When on linux, there is nothing but good old vim for me. This little tutorial even taught me some new stuff and I have been hooked on vim for quite some time now. For any noobs, a better tutorial for you is here.
The concept of scaffolding in Rails 2.1.0 has been bugging me for a while and I haven’t been able to find out much about it online (at least what I wanted to know), so I am going to address my issues. I have been designing an app on rails that doesn’t fit the normal rails model as snugly as it should and am building the model level first and making sure everything works on the command line before I even bother with the GUI. (more…)
I wonder why a company with a speech recognition phone system, online tracking and all these fancy tech features haven’t figured out something as fundamentally important as routing protocols. Case in point. Two weeks ago, Toledo, OH got flooded. I ordered some vitamins a week ago and they were shipped from Nevada this past Monday. For two days, my package has been stuck in the UPS center outside of Toledo, where they sent it to from Nevada. (more…)
For those of you living in a cave, there have been some pretty serious vulnerabilities found in ruby. See this link for the announcement.
In my trademark paranoia and goodwill, I have built myself a .deb package for the patched ruby. It is just a basic checkinstall generated package, but for those of you who have too much trouble running ./configure && make && checkinstall I have posted the package I generated. As always, I guarantee nothing, if you really care about your system, you will build the package yourself rather than downloading it from a nobody site such as mine. (more…)
One of the hardest things I have to tell people when I try to win them to linux is “you are going to need to do some things on the command line”. That about instantly shuts them off. I, personally, love the command line. My home server doesn’t even have a screen, I manage everything through ssh (a remote command line terminal session ). Now for those of you who want to try out linux, once you have installed ubuntu (the best linux to learn on), you will inevitably read online about typing in some kind of command in the shell. When you actually go to the shell, you will be greeted with:
jkorz@lappy486:~$
That’s enough to make most people confused.
Anyone who has been to linux land, but is in exile with windows (as I am… MOZY PLEASE MAKE A LINUX CLIENT) misses many things that used to make life much easier. One of those things is the terminal. Gnome-terminal, xterm, terminal, konsole or whatever you used was a joy (once you figured out how to use it) compared to the ancient cmd.exe in windows. (more…)
Update: Thanks to an anonymous comment below I found a fix. If you download the package from http://www.boutell.com/gd/http/gdwin32.zip and place bgd.dll into your system32 folder, it works like a dream.
Just thought I would post something about this since I banged my head against the wall for hours on this one. I am working on a site that I need a drawing library for. Since I am vaguely familiar with php-gd, I almost got stuck with php on this project until I saw that there is a ruby gem that wraps libgd2, so I stuck with rails on this one (horray). My laptop (running Ubuntu Hardy) was already set up for rails development, so I just did a gem install gd2 and I was ready to go. A couple hours into the project, I was at home where I could use my dual monitor windoze rig (I am a linux zealot, but I am forced to use windows for my main machine since no decent online backup services support linux).
Anybody who I have rustled into trying linux has heard me rave about this program called Vim which, up until about ten minutes ago was the coolest text editor in the world. Well, I just found something that chews up gVim (graphical interface for vim) and spits it out (command line vim: I still love you and will use you in every ssh session until I croak) on a lifehacker post. LH has been putting out some great stuff lately, but this is a real gem. (more…)
Ohhh the thrill as a night’s hacking journey reaches its culmination. It all started yesterday…
I was doing some work on my Preacher’s computer and in the process, set up Mozilla Thunderbird to work with his shiny new GFYD email address, which for him and the rest of the Church staff, will be replacing their old dusty AOL addresses. I had Tbird running like a dream. It started in the tray as a notifier, checked and sent as either his old and new addresses, the works. So yesterday evening I went to drop his computer off and proudly showed him how to work Thunderbird.
So he says… “where are my contacts?” My heart sunk, I hadn’t even given that a thought.
After searching online a bit, it seemed that the only way to get your contacts out of AOL into a CSV is a pay program (unacceptable) or to just manually type them out (double unacceptable).