linux audio editors

An overview of linux audio editors.

food pairing

Food Pairing is an interesting site that lets you create recipes by pairing foods that might not usually be thought of going together.

polar bear attack

google

An article about the Google business model, and if it can be applied to other companies.

heart

Everyone would probably agree that feelings of appreciation and gratitude are positive states, but did you know that they also have a profound effect on your physical body? Both of these states, as well as those of compassion, forgiveness, happiness, non-judgment, patience, sincerity and caring are all heart-centered feelings, which immediately affect your heart rhythm. The heartbeat becomes more synchronized and coherent, which improves hormonal balance and immune system response.
The heart has its own independent nervous system, referred to as ?the brain in the heart,? say Doc Childre and Howard M artin in their book, The Heart Math Solution. There are at least forty thousand neurons in the heart-as many as are found in various sub-cortical centers of the brain. Childre and Martin go on to say that, the heart's electromagnetic field is by far the most powerful produced by the body; it's approximately five thousand times greater in strength that the field produced by the brain. The heart's field not only permeates every cell in the body, but also radiates outside of us; it can be measured up to eight to ten feet away with sensitive detectors called magnetometers.
(Scott Beebe) - www.energeticawakening.com

karma

There is no good and no evil. In every
concrete situation there is only the
necessary and the unnecessary. The
needful is right, the needless is wrong.
The situation decides.
Every situation is a challenge which
demands the right response. When the
response is right, the challenge is met
and the problem ceases. If the response
is wrong, the challenge is not met and
the problem remains unsolved. Your
unsolved problems - that is what
constitutes your karma. Solve them
rightly and be free.

- Nisargadatta Maharaj
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `

"I Am That"
Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
The Acorn Press, 1973

cor

earthrise

orrey

I love orreys.

beautiful forms

Another great css-tricks article about how to create great web forms.

rails

Again Rails has proven the old adage:

"Those who do not know history are doomed to reimplement it, badly"

They thought they were being so tricky with gems, but now we see the problems, there is something totally hosed at gems.rubyonrails.org, and it refuses to install Rails 1.2.6 for me. No thank you, I don't want to use Rails 1.99 beta for my production code, thank you.

Thus concludes my rant for this evening.

css sprites

CSS Sprites - I had heard about them but never understood, and this article has a great description of them. They are one huge image that you load just once that contains a whole bunch of smaller images that you move to where you need it. Can provide big speedups for users.

money plugin

The Money Plugin for Ruby looks neat, but a bit big for what I need.

What is important though is to never use Floats for currency in Ruby, always use BigDecimals instead.

beautiful html

What beautiful HTML code looks like. Great article.

csstricks

css-tricks is a neat site that talks about CSS.

planetwaves

An excellent planetwaves horoscope for me for November 2007:

Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 19)
There is a dialog that needs to happen, and you seem to be holding back. You seem to have grievances, or grief, that is troubling you, and you would go a long way toward resolving it both inwardly and outwardly if you initiate the discussion that you want so badly. The problem is that it may seem nobody is listening -- but that will not be true for long. People are listening and you need to both notice that they are doing so, and take advantage of that fact. Then, basically, you need to take a chance on love. Not romance; actual love, and passion, and on the simple truth that the future is different than the past as long as we make it so.


It's true, someone did listen. Thank you.

frugality

Wikipedia definition of frugality: "The acquiring of and resourceful use of economic goods and services in order to achieve lasting and more fulfilling goals."

billionaires spend less

A very interesting article about how some billionaires are very frugal.

This last two years of working for myself I've made a fraction of what I was making working for other people, and I'm also the happiest I've ever been. I love living frugally now, and find it so freeing to not be in debt. The easiest way to have money is just not to spend it. It's hard to believe it took me so long to learn, it's so simple, but very hard to do in this society where we are under huge marketing and advertising pressure by people who want us to buy things. Resist this urge, my friends, you don't need all that stuff they're selling, you'll be happier living more simply.

