Google Reader revamp

I just noticed the UI of google reader got a relift.

The subscription folders are more clear and the whole site seems a bit faster

out

Wanted: Icons in the favorites list of the iPhone

The Phone-application of my iPhone has this nice favorites list. However it is text-only, and I have all these nice pictures of the people in my phone. So how can I tell the Phone application to show a grid of thumbnails of my contacts?.

sigh.

Phusion Passenger / mod_rails

I was running some mongrel_clusters until today. :) I had read about phusion a couple of times, but only now I took a few minutes to install it.

Some things went wrong at first (no rake in $PATH, missing some packages) but the installer notified me about that. Very nice.

Installing was a breeze, so now our rails apps run in apache with mod_rails (passenger). We still proxy and serve static content with nginx though.

Next step: Enterprise ruby, or some other VM

Hudson rocks

Last week I've implemented Hudson as our buildserver. Previously, we were using Luntbuild (and cruisecontrol).

The installation was a breeze. Installing it as a service was just a click away. We did have some problems with SSL when installing several plugins, so we donwloaded them from theinternet manually.

Hudson is a very neat tool, which integrates with http://www.redmine.org

thumbs up!

A tiny solution to the email problem: Notification headers

This is something I was thinking about some time ago... Some of my emails aren't really emails, but system messages. Stuff like "Import failed or succeeded" or a password change request email. Also, most of those emails are only valuable during a brief period of time (The log email of an importer isn't something you need to keep etc). What if there would be a mail header that specifies that an email is a notification email? We could do things like show a popup only on notification emails, automatically delete them if they're read or when expire.

Just curious if there already is such a header and what you think about it.

Switched from putty to poderosa

I just discovered poderosa. A terminal client. I've used putty for ages, but it doesn't have tabs, local cygwin connections and, very important, the ability to save passwords.

Poderosa has it all. The only downside is that it uses .NET, so it isn't as lean as putty. + I don't like the office 2003-like menu bars.

Free JavaRebel license

ZeroTurnaround offers a free JavaRebel license for a limited time. Go to http://www.zeroturnaround.com/javarebel/ and hope the link is still there!

JavaRebel allows you to hotreplace classfiles, even when method signatures differ.

NetBeans the best IDE for RoR

I'm an IDE junky. I like productivity. So far all IDEs for Ruby on Rails have been crappy. Since a few weeks I've been using NetBeans, and it is the best by far.
That is why I wanted to do a post about it. But lifeonrails has beaten me by 6 months ;)

One thing he forgot to mention was CTRL + SHIFT + A to switch from controller <-> view

Logitech diNovo Mini Review

Hi guys.

I'm reviewing the Logitech diNovo Mini today. The diNovoMini is a small wireless bluetooth keyboard and mouse combination perfect for HTPCs and the PS3. It acts just like a normal keyboard and mouse so it should be compatible with any device that supports a usb or bluetooth mouse and/or keyboard. A bluetooth usb dongle is provided.

First of all the diNovo Mini is SMALL. I'd say it's the size of an old pocketpc. It's smaller than my hand. The first thing I did is plug in the battery and the usb dongle. A few seconds later I was ready to go.

The mousepad on the top right acts as both the 4-way cursor of a keyboard and a touchpad mouse. The function is toggled by the switch next to it. The left mouse button is on the top left and is labeled OK. Pressing the pad results in a click too. In mousemode the leds are amber, in cursor mode they are green. It looks pretty cool.

The diNovo Mini turns on as soon as you open the lid, and goes in standby if you close it or if you wait for a few seconds.

There's a compartment for the USB dongle underneath the diNovo just so you won't loose it.

Typing can be done in two ways: keyboard style or with your thumbs. Keyboard style is kinda weird, and the keys aren't layed out exactly as a normal keyboard. I prefer using two thumbs. That's what it's made for. The keys are soft rubber-like.

There are a few media keys such as volume up/down/mute mediaplayer prev/next etc. A webbrowser button is also present which is a nice addition. On the left side there's a pageup/down button which makes reading a webpage easier.

I started up LA-MULANA, an MSX-like game to try and see how well the diNovo performs for gaming. This is where the diNovo falls short. It is not possible to press 2 cursor keys simultaneously. If you do so, for example you press left, and want to press up to jump, it will just keep on walking to the left.
This makes the diNovo unsuitable for action gaming. For strategy games it is perfect though.

The maximum range I measured was over 15 meters, I couldn't really get to the maximum. So that's perfect.

I have no pictures at this moment, but I'm sure you'll find those on google ;)

Google App Engine

I just discovered that google has released a preview of Google App Engine. What it basically does, is allow you to create webapplications in python and let it scale on the google cloud. They have a data store + sql-like query language (GQL). I'm going to digg ;) in to it soon, to see what it's like. Unfortunately they don't have a ruby or java framework. But I assume they do allow for django, or maybe some ruby interpreter for python + an ActiveRecord plugin for GQL

How long until everything is google?

