Last year we had a bicycle trip to Mangup that I covered with Google map routes, bells and whistles. This year we had the same trip but in a different company. Nonetheless, it wasn’t less interesting. I took less pictures as the nature of that region was already covered, but focused on the trip, the air and views.
See some interesting stuff in my Flickr photostream.
Dreams eventually come true and I finally converted to Macs. I still have my 5-year old HP Compaq nx9005 with Win XP and Ubuntu running to my side for various tasks (like verifying the web sites I work on in IE), but all my ongoing work and music experiments shifted to a great Macbook Pro MB134 from the Apple’s latest line.
APPLE MacBook Pro MB134, 15.4″, Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 (2x 2.5GHz), 2×1024MB, 250GB, DVD±RW DL, nVidia GeForce 8600Md GT 512MB, 15.4″ WXGA+ (1440×900), LED-TFT, DVI, Gigabit-LAN, WLAN, Bluetooth 2.0, FireWire 400, FireWire 800, 2xUSB2.0, ExpressCard, WebCam, OSX 10.5 “Leopard”
There’s not much to say other than that I, as all migrants, feel like a huge army of nurses taking care of me all the time; so smooth Leopard’s interface and laptop hardware are. All these Spaces, Dashboards, Expose, Stacks, iCals, Frontrows and others feel like from a future. Even Rails, Apache, and PHP5 are pre-installed!
Well, hooray!
Kate prepared a mind blending surprise for me today. When I got back from my streetball game a shiny new black iPod Nano 8Gb was sitting in its stylish leather jacket on my table. Ahhhhh. I love you my dear. She is full of surprises, isn’t she?
The screen of my first iPod Nano 1Gb was crashed half a year ago. I was walking out the house holding it in my jeans pocket and metal railings of the outside staircase served just right to make an iPod Shuffle out of my old nano friend. It played like that for a day or two, but then battery problems became obvious. Eventually it ended up on the book shelf. A sad story. Well, anyway…
The kind is dead. Long live the king!
Intriguing title, isn’t it? Heh, well, not so bad. Get your Wednesday morning smile with these two gorgeous findings.
First comes Photoshop Disasters with their way-too-many-arms evidence of what happens when you are photoshoping in an unstable drunk smashed state. But, wait, there’s more to it. Be sure to check the comments for additional fun; you deserve it.
And this one is for a desert. The Cockeyed.com Citizen explores the Lippencott “Gold Kit” offer (don’t miss the second page) inside-out and has incredible fun with it. These two pages gave me a huge smile (as it’s still early and I can’t laugh out loud without a danger to wake up Kate). It’s simply hilarious, don’t you find? This service would never work here on the eastern side of the pond, not to mention the trick itself. Opinions are welcome.
Enjoy your morning!
This week I stumbled across many interesting things, but here are the two most valuable for your Friday enjoyment.
Pretty and functional DHTML calendar for web applications. This one is the best I’ve seen so far. It’s used in some of my favorite web apps and I’m using it in my own projects. Easy styling, nice integration, ability to show date / time in one field and store the computer-digestible version in another, very quick start through lots of examples, PDF documentation.
And now the amazing has_finder Rails plug-in to convert many standard single-line finder methods into a nice declarative beauty. I’m just beginning to use it, and the Rails edge has already adopted it. Kosher, with no side-effects.
I’m thinking of making this kind of posts more frequent. It’s a nice reminder to me and a great source to those who value my advice.
We all make new year resolutions, and what’s tricky about it is that adding an item to the list often means becoming unhappier. How is that?
Well, the moment you start building the list you start hand-cuffing yourself. Every moment later you will be checking with your list to see if whatever you do at this very moment helps your goals or is it an awful “waste of time”. Even if it is a better thing to do, you will be sorry as it doesn’t help your own plans. Sticking to the plan is good, being flexible is better.
Enjoy the moment, be yourself!
Here’s some great inspirational read for you, entering this new 2008 year — 12 Ways to be More Free in 2007 by Pamela Slim. Yes, it’s a guide for the leaving year, but I reviewed it just now and can feel how right she is.
So enjoy your read, make the coming year better, and make it suite you best!
Currently I’m in the receiving mode and looking for projects to apply my skills and knowledge. If you have a project for or need any consulting / programing services from an open-minded and communicative guy with more than 10 years of programing and software design experience, please contact me via e-mail or IM, and we’ll see if we could work out a mutually beneficial agreement.
I’m especially interested in the areas below. However, if you have something else in mind, don’t hesitate and drop me a message. It won’t hurt.
Also, I work with a talented web / graphics designer. She is brilliant at what she does, and you can see it with your own eyes in her portfolio. If you need a site, a redesign, a logotype, a business card or anything else that looks, I’m sure Kate could lend you a hand of help. Let me know and we’ll arrange an introductory meeting.
To learn more about me and my experience you can check my LinkedIn profile or reach directly:
Whole last week we spent under the warm sun of Egypt: swam in the Red Sea, traveled a lot, socialized. What I would like to show you is our little photo-report — a Egypt set on Flickr. Almost every image is accompanied with the comment — a story, a history note or just an observation.
Kate and I hope you’ll like this little fraction of the journey and share our joy. Leave comments, ask questions, do amends to history notes.
Everyone is welcome!
P.S. Sheriff, Aladin, Amir, and Ibrahim — you, guys, are the best. We enjoyed your trips and greatly appreciate your help with tea issues. Hope to see you some day again! 
This question pops up every now and then, and every time I spend time mulling it over. The apparent reason that I come up with is that I use the blog as my personal notebook. Every time I find something interesting and non-trivial I confront a dilemma: to put it in my desktop jots keeper, or quickly put together a blog post.
Recently I decided to try something new with my blog and started publishing almost ever single finding that helped me or someone I personally know. The bad interpreter thing, rails exception handler, whatever else deserving a word goes directly to the pages of this site. No matter how small the finding is, if I feel the need to take a note, it wins the elections.
An added bonus of this approach is that I’m building a searchable database of tips and tricks that I personally can get back to no matter where I am.
Certainly, nothing new… Just to shed some light on what’s going on.
The default Rails framework seems not support the foreign keys in database migrations and that’s a big omission. You are bound to deal with raw SQL to add these or end up with complex (and often ugly) code to emulate them.
Recently I found a very nice plug-in that adds foreign keys functionality to the migration classes. The syntax looks native and doesn’t stand out prominently. It is also clever enough to recognize some basic intentions, like ‘user_id’ being a reference to the ‘users’ table etc.
Check their other rails works too. They look handy!
Aleksey Gureiev
I'm a Java and Ruby on Rails fan. Among my other interests are industrial photography and electronic music composing. In the mean time I build great web-sites and help AVAAZ to save Great Barrier Reef.
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