Unconventional Dance Moves

linux desktop apps

Linux App Finder is a really neat site that tells you all the Linux applications out there that do things that you normally do in Windows. Very neat.

facebook

Here I thought I was doing so well on facebook, with over 100 friends, and then an old friend added me, and he has over 600 friends. Dear me, that's a lot of friends!

aim high

Continually aim just beyond your current range. Good advice.

prototype

How well do you know Prototype, parts one and two.

jquery

How jQuery works. I've invested a lot of time in Prototype.js, but jQuery sure looks sweet, quite a few big wins over prototype.js.

ruby ec2

Managing your EC2 instances with Ruby.

sortable list

A very neat plugin sortable_list that lets you sort your lists easily. I've had to do this by hand quite a bit, I'll have to check this plugin out.

Integration Testing

Some more integration testing links:

How to learn Integration Testing
clarkware integration testing
mike clark integration testing
new for rails 1.1 integration tests
rails 1.1 integration tests by jamis buck
Integration Testing at Wikipedia

dawn Landes - Young Folks (bluegrass style)

integration testing

Wow, I'm a total convert to Integration Testing in Ruby on Rails now. It's so powerful and very cool. I've been unit testing for about a year now, but just graduated to functional and integration testing, and it's amazing, especially integration testing, which simulates a person with a web-browser interacting with your application.

controller actions

Firing Rails controller actions from the console .

assert_select

trawlr.com has a good writeup about assert_select with nice descriptions of some more complicated situations.

who am i?

bhairavi 631 [~] % whoami
sness

I think I might patch "whoami" to output from time to time:

bhairavi 632 [~] % whoami
you are a incandesent manifestion of the infinite universe

Cover: The Lakes of Canada

dropdown menus

clubcard.ca has neat dropdown menus.

How to love and heal others as your larger self- Siddhanath

grooving

I'm really grooving on somptin hapnin by Adham Shaikh. Mmmm.

iridescent

Vitalic

VITALIC - My Friend Dario (Different Recordings)

Orchive

I'm also using the excellent Yahoo Grids CSS for doing the layout. Wow, after so long of doing all that CSS layout by hand, using YUI Grids/Fonts/Reset CSS is just so much better.

They solve so many problems for you, problems most of us don't even know exist, and I for one am using YUI CSS in all my new projects.

orchive

I'm designing the website for Orchive, an archive of 20,000 hours of Orca song. Here's some of the resources I'm using:

CSS Beauty
CSS Website
CSS Drive
CSS Gallery
Orca Live
Orca Lab

belly dancing

A friend was teaching me some belly dancing moves a couple nights ago.

"Wait", you say. "Belly dancing for men?".

"Well yes, of course.", I say. "It's quite traditional. The trick is that you have to act like a fierce LION!"

Belly Dancing for Men
Masculine Belly Dance
Belly Dancing Resources

I really enjoyed learning some belly dancing moves, and found that there was quite a bit in common with Yoga. I love the body control and independant body part movement, which also reminds me of drumming.

Neato! A new hobby for sness!

dartagnan

Mmmm, D'Artagnan food supplier. Saw it on the ReMARKable podcast.

wisteria

wisteria is a lightweight MVC framework for building fast APIs with Ruby, nicely suited for REST APIs.

acts_as_trashable

acts_as_trashable looks like a neat plugin for doing undo in Rails applications

mime and http response codes

mime-types

HTTP status codes

testing rails

Some good articles about testing in Ruby on Rails applications:

Integration Tests at clarkware.com
Rails Integration Testing
Integration test file uploads - This didn't actually work for me, but YMMV.
multipart_post - This one did work for me for uploading files in Integration tests, and integration_test_file_upload.rb is the file you install in RAILS_HOME/lib
Integration Testing by Jamis Buck, excellent article.

gems.rubyonrails.org

I was having all this trouble updating ActionMailer tonight, and couldn't figure out why. It turns out that the main http://gems.rubyonrails.org is down! That's just crazy!

sigur ros

I never could get into Sigur Ros, but then I just got I-Gaer from one of my many podcast streams (I'm not even sure which one), and I am blown away!

barcelona food girl

My friend Anna is in Spain and her blog Barcelona Food Girl is a complete pleasure to read. Food Rapture!

definr 2

And definr is written in Ruby on Rails! That's so cool how fast they made it run!

definr

definr is a super crazy fast new online dictionary. how can they be so fast!

geek meditation

meditation 2.0

orca

A friend told me about the book Listening to Whales: What the Orcas Have Taught Us by Alexandra Morton, I've got to read this book!

web design

A great article at A List Apart about Web Design. They make the excellent point that Web Design is not Print Design, Illustration, Poster Design.

