Author Archives: jjolma

New Wordpress Theme

I got tired of the old theme on this blog. So, rather than write an interesting post I upgraded my version of Wordpress and added a new theme: Typographic. I like how it’s simple: monochromatic, no images, etc.

Animoto is dependant on Google

Google (apps, search, analytics, etc.) was down for an hour, and this hosed us. We use Google Apps for email and chat, which was only a minor nuisance. But we use Google Analytics, and its outage cause all of our pages to time out. Yikes.

back up

My hosting service screwed up a data migration and I didn’t notice until recently. Well, it’s fixed.

Bit by a Monkey

Bad Monkey Patch.
A gem we are trying out (Blackbook) decided to override a common string method:

class String
alias :blank? :empty?
end

Um, this method is used everywhere in rails and has a much different definition:

class String #:nodoc:
def blank?
self !~ /\S/
end
end

Bad monkey

Installing giternal

I read great things about giternal here.
I ran into problems trying to install it based on the README, though. I installed the gem from RubyForge but wasn’t able to find the giternal executable. And trying to run the sake tasks gave errors like:
/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/RubyInline-3.6.7/lib/inline.rb:732:in `initialize’: Permission denied – /Users/jolma/.ruby_inline/Inline_ParseTree_fa12.c (Errno::EACCES)

and

undefined local variable or [...]

Awful UI of the day: Paypal

Here is Paypal’s transaction search. It would be nice if I could see the full year.

How to nap

Anyone who knows me is aware of my love of naps. But how does one nap well?

Full article here.

Error Message of the Day

Courtesy of MS Office.

Inbox Zero

There are few things in life more satisfying than empty inboxes, my big accomplishment this weekend.
Merlin Mann gave a great talk on this at Google: http://www.43folders.com/izero#video

What should I build?

I’m bored. What app should I build this weekend? It can be a standalone web app or a Facebook app. And I only want to put in a day.
Ideas?