John's finally writing that book...
Tuesday, 16 June 2009
Since getting back from Canada, we've been doing a lot of spring cleaning round the place; working out what we don't need, what isn't important and securing the valuable stuff incase of the worst.
Michelle's got my old MacBook, half because I needed her on the same hardware and secondly that it protects her against all those crashes and virus outbreaks.
Apple's WWDC announcements were not all I wanted to hear, having recently forked out on a new MacBook for myself it's a dull thud but who cares in the end; it's not what you've got but what you do with it that's important.
I've signed up for the iPhone Developer program and moved all my mail into individual email accounts, rather than routed to one box, seriously makes life a lot simpler and easier to manage; hooked up to my iPhone and the Mac.
On top of that we've gone thru the accounts and shaved off anything that's not needed, attacking the whiteboard to track where everything's going and get a better picture of the big world.
I'm building Fallon, which should make generating a basic but tooled-up rails app a lightning-quick task and improve my productivity a hell of a lot; plus I'll get to try out some new things I've learnt that aren't in the rule-book, but when are they :-)
Then there's security, I've beefed up my passwords (you don't even want to know how long the github one is), given all the servers I interact with individual keys so one key doesn't break them all and passphrased them just in case. Created Git repo's for the important stuff and shelved off our notes so we both don't lose them.
Regarding websites, I've also moved my blog and some others onto my Joyent box that I never have to pay for as they don't really need their own box and I don't really want to pay for monthly hosting for something like that; better to leave it for the bigger apps.
...then there's the books
Now Michelle's going thru her bookcases, reading them all and then donating them to charity so I better do something similar. My dad taught me a load of things when I worked with him, all those stories and crufts of advice, don't really want to forget them, so I've decided it'd benefit me to go thru all these books, glean from them what I can and start compiling something to help me in those dark hours; so a book is in order.
I can't believe I've got nearly 500 posts on this blog so I must be able to write something, let's hope it's a cracker.
Software I've sorted by purchasing a copy of Scrivener, I originally hunted around for something to help me write a script or story idea I had but things are just too busy and I can never nail down the plot just develop really nice scene layouts. Scrivener from trawling the reviews and trying the demo really shines. You start off with your document you can generate out of several initial templates that are given to you, screenplay, BBC stageplay and most notably novel.
This then gives you folders to store Research material (which can be broken into folders if you want), your working Draft (which can be re-generated to whatever font or layout your publisher requires separate from what your using) and Trash which is only ever deleted if you really want to; making sure you don't lose anything you may actually need. For $39.95 it's a very polished app and a pleasure to use, one of the better ones.
With everything set in place and two weeks to Vegas I've got time to shave down that book pile and gain something in the process. Kind of reminds me of something I heard about a person who once they've read something, writes an essay about it, smart guy; let's see if I can do something similar.
As always, take care out there
Removing MobileMe from the menubar
Monday, 15 June 2009
You see that swirly icon that looks like a dog chasing it's tail, that's MobileMe. Now if it's irritating you and you don't want it any more do this...
Hold down the command (apple) key then with the mouse drag it off the menubar, It'll go poof and there you go; job done.
todays project
Thursday, 11 June 2009
Going to work on Fallon today, a dead-easy Rails site generator, mixing in restful authentication, any gems you'll need, tests, stylesheets and all the other malarky so you can get to and build your app without having to worry too hard how the user's will be handled.
Why the name, well I'm a fan of old movies and this one (Juggernaut) although not an oscar-winner was a classic starring Richard Harris; it's a popcorn movie of it's time with a lot of cringworthy scenes but isn't all bad.
Keep you posted,
Moved to Joyent, Loving Toronto
Tuesday, 26 May 2009
well finally I've found a way to use that Ham+Eggs deal I bought with Joyent ages ago, cut down the matilda engine to the core, the DB over to SQLite; this is because the pages are cached so it only gets read off of once, a full db isn't that necessary, too much weight & less memory for the joyent service fits in well.