Singularity (C# / .NET OS) source released

Microsoft has released the source of Singularity, an operating system bulit in C#.

Link for the source code on codeplex

Some videos on channel9 about singularity for those wanting to see it in action:

Singularity: A research OS written in C#
Singularity Revisited
Singularity III: Revenge of the SIP
Singularity IV: Return of the UI


In short: The os is pretty cool, and does some compile time stuff that ensures certain things (just like the java preverifier). That way you can run processes on seperate hardware threads.

Ok, I have to watch the episodes again, but I don't feel like it. It was a year ago or something since I've seen them

Deferred debug logging

This is not RoR specific or log4j specific. This is just something that'd be really nice. And I'll implement it soon in RoR...

In production, you don't want tons of logging. If something goes wrong, you wish you had set the loglevel to debug, right? ;)

So the idea is this:
The loglevel is set to info.
Someone makes a request.
The logger logs everything as if it was on debug-level, but all in memory.
If the request outcome was without an error, only log the info/warn/error messages.
But if something DID go wrong, we can now output the whole debug log.

The downside of all this is that it eats a few kb per simultanious request, and all the stringconversions has to be done. IMO it's worth it..

Capistrano

Ok.. I got this book RoR for Java Developers from my friend. While browsing through the book, I noticed capistrano, and I really want to play with that; it looks like deployment heaven :D

I installed redmine, which I like, and looked at the source of both redmine and rforum. redmine is more ruby'ish, but pretty obscure sometimes. rforum is probably the way I'll start out making my apps. Java like if constructs and loops. Yeah I know, I suck

Well.. that's it for now, later...

RoR Deployment

So.. I've been reading about RoR and deployment here and there. Basically it all comes down to running a mongrel for each cpu.

But what if you run 40 rails apps on a single box? will that result in 160 mongrels on a quad-core? And 40*50mb = 2GB of ram?

Isn't it possible to run multiple rails applications on a single mongrel?

Also, I'd like to know if there is some sort of tool that will manage mongrels accross all my servers, and deploy application to servers (and maybe do all that on EC2?) depending on the load / availability.


So far RoR is nice to me. But I haven't deployed it yet on a production environment. I'll be installing redmine on one of our servers. just to see how that will behave.

Hilversumse heide

Last weekend I went to the Hilversume Heide with Sanne, my gf. It didn't show up on my Garmin GPS, and I couldn't find it on google maps, but here's the spot we sat:

Link on google maps, the middle bump is where we spent most of the time

Template disaster

I recently changed my template to this really nice one from http://www.ilemoned.com/wordpress/wptheme-greenery. I just posted link to the A:K announcement, and noticed that my template was all crappered. Turns out photobucket traffic exceeded. I'm going to upload the images to
Blogger Images in a post and make the post invisible.
I don't like having theimages on another server :)

MMO Strategy For Your Cell Phone

Bloomsix got dugg with Armada: Kingdoms. I hope it'll turn out to be a success.

The story of haphap.nl

Hey guys (and girls ofcourse),



So.. A few years ago, Maurice and I launched a dutch site where you can order food online. It's called haphap.nl . Now, we were doing some adwords, and we got some orders, but only a few per week. We had this idea about creating not only an order site, but also a whole community to talk about what you ordered, and we thought of a widget (note that this was 2004) for your site where you could post what you ordered last time. We have ratings and everything.



So what happened? We called our ears off, and visited several restaurants, but it was so damn hard to sell a free service! This was something we didn't expect. We had all these great ideas we could do with the site, and cool marketing plans, but we had to make some revenue first. Which never really happened. We felt like Seth Godin, a great markeer. We're both a big fan of Seth, but we make these jokes about how he knows how to do it, but can't really do it himself. ;) Squidoo is doing pretty well lately though.. ok, let's carry on...

Now, a few years later, the site is still online, and we're thinking of doing it again. But this time with a different strategy.

1) Although our site doesn't require an account, we need the postal code to determine where you are. This is a no no for search engines. So we want to create a page with all zipcodes, and make the site more stateless and RESTfull (i.e. /zip/1018/restaurants/chinese)

2) Don't aquire business ourselves. Because we're not that great at selling our business, we're thinking of letter others manage cities. The manager will get a revenue share based on the orders. If they don't perform well enough, we'll find someone else. Let the manager decide on the price (xx per order, or yy% of an order)

3) Ask a monthly fee. I'm not sure if this is something that works, but if it works it'll mean more commitment, and a stable revenue stream.

4) Do the widgets for hyves (our facebook/myspace)

5) Take it international.


So, what do you guys thing of this? Should we do it or not?

Still no google toolbar for firefox 3

As some of you might know, firefox-3 beta-2 is out for some time now, but still there is no google toolbar for it. So, if you're listening Google, compile your toolbar :D

I don't really like the new address bar (history), but it's ok.

PS: Someone teach me how to blog!

Free mobile wallpaper corpping service

Still only in Dutch, but here you can upload a picture, select your phone and crop a part of your picture. The result will be a perfect fitting wallpaper for your mobile phone.