Working With Rails

News flash: fast food is bad for you

Alexandre Martins’ Blog » Measuring test effort.

A Self-Discovery of the Process of Discovery

Maintaining an SVN repository after moving to Git

Ruby Ranges

SQL Server Float Dates in Ruby

Twitter flashes a bit of redesign skin

Trouble Starting Gitnub? (doesn't open)

You can open console.app and check the logs — in my case it said:

no such file to load — open4 (LoadError)

Upon checking my installed gems — open4 (0.9.6) was installed.  Hrm.  Checked around and apparently GitNub attempts to use the default OS X ruby install.  Odd considering most rubyists I know usually gut the default Ruby install and just use MacPorts.  Anyway — Found that you can run the following to aleviate the issue:

`sudo /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/gem install open4`

Default OS X Ruby will now have the open4 gem and GitNub will be happy.

Endorse No One!

Amazing Stat: California Uses More Gas than China | Wired Science from Wired.com

touchcode - Google Code [del.icio.us]

2+2 = 5

Se tem uma coisa que me irrita, é quando as pessoas dão nomes as coisas de uma forma não condizente.

Por exemplo, trabalhando com o Plone e categorização de objetos. Você já imagina que para procurar objetos por categorias você irá esbarrar em categories, category, até um possível tag. Mas dentro do Plone, você busca por Subject.

Mas em um outro caso, é o Plone que me salva. Se você vai adicionar uma informação geográfica a um objeto, você logo pensa em location. Ao menos é o que a tela de edição do Plone mostra. E é o que o Dublin Core chama de coverage.

Vocês podem achar que eu estou sendo excessivamente chato com isso, mas lembre-se que você sempre terá de gastar alguns segundos para associar a palavra ao seu significado específico dentro daquele contexto onde ela tem um significado alienígena

Brasigo no Ar!

Note to Corante - "What's in a (blog) name?"

When I first read the following blog title - 'World Health Care Blog'

I thought - 'World Health Care' - now this sounds really interesting.

I looked again at the label.

I looked at the tin.

I'm sorry, but from the top-down this blog proved a disappointment.

It's not that I was expecting a paper on world health care models or frameworks.

Don't get me wrong the business (economic, industry) world of health care is essential (reading) for those who want to stride - not step - from today into the future. Health care has been commodified for ages, for all ages. To be fair the 'subtitle' and 'about' statement makes the focus of the blog very clear. From the bottom-up there is clearly content to satisfy the ardent business-info-addict with posts and contributions from leading players.

Maybe it's me and my digital preoccupation has regressed to hairs; but this title IS imho very misleading. How so? Well from the perspective of world health care business-industry insiders all seems well with the-ir world. Meanwhile, non-'business' visitors like this one, may spend their visit exercising ruined expectations. (If the target audience is specific then somebody had better go sort the stage and the sights: there's still a debate to had.)

<o:p> </o:p>

'Stuck' (and essentially 'skint') as I am here in I can't exactly throw stones. Hodges' model is a small - very tasty - fruit (when ripe!) with four (or five) kernels possessed of global - world health aspirations. We need global conceptual frameworks for health and social care and education.

<o:p> </o:p>

Browsing the 'World health Care Blog' and searching for 'world health' revealed posts totally unrelated to what many people would consider the real issues surrounding 'world health'. There are posts on global health funding and global health program, India, Mexico, Thailand.

At the time of writing 'World Health Care' is not even listed as a category. Try 'poverty'...?

Perhaps 'world health' is implied in the content, but is this sufficient given the title?

<o:p> </o:p>

Noting the sponsor perhaps there's a risk of confusing or conflating the sponsor 'World Health Care - Congress' with 'World Health Care'?

The World Health Care Blog is not listed on the main Corante site, so perhaps this blog is off the beaten track?

All this makes we wonder about Google-SEO ranking and semantic web weighting? [Actually, where does (will) the weight of blog, website, and Web 2.0-3.0 application purposes and titles feature on the semantic web?]

<o:p> </o:p>

'Corante' may have been the world's first English language newspaper, but *global health care* comprises a multitude of languages that must be given a voice. Especially as many of those languages are threatened species (including Danish).

