The Presidents of the United States of America Live
Yeah! I got myself some tickets to The Presidents of the United States of America, live at Effenaar, Eindhoven.
To be honest with you, I’ve never been to a real concert before, so this is going to be *very* much fun for me! Among the few albums I bought back in the year 1995 was PUSA.
Your help is needed! - Railsjobs.nl
Since I started Railsjobs.nl some time ago, I’d like to ask you a simple question. Thanks for putting in your $0.02 :)
Roles: Admins pretending to be users!
Most applications have some sort of role system. You have administrators, who can do basically everything, semi-administrators and “regular Joe” users.
Now, sometimes you want, as an administrator, be able to login as a user to solve some problem, or manage settings for a user, or whatever.
Harm did a very nice write-up on how we did this in a Rails project of ours. You can read the article here.
Attack of the Killer Bunnies
Well, here they go then! Just swooping in, eating all the green stuff from your garden!! Someone stop them!
This was taken in the back-yard at Laura’s parents house. The neighbours have about a dozen rabbits, but they are allowed to walk around as they wish, occasionally finding their way into other people’s gardens.
Kabisa Blog
Well, we’ve got our blog up and running at Kabisa now! Our entire team will be posting interesting Ruby, Rails, Java and Subversion articles that may be of very good use to you.
Check out the blog now on http://blog.kabisa.nl or grab the RSS Feed to stay up-to-date.
Thin: A Ruby HTTP Daemon That’s Faster Than Mongrel
Thin is a new Web server / daemon written in Ruby by Marc-André Cournoyer that uses the EventMachine, Rack, and Mongrel libraries. EventMachine makes it super fast at processing network I/O, Rack makes it easy to integrate with existing Ruby Web app frameworks, and Mongrel helps it parse HTTP. So, yes, the title is slightly misleading. Thin actually relies on Mongrel, but is ultimately faster than it, even against Mongrel’s EventMachine-enhanced guise.
You can get started with Thin with a simple sudo gem install thin and then you can use it with any Rack supporting Web app / framework. With a Rails app, for example, a simple thin start in the base directory will get things moving.
Review: Parking London
This is a paid review
I’ve been asked to review a service named Parking London. What this service does is two things, really. Firstly, it allows owners of garages and parking spaces in London to offer their spots to others. A location can be specified, with a small description. Of course, the price for the monthly tenancy or sale is added.
The service doesn’t look very special at a first glance. Just a listing of available parking spots in London. When I took a closer look, I noticed a link “Map view”. When I clicked it, a Google map popped up of the UK, and I was able to zoom in and see where all the available parking spaces where. Hovering over the pin points shows the monthly cost for them. Great!
Being a good reviewer, I setup a scenario where I was a potential buyer who’s looking for garage space in London. I have a budget of 250 pounds a month, and I want the garage to be in the north of the river Thames.
This proved very difficult indeed. With a service like this, I expect to be able to specify some search criteria. I can enter a ‘filter’ parameter, but this didn’t seem to do anything useful.
There is an option, however to search for locations and postcodes. I gave it a try, but again, I found the results next to useless to me.
I left the location issues for what they were, and focussed on the pricing. I’m not sure what a reasonable price for a garage is, but I set myself an imaginary budget of 250 pounds. I was not able to find any way to select items by price, or sort the listing by price to simplify my search.
In my opinion, this service is really basic. A lot of time went into making the Google map work correctly, and it really does. It’s easy to locate a parking space near a location you want.
Finding items with a certain pricing, or any other form of search was pretty much impossible. With a little work, this site might be a very useful tool for garage-seeking Londoners.
Write a DVD-Video from the Linux console
This is probably my last post for this year, and it’s not about Ruby on Rails! Or web development! It’s about how to burn a DVD-Video from the Linux console.
I know, there are tons of fancy apps (with a decent GUI) that allow you to create DVD-Video disks from Gnome or KDE. But, my Linux machine has no monitor attached and I don’t care for hogging up resources by running X.
All you really need to burn a DVD-Video is one packages: dvd+rw-tools. If you’re on Debian or Ubuntu, just run this:
apt-get install dvd+rw-tools
So, I have this VIDEO_TS folder and a blank DVD in my DVD driver (which is known to my system as /dev/sr0). To make a correct DVD, you’ll also need an AUDIO_TS folder. It doesn’t matter if it’s empty, it should be there.
I’m assuming you’re all doing this as root. If not, just add ’sudo’ in front of every command you perform
mkdir AUDIO_TSNext, we need to set the correct permissions on the VIDEO_TS, AUDIO_TS and the files contained in these directories.
chmod -R root:root VIDEO_TS AUDIO_TS chmod 500 VIDEO_TS AUDIO_TS chmod 400 VIDEO_TS/*
Well, you already have all your files prepped, and you’re good to go.
The following command will burn you a nice video DVD. Make sure a blank DVD is inserted into your drive. As I said before, my drive is located at /dev/sr0. You system is probably different. Check your boot log (dmesg) for messages of a dvd driver.
growisofs -dvd-compat -Z /dev/sr0 -dvd-video .
It’s very important not to forget the tailing dot, it tells growisofs that you want to use the current directory as the source for your DVD. Depending on the speed of your burner, you’ll have a new DVD to watch in a few minutes. Enjoy! And a happy 2008!
For You: Merry Christmas and a Happy 2008!!!
We (Laura and I) wish you a very merry Christmas and a happy 2008!
I hope to welcome you back on Ariejan.net in 2008. Happy Holidays!
Startrek.com Shutting Down
Oh my! Bad news! Startrek.com is shutting down! I’ve been around Startrek.com quite often to check up on my favourite characters and learn more about the great Star Trek universe. If there is an online petition to keep the site up and running, I’d sign it!
Curlsman writes to let us know that the fan site startrek.com, operated for 13 years by CBS, is being shut down and its staff laid off. Is this site worth a write-in campaign? From the (perhaps final) post: "Goodbye from the STARTREK.COM Team. Sadly, we must report that CBS Interactive organization is being restructured, and the production team that brings you the STARTREK.COM site has been eliminated. Effective immediately. We don't know the ultimate fate of this site, which has served millions of Star Trek fans for the last thirteen years. If you have comments, please send them to editor @ startrek.com — we hope someone at CBS will read them.