After upgrading to Ubuntu 8.10, Amazon’s MP3 widget does not work anymore. It asks for Flash 9.0.45 or higher, but Ubuntu 8.10 installs version 10. The conflict is that Adobe site offers a version older (for 8.04 LTS) than the one installed by Ubuntu 8.10 so Ubuntu 8.10 won’t install it.

Today when searching for a better editor for Ruby and Rails coding again, I found this excellent work by Tim Pope: rails.vim. It adds some really nice features to VIM, my favorite editor of all time. It’s as simple as vi but with more powerful features like color coding, code completion and file navigation.

I have installed the following plugins for vim:

1. minibufexpl.vim

2. matchit.vim

3. opsplorer.vim

4. project.vim

5. dbext.vim

6. fuzzyfinder.vim

7. fuzzyfinder_textmate.vim

8. rubycomplete.vim

9. vimballPlugin.vim

10. snippetsEmu.vim

11. rails.vim

12. vibrantink.vim

13. haml.vim

GitHub makes it really easy to contribute any changes you make to open source projects. SVN has a central control and repository, gaining committer right requires a lot of efforts upfront. Fortunately, GIT is distributed and it allows anyone to commit changes. If your change is good, likely others will pull the changes from you.

I think that we could apply GIT into corporate world for greater productivity gain. Properly structured and trained, developers in the corporate world can definitely be more productive. As more and more companies adopt agile methodologies in their software development, GIT and other tools widely used in the open source communities would help a lot.

I was trying to set up the internet connectivity via my BlackBerry the other day and couldn't get it to work. With this new offer, it's no longer needed as my BlackBerry has unlimited data plan. Way to go AT&T!

It took more than three hours to download and install the upgrade over the internet.

Ruby and Rails still work. Firefox works. Couldn’t find BBC radio stuff. Lost wireless connectivity (ndiswrapper) and network icon in the notification area. Working on to restore the wireless card and BBC stuffs.

Update:

Found Totem Player and click on the top right combo box to switch to BBC or YouTube plugin. It works great.

For the wireless card, I had to go to System/Administration/Hardware Drivers and download the Broadcom B43 Wireless Driver and activate it. It also needed a reboot after driver installation.

Many open source communities are moving to using GIT for source control and collaboration. It’s easy to set up your own GIT repository for yourself, but you will need to make it available on the net if you want to work with others. Here comes the GitHub.com. It offers free hosting for small public repository (100 MB disk space). For $50/month, you can have 3GB disk space to host your private and public repositories.

One of the nice feature is the forking. You can fork easily from another repository then make changes in your fork and notify others to pull from you once your change is completed.

GitHub.com uses SSH public key to allow you to push your local changes to the repository at github. You need to generate a SSH-key and save it in your .ssh folder and make sure to add it into SSH using ssh-add command.

I was checking Ubuntu.com every five minute on the latest 8.10. Now it’s out and I’m downloading at this moment to my laptop. Here’s the info to upgrade.

Some of the highlights on the desktop version:

1. 3G support for WiFi connectivity.
2. Install to/from a USB drive. Now you can carry your Ubuntu and data with you and use any computer to boot from a USB stick.
3. BBC content. I was trying to get BBC radio to work yesterday. The new feature should help!
4. Guest session.
5. Latest Gnome 2.25 Desktop.

Yesterday was the day that my new DSL service started. So I turned on the power on the DSL modem and noticed that DSL LED light was solid steady. Hooked up the network cable from the modem to my laptop then started Chrome, and I got an error saying “browser not supported”. Started IE browser and this time it worked. After signing up for account activation in the IE, boom, the internet connection started working!

Radiant default installation does not provide ways to manage the images. We can install an extension called PaperClipped, which manages assets and images with the Paperclip plugin. Here’re the more detailed steps to install it:

LinkedIn.com has introduced many third party applications into its professional social networking site.

Among the applications they are: Slideshare for presentation, Box.net for files, Huddle Workspaces for collorbation, Blog Link for linking to blogs, Tripit for showing trip info, etc.

I got this error many times after I tried “Huddle Workspaces”. This application is really slow and not ready for prime time!

After 5 years of using Road Runner and Comast, I switched to Windstresam Bundled Service with DSL and Phone. The trigger was a letter from Comcast about raising the high speed internet access fee again. When I called to discontinue the service, I was given an offer of $29.99/month for six-month. I declined it since I just wanted to take business elsewhere as protest.

If you’re existing Comcast customers, call their support to see if you can get that $29.99 deal.

Running PHP scripts in Nginx is easy.

You need to install the php5 with fastcgi support. If you like to compile from source, you need to include the configure options

--enable-fastcgi

and

--enable-force-cgi-redirect

.

Here’re the steps:

1. Run ”/usr/local/bin/php-cgi -b 127.0.0.1:9000”.

2. Configure Nginx to pass any calls to the php scripts to this port 9000.

A common error in configuration is mistakenly setting “fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /vaw/www/phpsite$fastcgi_script_name;”, which results the incorrect file path ”/var/www/phpsite/phpsite/xyz.php” and the dreadful “404 File Not Found” error for a request like “http://www.example.com/phpsite/xyz.php”.

I got this in the email from Amazon.

“We are excited to announce that Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is now Generally Available and includes a Service Level Agreement (SLA). AWS is also releasing a public beta of Amazon EC2 running Microsoft Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server.”

RAILS 2.2 RC1 is out!

New Features: i18n, thread safety, docs, etag/last-modified, JRuby/1.9 compatibility.

Before craigslist started charging $25 in Houston, there were lots of job postings in software/qa/db board. Many of those postings were from some local training shops that provided SAP etc. trainings like familiar weekend pyramid scheme seen on the infomercial on TV. Just to good to be true. I’m glad that those fake postings are fading away:-).

With the new 32 GB compact flash memory card appearing on the market, the 8GB and 16GB cards are getting cheaper and cheaper. I’m still using 2GB and 4GB cards, but feel that it’s time to buy some 8GB and maybe 16GB cards for shoots.

Adobe released its new LightRoom 2.0 for digital photo management and post processing earlier this year. One of new features is the Adjustment Brush. I was trying it on a Dell Laptop E1505 with 2GB memory, the performance was unbearably slow rendering the feature useless, IMO.

There’s a fix 2.1 RC1 available for download at Adobe’site but it’s not fast enough to use the feature either.

We’re moving to using Nginx as our main web server and Thin as backend to run Rails.

Here’re the steps to install Nginx and Thin in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS.

Sony’s first entry into the full frame DSLR: A-900. Highlights: 24.6MP, Full Frame, 100% coverage View Finder, 5 FPS, DSO, SteadyShot (In-camera image stabilization), etc.

It’s an awesome camera. The highlights are: high ISO performance, HD Movie, Live View, Full Frame, 21MP and water resistence up to 10 mm rain in 3 minutes.

LinkedIn.com has recently added forum discussion to groups. The forum has added some dynamics and interactions into the professional social networking site. Other applications include Search on People/Job and Q/A. One of potential killer applications, I think,

I’m getting an ASUS EEE PC 1000H 160GB notebook. I was thinking of 40GB SSD (Solid-State-Drive) with Linux but changed my mind after reading some negative reviews: 40GB SSD was really a 8GB + 32GB in two SD chips and the 2nd SD was slow.

If you like Ruby, now you can write JavaScript in a more Ruby-like way, thanks to JS.Class.