Vostro (1400) + Ubuntu 9.04 + sound issues
Another Ubuntu upgrade, another sound configuration that doesn't work out of the box. This is what I had to do for Ubuntu 8.10, that also worked for this version:
$ sudo vim /etc/init.d/alsa-utils
Around line 364, replace this
[ "$TARGET_CARD" = "all" ] && log_action_end_msg_and_exit "$EXITSTATUS" exit $EXITSTATUS ;; stop) EXITSTATUS=0 TARGET_CARD="$2"
with
[ "$TARGET_CARD" = "all" ] && log_action_end_msg_and_exit "$EXITSTATUS" exit $EXITSTATUS ;; stop) ifconfig wlan0 down ifconfig eth0 down EXITSTATUS=0 TARGET_CARD="$2"
Then restart. In 9.04 I also had to go through my volume control panel and make sure nothing was turned all the way down or muted. I think I had to unmute the master volume and turn PCM Playback (under HDA Intel) up.
Please comment if this helps you!
UPDATE April 29th, 2009: I also had to reinstall flash in order to get sound working in Firefox again.
XSLT is a giant pain
Some of you may be aware that XML+XSLT 1.0 can be rendered directly by modern browsers (even IE6!), which led me to thinking that it may be a good idea to give it a try and see how good or bad it was.
Announcing: Ramastic, a skeleton for Ramaze
This is something I've been working on since slightly before my original call for suggestions a while back. It's not done yet (I'd say it's somewhere around 75% done) but I want to get it out there before I totally lose steam on it. There are a few inline styles I was planning on removing, but haven't gotten around to, so...apologies. If you find it of use, please leave a comment.
And yes, it doesn't look that great. But I'm expecting you to restyle everything anyway and possibly blow away the templates entirely in your instantiation of the skeleton.
Now, without further ado, here are features and screenshots:
Features/requirements
- Built on Bones
- Edge Rack/Innate/Ramaze
- Haml/Sass
- Sequel + sqlite3
- Blueprint CSS
- jQuery, jQuery UI
- OpenID (via RPX)
- RestClient
- Crack
- UUID
- Rack-flash
Screenshots
Repository
Thanks for looking!
Ideas Needed for Mr. Bones skeleton built on Ramaze
If I were to make a skeleton using Mr. Bones that was built on Ramaze, what would people like to see in it? It's for my use first, but the community's use a close second if I can generalize it enough. I was thinking along the lines of openid support, having a decent home page and logged-in-user gateway, appropriate nav-bars, haml+sass, jquery+ui, etc....thoughts? What do you find yourself doing at the beginning of every website project that you'd like to not have to repeat every time you start a project?
re-"require"-ing: how's the speed?
What this is about
So I like the design that, when you need a particular library in your code, you require it in right there in the method/class (JIT library-loading, so to speak), even if it means the require directive will get executed more than once. Running through irb you can tell that calling require twice on the same library is usually much faster the second time, but how much faster?
Read on for benchmarks!
Starting new projects
So I know I'm not the only dev who does this, but I tend to start a lot of projects -- and not finish them. I'm coming up with a checklist of things that I want to make sure I do before getting involved in any new projects.
Read on for some of the initial questions you should ask yourself, and what to do next.
Nifty easy screencast software
Not necessarily the easiest or the best, but it certainly looks cool and could very much have a niche to call its own. It's called uTIPu.
Check it out. Someday I'll create a screencast for something useful.
Gotcha with Sequel and Association Caching
One thing to remember with Sequel is that it caches associations -- for an hour, by default. Normally this is good -- if I say my_model.my_associated_models twice in one request, I'd like that to be cached. But at least with Ramaze, where you can access a variable that persists between requests (via session, like session[:user]), you have to remember that associations on that session object get cached, too. So what does that mean? That means if you have a user view their posts (with session[:user].posts), and then they go make a post, and then they come back to view their posts again...the new post won't be in the list of posts! So you have two basic options here, that I know of -- either a) manually kill the cache by putting session[:user].refresh on the action that alters the associations of session[:user], or b) put session[:user].refresh in a place that gets executed at the beginning of every request.
Sprockets — it's a good thing
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 
Ruby 1.9 and OpenSSL on Ubuntu
Having trouble getting openssl working on your Linux box and Ruby 1.9 (or 1.9.1, specifically)? Here's something to give a try...