The core's been ripped into plugins to handle formatting duties and MySQL -> SQLite differences, all doing well. Still have some bugs to iron out but will be dealt with over time.
Loving Toronto, nice people, book stores are open later and there's more to do & explore than the UK. Michelle doesn't want to leave & I have to agree with her, made some good friends over here.
On that side we put our Permanent Residency applications in late 2007 so shouldn't be long now, our future kids are gonna love this place.
Till next time, signing off
New Intel Graphics driver for Ubuntu - 2.7.0
Friday, 08 May 2009
Fixed a few of my prob's with the GMA965 chipset, works well on Ubuntu 9.04, dvd playback's no longer choppy (thank god!); the thing roars ahead now, cheer's Intel.
To install, open your sources.list file
sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list
Then copy & paste these in and save & close
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates/ubuntu jaunty main
Then run
sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com AF1CDFA9
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-intel
Log-out and back in and the new drivers should be running.
Check your chipset with:
lspci -nn|grep VGA
More here
.bashrc aliases + split-screen terminal
Thursday, 07 May 2009
# console coloring
export PS1='\[\033[0;35m\]\h\[\033[0;33m\] \w\[\033[00m\]: '
# edit bashrc
alias bn="nano ~/.bashrc"
alias bs="gedit ~/.bashrc"
# free memory
alias free="free -m"
# system helpers
alias update="sudo aptitude update"
alias install="sudo aptitude install"
alias upgrade="sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude safe-upgrade"
alias remove="sudo aptitude remove"
alias clean="sudo aptitude clean"
alias search="sudo aptitude search"
# reload bash aliases
alias reload="source ~/.bashrc"
# download and view railsbrain locally
alias brain-update="git
clone git://github.com/guillaumegentil/railsbrain-updated.git
~/railsbrain"
alias brain-view="opera ~/railsbrain/index.html"
# git helpers
alias gu="git pull"
alias gp="git push"
alias ga="git add ."
alias gc="git commit -m \$1"
alias gs="git status"
alias gi="nano .gitignore"
# view git diffs
alias gv="gitk"
alias installgitk="sudo aptitude install gitk"
# git config (globally)
alias ggmyname="git config --global user.name \$1"
alias ggmyemail="git config --global user.email \$1"
# git config (locally)
alias gmyname="git config user.name \$1"
alias gmyemail="git config user.email \$1"
# test cucumber features
alias ct="cucumber features -n"
# start ruby
alias rs="ruby script/server"
alias rc="ruby script/console"
# disk space and cls/clear
alias left="df -h"
alias cls="clear"
# flush dns cache
alias flushdns="sudo /etc/init.d/nscd restart"
alias installdnscache="sudo aptitude install nscd"
# thin
alias ts="thin restart -C thin.yml"
alias tc="thin restart -C \$1"
alias tp="ps aux | grep thin"
# logs
alias ld="tail -f log/development.log"
alias lp="tail -f log/production.log"
alias lc="rm log/*.log"
# apache
alias ame="sudo a2enmod \$1"
alias amd="sudo a2dismod \$1"
alias ase="sudo a2ensite \$1"
alias asd="sudo a2dissite \$1"
alias arc="sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload"
alias arg="sudo apache2ctl graceful"
alias ars="sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart"
# capistrano
alias capsetup="cap deploy:setup"
alias capcheck="cap deploy:check"
alias capcold="cap deploy:cold"
alias capstop="cap deploy:stop"
alias capstart="cap deploy:start"
# testing
alias test="rake test"
# rake
alias migrate="rake db:migrate"
# gems
alias addgem="sudo gem install \$1"
alias updategems="sudo gem update"
alias updategem="sudo gem update --system"
alias cleangems="sudo gem clean"
alias deletegem="sudo gem uninstall \$1"
alias listgems="sudo gem list"
# processes
alias pav="ps aux | grep \$1"
Split-screen Terminal
Available thru terminator
sudo apt-get install terminator
