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
“Wouldn’t it be nice to have an in-browser console for a Rails application?”
Introducing rack-webconsole
Rack-webconsole is a Rack middleware that enhances your development experience providing a JavaScript-powered bridge to your Ruby application backend.
With it you can interact with your database and explore the runtime environment from within the browser. Although it should be used mainly in development environments, I personally think it could be a useful tool for staging as well. Avoids the pain in the ass of interacting with some console over an SSH session :)
via
blog.codegram.com
This one is really useful. It keeps you in your browser window while debugging an application.
Gem Versioning and Bundler: Doing it Right
May 30th, 2011
Executables
When you install a gem to the system, Rubygems creates wrappers for every executable that the gem makes available. When you run an executable from the command line without bundle exec, this wrapper invokes Rubygems, which then uses the normal Rubygems activation mechanism to invoke the gem’s executable. This has changed in the past several months, but Rubygems will invoke the latest version of the gem installed in your system, even if your Gemfile.lock specifies a different version. In addition, it will activate the latest (compatible) installed version of dependencies of that gem, even if a different version is specified in your Gemfile.lock.
This means that invoking executables as normal system executables bypasses bundler’s locked dependencies. In many cases, this will not pose a problem, because developers of your app tend to have the right version of the system-installed executable. For a long time, the Rake gem was a good example of this phenomenon, as most Gemfile.locks declared Rake 0.8.7, and virtually all Ruby developers had Rake 0.8.7 installed in their system.
As a result, users fell into the unfortunate belief that running system executables was compatible with bundler’s locked dependencies. To work around some of the remaining cases, people often advocate the use of rvm gemsets. Combined with manually setting up application-specific gemsets, this can make sure that the “system executables” as provided via the gemset remain compatible with the Gemfile.lock.
Unfortunately, this kludge (and others) sufficiently reduced the pain that most people ignored the advice of the bundler documentation to always use bundle exec when running executables tied to gems in the application’s Gemfile.lock.
It’s worth noting that typing in rake foo (or anyexecutable foo) in the presence of a Gemfile.lock, and expecting it to execute in the bundler sandbox doesn’t make any sense, since you’re not invoking Bundler. Bundler’s sandbox relies on its ability to be present at the very beginning of the Ruby process, and to therefore have the ability to ensure that the versions of all loaded libraries will reflect the ones listed in the Gemfile.lock. By running a system executable, you are executing Ruby code before Bundler can modify the load path and replace the normal Rubygems loading mechanism, allowing arbitrary unmanaged gems to get loaded into memory. Once that happens, all bets are off.
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via
yehudakatz.com
Great tip as I’ve been having the ‘rake-problem’ myself lately while upgrading to 0.9.1.
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