Nomadicoder

James Fallows on Google Keep

Steven — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 14:38:57 +0000

What to trust and not trust to Google:

A Problem Google Has Created for Itself – Technology – The Atlantic.

Wonder Why There Were So Many Videos of That Meteor in Russia?

Steven — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 04:34:02 +0000

There are so many Russian drivers with dash cams, some of which captured spectacular video of a meteor exploding over Russia. Wired’s Damon Lavrinc reports, “A combination of inexpensive cameras, flash memory and regulations passed by the Interior Ministry in 2009 that removed any legal hurdles for in-dash cameras has made it easy and cheap for drivers to install the equipment.”

TED Talk: Everything is Remix

Steven — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 13:38:34 +0000

Kirby Ferguson talks about patent law and remix. “Remix may sound like common sense until you’re the one being remixed.”

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs ePub

Steven — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 16:38:21 +0000

Thanks to Calibre, I was able to convert Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman to ePub.

RSpec test code extracted from Sinatra Ruby

Steven — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 18:00:16 +0000

From: http://www.sinatrarb.com/testing.html#frameworks

In app/hello_world.rb

require 'sinatra'
get '/' do
  "Hello World #{params[:name]}".strip
end

In app/spec/app_spec.rb

require 'hello_world'require 'spec'
require 'rack/test'

set :environment, :test

describe 'The HelloWorldApp' do
  include Rack::Test::Methods

  def app
    Sinatra::Application
  end

  it "says hello" do
    get '/'
    last_response.should be_ok
    last_response.body.should == 'Hello World'
  end
end

To execute:

$ spec spec -c

Posted via email from nomadicoder’s posterous

Quick RVM Rubinius 1.0.0 Install Recipe

Steven — Tue, 25 May 2010 18:54:42 +0000

Here are the quick and dirty commands I used to install Rubinius 1.0.0 with Rails, RSpec, and Sinatra in RVM on Mac OS X. ~~So far I haven’t been able to get Cucumber to install.~~

The problem has been fixed with the 1.0.1 release. I have added commands to install Cucumber support.


rvm install rbx
rvm rbx
gem update --system --no-ri --no-rdoc
gem update --no-ri --no-rdoc
gem install rails --no-ri --no-rdoc
gem install sqlite3-ruby --no-ri --no-rdoc
gem install rspec --no-ri --no-rdoc
gem install rspec-rails --no-ri --no-rdoc
gem install cucumber --no-ri --no-rdoc
gem install cucumber-rails --no-ri --no-rdoc
gem install sinatra --no-ri --no-rdoc

The App That Lets Me Leave the iPhone at Home

Steven — Sun, 02 May 2010 22:12:24 +0000

Though I had switched to a Motorola Droid, I kept carrying my iPhone with me. But now that I have Google Listen, Evernote and VIP Access for Android, I have duplicated all of my critical apps on my Droid. It’s nearly perfect. If only OmniFocus ran on the Android. But it’s not critical. Besides, I’m moving my GTD functions to Evernote.

Too Many Apps

Steven — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 19:11:26 +0000

Monday I had to factory reset my Motorola Droid. I was unable to wake my phone. It was on, the green new mail light was flashing, but when I pressed the power button to wake it up, nothing happened. The night before, I inadvertently made a phone call as was unable to hang up the call. When I hit the power button, the screen would come on with the phone, but immediately go dark. I had to pull the battery to end the call. Verizon told me that it was possible that the onboard memory was corrupted by an app. I can think of two or three that may have done it. To correct the problem, I would have to do a factory reset. This would blow away all of my loaded apps and all of the data associated with those apps.

I had 40-50 apps installed on the phone. While the clean start was nice, reinstalling the “essential” apps and setting up their on-line accounts was a hassle. It took about 2-3 hours to restore the phone to where I had what I needed. In all, I now have 36 apps. Of these, I think I should pare down some more. It would be nice to get below 30. I’m still figuring out what I really need (like WordPlayer) and keeping a few that aren’t essential but really nice (like Pandora.) Some of the productivity items I seldom use an go, like GDocs. I’ve taken out many of the streaming apps like TV.com and Stitcher. But having a much lighter and reliable phone will be nice.

Stupid Smilies!

Steven — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:30:53 +0000

It was a good idea to start blogging lessons learned as I code, but it took almost as long to post a correctly formatted entry when I ran into one problem. WordPress creates emoticons automagically. Even if the text is embedded in a or

 block. My last posting contained a :order symbol, which WordPress converted into a laughing smiley. Thinking it was in my code, I manually retyped in the text, tried a code tag, and removed extraneous tags to no avail. WordPress has a setting that takes care of this. Emoticon conversion is turned on by default, a bad thing for Ruby bloggers. Problem fixed, after wasting too much time doing the right thing.



iPhone Blogging
Steven — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 17:11:16 +0000
Ecto for the iPhone: iBlogger
Tags: mobile, iPhone


[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]




Lack of Blogging Activity
Steven — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 16:45:53 +0000
I blog infrequently, especially over the last few months. But I’ve been posting to Twitter quite a lot over the last year, mostly my adventures in podcasting. Much of it mundane — I’m working on show xyz, etc. This is … Continue reading →


Los Angeles City Fire Department Gets It When it Comes to the Web
Steven — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 14:59:46 +0000
Brian Humphrey, from the Los Angeles City Fire Department’s Media and Public Relations, really understands the web and how a Fire Department can put it to use.  First he started twittering major incidents.  Lately, he’s been blogging complete reports, such as this dramatic rescue.


Technorati Tags: blog, fire, technology