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karmic koala finally

admin — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 18:55:04 +0000

So I may have totally hosed my server in the process, requiring me to reimage the thing, but I finally have Ubuntu 9.10 running on it woot...

Pleasantly Surprised: Windows 7 RAM reporting

Max — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 05:01:22 +0000

It's the little things that show someone's listening at Microsoft that make me happy.
Vista, when it first came out, reported that I had 3.25 gigs of RAM in the System Properties dialog. Bummer, but to be expected when I put 4 gigs of ram into a 32-bit system.
Microsoft later released a "patch" so that instead of reporting how much RAM you had available, it would report how much RAM was /installed/ (aka, 4.00 GB instead of 3.25 GB). I, along with countless other nerds out there, were outraged that we had to download a third-party program to find out how much RAM was actually available.
Windows 7: Installed memory (RAM): 4.00 GB (3.50 GB usable). Huzzah! Don't know where the extra 0.25 GB came from, but at least they're trying, right?

New little discovery -- "progress bar" applications, like copying files, have their progress bar /in the system tray/. How cool is that?

*still writing this post from Ubuntu *

Sprockets — it's a good thing

Max — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 06:23:59 +0000

Came across an interesting utility library: Sprockets. It's a Ruby-powered Javascript preprocessor. It's used for three things -- embedding other js files into the current js file, ensuring required assets get copied to the assets root, and for interpolating constants (like version numbers, author, etc) into the js file. I found it browsing Prototype.js's source -- really cool stuff. Also funny because I came across it by accident and I was just contemplating designing an identical tool. Good thing and bad thing at the same time

Moving…

Max — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 17:37:24 +0000

I'm paying two webhosting companies a total of $30 a month, so I thought I'd try to consolidate that, which means moving stuff off of the server this blog is hosted on. May experience some temporary interruptions...

Projects updates

Max — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 05:10:53 +0000

Eh, so none of my projects strike me as interesting anymore. The stylometry app seemed sort of gimicky (and pseudo-science at best), and the blog app is sort of ho hum web 2.0 ruby framework stuff. And if I wanted it to be a good blog, even remotely comparable to Wordpress...I'd have to put in dozens of hours.

Now I need to figure out what a good use of my time is. Pretty sure Left 4 Dead isn't it, but it is quite entertaining. I think what I need to do is...instead of trying to come up with ideas for projects out of the blue, come up with ideas that are solutions for problems I'm having, something I would use and benefit from even if no one else did. My Notepad app sort of fits that description, but is very limited in scope. I would like something bigger to work on, that still meets that description...

Mini notebooks galore

Max — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 06:10:51 +0000

This article has a good list of recent notebooks to keep an eye out for: http://crave.cnet.com/8301-1_105-9962473-1.html

merb_multi_js

Max — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 19:06:54 +0000

I'm writing a plugin right now to add some built-in JS functionality to Merb. It's coming along pretty well, but is still pretty raw and not specced, though it does have SOME documentation. It's available at http://github.com/nanodeath/merb_multi_js/wikis/home. If you have questions, you're encouraged to send me a message at Freenode#merb.