage, it will take a while for iTunes to re-import your libraries xml file
These steps were necessary because there are two accounts on my iMac using the same storage path for music but different iTunes libraries. Using the standard “Consolidate Library” method would have left me with thousands of duplicate song files. Using the above method simply changes where iTunes looks for the file to play.
California School Textbooks
Posted by – June 10, 2009
California’s Governor has recently announced an initiative to allow the use of electronic textbooks in the classroom. This is being done to reduce costs in a time when the state’s budget is in crisis. Unfortunately, at least in my opinion, the stated initiative misses the mark.
Instead of allowing textbook publishers to present their materials in an electronic format we should be looking into bypassing the textbook publishers entirely. There is no reason that the educational material could not be crowd-sourced to the thousands of certificated teachers currently working in California. Sure it would take some time to compile the material and there would need to be a strict approval policy, but a wiki-like textbook would be effective, efficient and cheap.
Imagine the combined brain trust of thousands of teachers all contributing, discussing and editing an evolving, online repository of information that is available free of cost or copyright restriction to anyone, anywhere. Additionally, local repositories could be branched off to suite the needs of individual communities and we could allow for a free and open discussion of contentious topics to ensure that the children being educated by the state are receiving the information in a manner that is judged to be fitting by people. Parents could comment, object or provide insight into any number of topics included and these comments, objections or insights would be available directly to the content providers. I am not suggesting a completely open system ala Wikipedia, but certainly something similar with controls over who can edit.
CAFE = FAIL
Posted by – May 23, 2009
The change to the CAFE regulations from the Obama administration seem to be much less stringent than I originally thought. The 35.5 MPG requirement is filled with as many loopholes as our street are with potholes.
The largest loophole is that instead of a strict, clear cut rule, the automakers will be able to base the fuel mileage in 2016 on estimates of what the Green House Gas emissions from that year will be. What this will allow the automakers to do is to reduce the Green House Gases by improving the Air Conditioners in their vehicles, which will effectively reduce their estimated fuel mileage that is being based on Green House Gas emissions. Huh?
Perhaps even more dumbfounding than the convoluted and idiotic fuel mileage mess is the provisions that will allow automakers to reduce their CAFE requirements based on the “footprint” (square footage) of the vehicles that they sell. The larger the vehicle, the less stringent the CAFE requirement. This also means that the CAFE standard for each company will be different based on the size of the vehicles they sell. How is this different than what we have now? How is this “Change We Can Believe In”?
President Obama, we do not need more of the same. The leadership of the last few administrations has left this country in dire straits regarding foreign oil dependence and emissions standards. Please, simply set strict rules without loopholes and allowances. Allow all car companies to compete on a level playing field and let them know what is required of them. Why is this so difficult to do in Washington D.C.?
