Ruby

I’m currently counting down to one of the most important events in my life. Most of my friends by now know what I’m talking about. But I always forgot to update my Skype mood message - that’s where my friend circle counts days nowadays. The following 8-line Ruby script takes the problem away from me. #!/usr/bin/env ruby deadline = Time.local(2007, 01, 20, 22, 05) seconds = deadline - Time.new days = (seconds / 60 / 60 / 24 * 1000).round / 1000.0 cmdline = "osascript " + "-e 'tell application \"Skype\"' " + "-e 'send command \"SET PROFILE MOOD_TEXT " + days.to_s + " days left\" script name \"Countdown\"' " + "-e 'end tell'" `#{cmdline}` Save that and put the following into your crontab (accessible with crontab -e on the command line): ...

I’m quite picky about my photo management. The thing I’m most picky about is my folder structure as I want to be able to live independent of a single photo management application. So far iPhoto did not allow me to keep my own structure and still use it. But that became possible with version 6 of iPhoto and as it came pre-installed on my MacBook Pro I’m now using it. Today I spent a short while to get it nicely integrated into my workflow. Without my strict folder naming requirements I could just set iPhoto to download my photos automatically and import them whenever I connect my camera. To move them into my own structure it’s a little bit more work - but not much. ...

This morning in the train I finally came around to fix a few issues with list.blogug.ch that had prevented a release for a while. The big change: search is now fast! the search uses a Ferret index with the acts_as_ferret module. Ferret is basically the Ruby version of Lucene. And the URLs are normalized when a new entry is added. This should leave us with far fewer duplicates than we now have. I find most of the duplicates when checking the new submissions but it still was an annoyance. ...

Die folgende Story ist zwar bereits ein wenig her, aber immer noch interessant. Nach dem Wirbelsturm welcher New Orleans versenkte, stiegen die Benzinpreise offenbar ziemlich hoch. Da ich kein Auto fahre bin ich davon nicht persönlich betroffen. Deshalb habe ich keine Ahnung, wie teuer Benzin normalerweise ist und habe darum noch das “offenbar” eingefügt. In dem Zusammenhang habe ich eine auf den ersten Blick witzige Story gelesen: einige Tankstellen konnten den Preis nicht auf die über drei Dollars pro Fass hochschrauben. Ihre Zapfsäulen waren zu alt dafür. ...