November 8, 2011 at 1:44pm
Notes
Quick note to self.
If you deploy a Rails application (with Capistrano for instance) to a Passenger / nginx server, you have to make sure you don’t deploy the app as user ‘root’ (I hear people say ‘never ever use root!’ … oh well).
Why not?
Passenger will run your Rails application as the user who owns the config/environment.rb file (see help). If the owner of this file is ‘root’, the user is switched to the default Passenger user, which is by default ‘nobody’.
This might result in insufficient permissions for actions like writing to a database file or when compiling assets.
October 25, 2011 at 2:14pm
Notes
Gitlab might finally be the front-end for a self-hosted git server. I’ve lost countless hours trying to install Gitalist and had too many ugly systems installed. But, no more, I hope.
(Gitolite support will be available in v 2.0)
We’re pleased to announce a wide range of new features and enhancements – including HTML5 support – coming in Kindle Format 8 (KF8). KF8 is the next generation file format for Kindle books – replacing Mobi 7. As showcased on Kindle Fire, KF8 enables publishers to create great-looking books in categories that require rich formatting and design such as children’s picture books, comics & graphic novels, technical & engineering books and cookbooks. Kindle Format 8 replaces the Mobi format and adds over 150 new formatting capabilities, including fixed layouts, nested tables, callouts, sidebars and Scalable Vector Graphics, opening up more opportunities to create Kindle books that readers will love.
Seems like great news to me. Although I doubt the new format will be available on the slightly older Kindle devices, not so great news.
(Source: decodering)
Building an installation together with Jeroen Bourgois, using Arduino and WiFly Shield.
For over 6 months now, I’ve been very happy with my Kindle 3G. It is a second generation one, with a keyboard. Being very lightweigt, having a long battery life and a fantastic screen (you have to see it before you know what I mean) is what still excites me everytime I use it. You see, I became somewhat of a Kindle / Amazon fan-boy!
And now, Amazon updated its Kindle line-up with the addition of 3 new (dedicated) e-readers: Kindle, Kindle Touch and Kindle Touch 3G. Even more lightweight and smaller.
If you were still unsure whether to buy one or not: don’t hestitate, go get one now (but know which one to choose :))! You’ll be very pleased with it, as I have been for the past months.
When owning a Kindle, living in Belgium has some downsides. You’re still dependend on the Amazon book / Kindle store for your books and it doesn’t contain much literature in dutch. So for now, this is my main medium for all my technical books and some international writers. There are some options to buy on a store like Bol.com and than convert the book … but that’s down a ‘non-legal’ road and that might be too much of a hastle. Buying on Amazon.com is as simple as hitting the Buy button and your book is delivered automatically and via WiFi or Whispernet (world-wide data connection).
But besides that: I’m all for the Amazon Kindle product-line.
Last but not least, Amazon announced the Kindle Fire. An Android based tablet with a strong focus on movies, music and books. Might seem an attractive (and maybe only decent) alternative to an iPad .. time will tell.
September 27, 2011 at 4:41pm
6 notes
The Mythical Man-Finger.
faster, easier to understand, easier to integrate, more scalable, more portable, more sustainable, more consistent, and many, many times more flexible than even the most well-thought-out graphical apps.
— http://j.mp/ofkcdS
Stockery, a simple Ruby gem that allows you to query stock quotes from (for now) the Google API or Yahoo Finance API. The nice thing is that you can use it as a library inside your project, or just via the command line and mix & mash it with your favourite shell script.
Usage via command line
By default stockery outputs a JSON format of the result fetched from Google.
Fetch GOOG quote via Yahoo.
Set the output to print and it prints it directly to your prompt.
Multiple stock symbols.
Help :)
Usage through Ruby
2.
