I’ve just finished a “public beta” version of Friendscribe.com, which is a web-based chat for keeping in touch with your friends. The idea is that chat messages are stored in a database, so you don’t need to have your browser always open to see what’s going on – just log back in later and see if someone has said anything while you were gone.
Just a brief revelation to share with any readers (perhaps they stumble here through Google, or by some horrible accident :).
I’ve had an Abit IP35-E motherboard in my HTPC setup for six months now, and while a great overclocking board, stable and packed with nice features (yeah, right, this is the budget version), I haven’t been able to coerce my Debian Lenny installation copied from previous IDE hard drive, or any Linux Live-CD to properly recognize my 500GB Samsung SATA hard drive.
Because booting to Linux rebooted with USB keyboard on, and IRQ options sometimes seemed to work their magic and temporarily get me to login prompt, I figured there was some IRQ conflict at work. I searched for the fix just half a year ago with no luck, but after 5 months of complete Linux abstince (spelled that wrong, I did), I stumbled upon an article in (now defunct) Fatwallet.
Turns out all I needed was to swap SATA cable from SATA1 port to SATA5 to avoid IRQ conflicts. Voila, now everything works great, no IRQ conflicts there (only SATA1-SATA4 ports conflict with USB controller).
You just have to love coding. I mean, unless you don’t, you’re not likely to put up with two hours of nearly useless debugging, when you realize your WeBRICK or Mongrel development environment do not work as it should. That’s exactly what I just did, and in order to help others, I’ll give you the details so you can get some decent results when Googling.
The problem: I wanted to do some quick template prototyping. Hitting my WebFaction rails development environment, I started to make changes to a page template, update it, make changes, etc. Only this time no changes were shown after initial load! Only a server restart would make the changes visible. WTF. This isn’t how the development environment should work at all!
Having done web development on several platforms (Perl+CGI, ASP.NET and PHP), I was introduced to Ruby on Rails about two years ago, and it was love on first sight. The separation of code and layout was a bliss after PHP require statements (and vaguely similar to ASP.NET, by the way), and database abstraction was on a wholly different level.
And, you don’t need semicolons after statements in ruby, just how sexy is that? What more can a man need (write a comment, if you disagree :).
Now Rails does have some annoyances, like painful configuration for multiple applications running on a same server. If someone actually likes writing Lighttpd rules and making special provisions for it in routes.rb, again, let me know. It also seems that in some cases, all the abstraction and “there is a really clever hack to do this with just one line of code” -mentality has taken over good sense, which for me has meant that my “Rails 0.9” skillset has been mostly deprecated, and replaced with layers upon layers of new stuff I should be continuously keeping up with.
Now a recent Slashdot article (the one linking the page-long rant from Mongrel developer) had some positive comments related to Django, and I decided to check it out. And guess what? It just rules.
Now if you like your trusted PHP or like to roll on with Rails, wherever they take you, please don’t read further. But for those adventurous who don’t think using indentation to format blocks is a bad idea (Python developers obviously didn’t, and Django is a Python framework), I think there are several lovable features in Django, when compared to Rails. These are, of course, my personal opinions, speaking as a person who has developed a fairly complex Rails project (a personal budgeting app) over two years of time:
Just a short note on this Slashdot newsbit that almost got me falling off my chair: Nokia is acquiring Trolltech, the makers of QT graphics library behind the popular Linux window manager (/platform) KDE.
I mean, if I had been asked a month ago the top three companies making money with open source software, I would’ve replied RedHat, MySQL and Trolltech. And since MySQL has already been acquired, I really wonder what is next.
Also, it is interesting that Nokia decided to acquire Trolltech, even though their Maemo platform is based on GTK and Gnome, not QT and KDE. Well, let’s just hope they don’t stop providing a GPL version of QT in the future.
Anyone want to bet who is the next open source shop being acquired by some big players? My bet is RedHat being acquired by Google or Microsoft, because, well, that would just be surprising, wouldn’t it?
Picture of this 99.9% light-absorbing monster material can be found from news.com.au coverage. Now as many slashdotters pointed out, this opens up obvious possibilities for solar panels, but once these really get cheap, I’d propose a couple of additional ones:
Limiting the light scatter in open areas where adequate lightning (e.g. for safety) and darkness are simultaneously preferred. Theaters, nighttime transportation (ever tried to sleep in a well-lit train?) spring up to mind
Ninja clothing. Of course the problem is, that once you actually become darker than the night, you may be more easily spotted.
Striking interior decoration. Doors that look like black holes? Check. Really black borders for your home theater projector canvas? Check. Sofa that just doesn’t seem to be there? Check!
And of course there is my absolute favourite: MacBook Night Air, as shown below.
Like Nigel Tufnel says in the movie This Is Spinal Tap: It’s like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black.
