allskonar

For the last few weeks in new job I hear a lot of Swedish. And all I can contribute is BORK BORK BORK!

Lets define Friday night boredom :)

i love windows= 45k i hate windows= 79k factor: 45/79 = 0.57

i love mac= 228k i hate mac= 10k factor: 228/10 = 22.8

i love linux= 73k i hate linux= 7k factor: 73/7 = 10.4

This has to be one of the best book covers ever. You really have to focus on all the little details:

How the floppy disk is casually resting on the keyboard as if the coder had to leave in a hurry to do some coding else where. How the books logo is stamped on the back of the leather jacket left behind on the chair.

I know I shouldn’t keep poking fun at some applications since I bet there is plenty people can find where I goofed up … but this one is truly precious.

Boy is that place a rats nest… haven’t looked at the site for a year now and decided to see how long it would take me to upgrade to rails 2. Remarkable enough it was really not that tricky to do which speaks to the level of my knowledge of rails at the time which was fairly slim so all my upgrading tasks where fairly light. So to make things more exciting I decided make it more rest-y … which also was remarkable light task except for a few minor issues such as lack of tests which makes it terribly difficult to even know if the site is working at all except for the fact that I clicked around a bit … (god I wish I had known testing better a year ago). So before I would dive into upping the test coverage I decided to save the very little traffic I get from google by issuing a 301 for the urls that changed. So as an former mod_rewrite ninja (oh did I mention that I deployed the site before I fell in love with nginx) I fired up .htaccess and wrote all the rules for the rewrites … then after 30 minutes of cursing and moaning I read somewhere that .htaccess doesn’t take on rails app jez. Not to worry I just stuffed the rules into my virtualhost config and things are flying.

As everyone who has gmail on their iphone know it can be severely frustrating and boy did I get excited when I saw this post gmail-now-supports-imap and since the article was just a tease and didn’t any specific information on how to accomplish this I did some googling and came up with various links in regards to setting up gmail with imap. Some of which were simply just too much effort, the title says it all: Gmail, IMAP, and iPhones – Part 2 – The Tutorial.

Google page explains in details how to enable this feature on your gmail account

The sad thing is though that my account didn’t seem to have that option. But then I created a new account and the option is there (see pic below). I sure hope that they’ll roll this out to my account. But in the meantime I’ll play with my new account.

According to gmail though it’s their intent to roll it out to everyone before too long. They also released a video demonstrating how to set up your iphone

Now here is the geeks view of my recent trip to Italy. Later I will ad a version of all the less important stuff such as food and wine.

The In-Flight Entertainment System

It’s not often that I get so excited that I clap my hands together like a giddy school child, but when I do so it’s always slightly embarrassing. My most recent incident of such occurred when I boarded eurofly plane on my way to Italy. This happened when I realized that the in-flight entertainment system was run on Linux which was unfortunately only evident because it was displaying an error screen which had Tux, the little penguin which is the linux mascot, sitting in the top left corner.

Here is a more up close view of Tux, isn’t he cute?.

The excitement faded quickly and turned into disappointment because the system wasn’t really that great, which ofcourse has nothing to do with the underlying OS.

The worst part was the interaction design. When I stumbled on the chess game I got pretty excited about the “play with another passenger” feature and I remember thinking to myself “oh my … they are so far ahead of their time having a social feature on a in-flight system, thats so brilliant!” So I decided to see if one of the 300 other passengers where waiting to play chess with me. After a long wait I gave up and decided to try again later when the swarm of passengers had settled. I had no luck in finding anyone to play, even towards the end of the flight, when I figured everyone becoming so bored that they would have found it. It was only then when I realized that the feature “play with another passenger” didn’t mean what I though it meant. As it turns out it basically meant you could play with someone you could hand the controller to … essentially either of the passengers next to you. Now English is not my first language and my expectations might be blinded by the fact that I work on social software so perhaps that affected my anticipation by seeing “play with another passenger” on a computer console, but I was dissapointed and embarreshed a little.

iPhone in Europe

After I had gotten over the whole “no one wants to play chess with me” fiasco and the plane had landed and the airplanes doors had been open it was time to turn off the airplane mode on my iPhone and see how Edgy europe was? and they sure where … I was roaming on the internet so fast I forgot all about that chess thingy. The untold story here is that I haven’t yet seen the bill, which I imagine is pretty steep since I never did read the phone print to discover how much one would have to pay for data transfers roaming in another country, if it ends up being a real shocker I will update this post and display the cost. I am especially worried because the last two days my connection suddenly died so either I exceeded some kind of limit or they realiced that the iPhone shouldn’t be working in Europe.

Where to Get Internet in Rome when iPhone was Shut Down

When the iPhone is no longer a reliable source of internet I started looking for wifi signs around the city and as it turns out they still have more hifi signs than wifi so my second best option was the laundry mats that also come equipped with internet machines … which in my opinion is quite brilliant and essentially how I do laundry here in the states except for that fact I go next door to the coffee shop with wifi.

Computer Books as Window Display in Book Stores

To wrap up my geek/tech impression of Italy check out this window display in a Rome book store, above! These skills are also in high demand in US but I still always have to go to the far dark corner of any book store to find my computer book titles, in Italy I don’t even have to be looking to find them.

I have been seeing a lot of this mephisto and it seems that all the cool kids I look up to use it so I wanted to get on the wagon and install and use it too. And I have to say I have no regrets it’s so much more fun to use than wordpress and the best part is it’s ruby on rails so there is less php that I have to deal with.