Posted by Max Dunn Fri, 14 Jul 2006 16:34:58 GMT | no comments
This week, I was at the Mashup Camp 2, which was organized as an un-conference. It was a fantastic experience and I will write more about it later. For now, here is a Mercury News article about it titled Langberg: Plan-as-you-go `unconference’ unleashes ideas
Posted by Max Dunn Fri, 07 Jul 2006 18:05:50 GMT | no comments
Yesterday, I almost lost everything on my hard disk – very scary. I was playing around with Ubuntu 6.06 and it ran well from the CD, so I let it install itself to the hard disk. I knew that it was going to partition the disk and add a boot loader, but I figured that the worse thing that could happen was that I would have a boot menu and be able to select to boot from Windows each time. Wrong. I almost lost all my data, but in the end, was able to restore the original partition information. Here is my tale and how I recovered.
Posted by Max Dunn Thu, 06 Jul 2006 18:50:27 GMT | no comments
In college, I went to see a Shakespearen tragedy with some friends. They thought it was depressing, but I disagreed. I said that it was depressing when a story had a happy but artificial ending because this was like saying that we can only be happy when everything goes right. But in a tragedy, when everything goes wrong and the characters still find the will to move forward and live, that is what I find to be the most encouraging and uplifting.
Posted by Max Dunn Thu, 06 Jul 2006 17:47:03 GMT | 6 comments
I have been working on a Flickr mashup on my wiki so that I can easily insert links to my Flickr pictures. There are several Flickr libraries for Rails, but the documentation is not very good. So here are some instructions for getting a Flickr library working with Rails.
(Note: On August 28, 2006, I expanded and updated these instructions at: http://www.maxdunn.com/RoR+and+Flickr)
Posted by Max Dunn Wed, 05 Jul 2006 20:41:03 GMT | 3 comments
It can be a little confusing to set up Eclipse to work with your Subversion repository. Once you have downloaded and installed Subclipse, follow these instructions to connect to your SVN repository:
Posted by Max Dunn Wed, 05 Jul 2006 17:56:32 GMT | no comments
I didn’t know anything about the U.N., so when I saw a review of “The U.N. Exposed” by Eric Shawn, I thought it would be interesting to learn more about it. Wow, was I in for more than I realized! While I am sure that there are some good things that the U.N. is doing around the world, this book is focused on exposing their problems, and they have a lot! In specific, it makes a very compelling case that the U.N. actually ended up aiding Saddam and helping him stay in power, which ultimately resulted in the Iraq war.
Posted by Max Dunn Mon, 03 Jul 2006 19:20:00 GMT | no comments
This summer, we all threw around some ideas for vacations. The kids wanted to go on a cruise (as always!) but Maxie also said he would like to go to London or Paris (which was a surprise).
Well, like most of our vacations, this one came together at the last minute. Suzanne emailed our brilliant cruise specialist and he came back with a fabulous cruise to Northern Europe. So we are going to be able to combine going on a cruise and visiting Europe.
This should be a good way to take the kids to Europe since they only have to unpack once, and when they get tired, we can just go back to the ship. However, it will be a long trip since the cruise is 2-weeks and we are going to arrive a few days early in London, so it will be interesting to see how the kids stand up.
Here is the agenda for the cruise:
Posted by Max Dunn Fri, 30 Jun 2006 17:03:00 GMT | no comments
How would you like to put an interactive Google map in your Ruby on Rails page with single or multiple markers? Here is how to do this.
Posted by Max Dunn Wed, 28 Jun 2006 18:23:00 GMT | no comments
Back in the 80s and 90s when basic PC applications like word processors were being developed, there were a lot of holes in what they could do. Even rudimentary features like numbered lists, foreign character support and tables were often missing. So users frantically upgraded to each new release to gain new features they could actually use.
However, at some point, the new features stopped becoming useful to most people. Sure there would be a few esoteric new features that a small percentage of people would use, but for most users, these new features just made the programmer bigger, slower and harder to use. This was the age of feature bloat.
Posted by Max Dunn Wed, 28 Jun 2006 02:25:00 GMT | no comments
Eclipse is known to be a memory hog and slow at starting up and shutting down. Especially if yo have a lot of projects with a lot of files, it can be painfully slow to start. A friend of mine took a programming class where they had exams using Eclipse. All the students made sure they started Eclipse well before class, otherwise they joked that it would take half of the exam time just for Eclipse to start!
Today, I discovered something that helps speed up Eclipse. If you right-click on the projects that you aren’t actively working on and “close” them, Eclipse won’t try to load them into the workspace. This helps not only with the startup and shutdown times, but also when it refreshes the workspace.