There is an interesting brief video clip by Dr Anil Kumar (Well said Sir!)

<o:p> </o:p>

I realise of course that many contributors and agencies at the World Health Care Blog and Congress will be greatly involved in major world-wide humanitarian and philanthropic projects. The concern is one of impressions.... Reflecting on the meaning of 'world health' and the inclusion of these term(s) might pay great dividends in terms of publicity, balance, governance, corporate and social responsibility.

<o:p> </o:p>

<o:p> </o:p>

So, come on Corante if you - as blog managers - insist on this title, on this stage then pick up the theme of 'World Health Care' holistically - you know you want to.... since after all

<o:p> </o:p>

Corante = Enactor

'To act (something) out, as on a stage: enacted the part of the parent.' http://www.answers.com/enactor&r=67

<o:p> </o:p>

Lead the way...

Kept silent for a week...

Last week (July 7-13) was basically hell on Earth, for me and for the group that somehow got the name Cabras locas, of which I am part since I joined the National Pedagogical University, where I worked full-time 2003-2005.
It was, yes, the first of my officially three weeks of Summer holiday at IIEc-UNAM, so no problems here. So, why hell on Earth? Because we were in charge basically of anything related with information flow, retrieval and manipulation at the 11th International Congress on Mathematical Education, in Monterrey.
What we thought would basically be one or two days of hard work followed by six days of relaxed vacations (we had even planned to have an internal seminar, showing off the shiny stuff each of us is working on) became... A mind-boggling eight day experience where we worked over 12 hours a day on being human replacements for Google, SQL engines, full-text parsers, report generators, printer watchdogs, and in general lines, just a bunch of unhappy firemen, ready to be called off for whatever task was necessary.
We did have, of course, several calm periods every now and then. We even had to learn how to look busy while doing something compeltely unrelated (that would explain, for example, a couple of low-hanging bugs I fixed for Debian, or some dozens of lines of code I could get off my head).
But my advice for whoever reads this: Don't trust people with long database-handling experience. Specially when they insist that hand-capturing a thousand registers is preferrable (i.e. less error-prone) than parsing three separate databases and discarding duplicates. And, of course, specially when this person is your boss, which is enough of an argument to have it his way.

Baby Borrowers: NBC’s Reality TV At It’s Lowest

Voicemail

Marvel vs. DC Films

Kosher Fail « FAIL Blog: Pictures and Videos of Owned, Pwnd and Fail Moments

iPhone App Review - Travelocity

Welcome to the world, Sam!

Twitter.com, Slightly Broken?

On Twitter.com (while logged in) it seems the layout is broken. I wonder whats causing it. Twitter just can’t seem to catch a break, can they?! Go check it out while its still not fixed.

"I just want to type ‘pussy’ so bad!"

Vuvox has been acquired by eBay

What does the word "Quality" mean?

Quality is the antonym of “defective,” with the addition of time. Meaning, it has few known defects in its current state, we have high confidence that we will not discover defects in its current state over time, and additionally that we will not create further defects in it as we add to or alter its functionality in the normal course of maintaining this software.

RE: RE: использование SQL функций

Artists Forced to Explain Modern Art, Critics Complain @Eyebeam reBlog

I’m simply not convinced explanation or content gets in the way of art — though I will agree that there is no replacement for its experience.

SIGSTOP

kill -SIGSTOP 29273

kill -SIGCONT 29273

fg

Relaunching TimeCert a trusted third party time stamping service

I launched TimeCert a few years ago and haven’t given it much love since. Now I’m pleased to announce the official relaunch of it.

TimeCert is a really tiny and light web application that does one thing and does it well. It records and presents the time it first saw something. If you look at the bottom of this post you can see a small TimeCert iframe which tells you the first time timecert saw this article.

The main application of this is really for intellectual property protection. But there are also various other applications. Lets say you’ve been blogging about an idea for a while and all of a sudden someone hits you with a Patent Infringement Suit. You know it could happen. Well TimeCert provides evidence as a trusted third party that you actually wrote your blog posts when you did.

One thing to remember though is that TimeCert can’t back date any existing content. It only knows the first time it was presented with the data.

API

The API is so simple that it’s not even funny. First of all you need to create a SHA1 hex digest of the data you want timestamped. This is easy in most languages. In Ruby it’s:

require 'digest/sha1'
@digest=Digest::SHA1.hexdigest @your_data

Just perform a HTTP GET to TimeCert to one of the urls below changing DIGEST to the digest you created above:

• http://timecert.org/DIGEST for end user link
• http://timecert.org/DIGEST for use in an iframe
• http://timecert.org/DIGEST.time for a plain text file with ini style parameters
• http://timecert.org/DIGEST.ini for a plain text file with ini style parameters
• http://timecert.org/DIGEST.xml for xml
• http://timecert.org/DIGEST.yml for yaml
• http://timecert.org/DIGEST.yml for json

The easiest way to use it in a web application is to embed an iframe in your page like I’ve done here:

<iframe src="http://timecert.org/a94a8fe5ccb19ba61c4c0873d391e987982fbbd3.iframe" width="450px" height="30px"></iframe>

This saves you from manually doing a TimeCert request as the timestamp is created on the TimeCert server when the page is displayed the first time.

Best practices in Rails

To do this from Rails first create a digest method on your model:

  def digest
    Digest::SHA1.hexdigest("#{title}\n#{body}\n#{extended}")
  end

Note this is from my blog, I’ve decided that the important content in a blog article is title, body and extended. I’m also using the raw textile data to create this. This is the safest as an update to a textile library could change the digest completely and thus create a newer timestamp.

You could also create a separate digest column and updated it an before_save. I’ll leave that task as an exercise to the reader.

Next create a helper method:

  def timecert_link(article)
    "<div class=\"timecert\"><iframe src=\"http://timecert.org/#{article.digest}.iframe\" width=\"450px\" height=\"30px\"></iframe></div>" 
  end

Now you can just include it in your views like this:

<%=timecert_link(article)%>

It would be great if someone with PHP/Python experience could create a similar example. I would expect it to be extremely simple to create a WordPress plugin to do this automatically, if someone is up to the challenge.

Open Source

This is not really a money making operation, it’s just a service that I feel is important to have. Therefore I’ve open sourced it and you can find it on GitHub. I think this is an important part of being trusted. This allows anyone with ruby knowledge to verify that I’m not doing anything strange. It also opens it up to potential competitors, which I’m absolutely cool about.

TimeCert is written in Ruby using Merb and DataMapper.

Share your confidential code safely with a Source Code Confidentiality Agreement on our free web service Agree2

https://www.cinemark.com/buy_ticket.asp?theater_id=260&movie_id=screens=4,movieid1=40144,movieid2=40145,movieid3=40146,movieid4=40147&show_date=7/17/2008&show_time=12:10AM&mix=0&conc=0&kiosk=1&imax=0&wireless=0&theater_name=Cinemark+Tinseltown&addr1=4535+

iPhone App Review -Trip Advisor 's Local Picks

That’s How I Roll!

We’re added some iCal views to BBC Programmes

My Eyes..

RE: использование SQL функций

Study Hacks » Blog Archive » Bonus Post: How the World's Most Famous Computer Scientist Checks E-mail Only Once Every Three Months

2008년 7월 18일

• 정대세의 말에 일본 네티즌이 열받았다는데 독도가 일본땅이라고 주장하는 일본의 근거가 뭔지 궁금하다. (일본 사람들도 미친거 아니면 근거가 있으니 저러는 걸테지. 아니면 미친건가?)2008-07-17 09:18:11

이 글은 꽃띠앙님의 2008년 7월 17일의 미투데이 내용입니다.

Brasigo, agora a festa vai começar!

RubyFringe Guide: Active Surplus, a.k.a. Hardware Nerdvana

Versions - SVN Client

Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog [del.icio.us]

Último dia da oficina de Javascript e Ajax

A Thinking Man's Sphinx

Social Media for Goverment 2008 - Recap

most of the .ME's were registered within the first few minutes [del.icio.us]

pdf

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=out.pdf *.pdf

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -dFirstPage=m -dLastPage=n -sOutputFile=out.pdf in.pdf

How To Make A Usb Popcorn Maker

awful bug

315   buf->base = malloc(sizeof(4*1024));
316   buf->len = 4*1024;