A quote:

"Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity."

th wizard uv time

postmod

Postmodern programming is writing software using as much existing software as possible.

lisp

chapter 1 and chapter 2 of ANSI Common Lisp.

vi

vi gang sign:



is also 'the shocker'. ah, you poor vi kids.

lighthouse

sts

blokus

I just played my first games of Blokus last night. A very interesting game where you have pieces shaped like all the Pentominos and 4,3,2 and 1 inos, and you have to try to put down all your pieces. Your pieces can only touch by their corners.

Lots of interesting strategy in this game.

It's very interesting with multiple players, because you can quite effectively gang up on other players to make sure they don't win, which limits the search space for the remaining players.

Excellent learning and strategy game that has lots of deep math in it.

consulting service ad

I just was reading one of my Ruby on Rails server extension errors, and the first advertisement on my gmail account was for Ruby on Rails programmers. Second was for EC2.

Now, that's the totally best place for small consulting companies to get contracts. You can just put up as many of the ads as you need for new contracts, then bring down the ads.

testing

Program testing is not to prove correctness. Yes, totally, testing is just there to help us program, not to prove correctness.

degenerative web page

degenerative is an interesting art project where the characters in a web page are randomly changed after each visit.

paul rand

fb

An excellent article on Bokardo Social Design about how Facebook is brilliant but evil. I heartily agree. I will now be careful to only browse Facebook through a browser where I only do Facebook from now on.

svn merge

Go back in time with "svn merge"

svn merge -r 30:31 file.txt 

riot prrl

lisp/perl

From the mighty mighty xkcd

earthrise

New picture of earthrise from Japan's Kaguya spacecraft.

moonbow

Moonbow

pasta al forno con asparagi

pasta al forno con asparagi

(Baked Pasta with Asparagus)

From "The Top One Hundred Pasta Sauces" by Diane Seed

400g Penne or other short pasta
1kg asparagus
1 stick butter
a little chicken stock
salt and black pepper (freshly ground, of course)
1 1/2 cups ricotta or similar curd cheese
1 tbsp olive oil
1 1/4 cups freshly grated Parmesan cheese
3 eggs

Wash the asparagus, remove any tough stalks and cut into short lenghts.

Melt 3 tbsp butter in a pan and cook the asparagus over a low heat for about 20 minutes. Every so often, add a little stock to keep moist. When the asparagus is cooked, season to taste.

While the asparagus is cooking, process the ricotta cheese with the oil. Cook the pasta for half the time stated on the packet. Drain and immediately toss in the remaining butter and half the freshly grated cheese.

Butter a deep oven dish. Make a thin layer of pasta, then one of asparagus, then one of pasta again and then one of ricotta. Repeat, finishing with a layer of pasta.

Beat together the eggs and the remaining cheese and pour over the top. Sprinkle with black pepper. Bake in a medium oven, 350F, for 20 minutes.

page breaks

How to put page breaks in HTML print documents (For work I'm doing on the sunshineorganics.ca page:

page-break-before: always

And from htmlgoodies
always tells the browser to break the print page after this element always.

auto is the default. You're telling the browser to do what it would do anyway: Page break where the page ends.

left is not supported by any browser yet. It is used if your printer will print both sides of a page, like a manuscript. If the page is a left-facing page, use this attribute.

right is what you use if it's a right-facing page.


And an interesting, if scary one automatically print a web page in Javascript with:

window.print()

nina

Roses for Nina.

books

In the topsy-turvy world of publishing, books remain a fundamental source of information for developers at Dr. Dobbs journal.

I have found that I really need the physical book to effectively absorb certain kinds of information, and learning computer languages is definitely one of those. I bought the Agile Web Programming with Rails book as a PDF (twice), the pickaxe Ruby book, Rails Recipes and a bunch others. I learned lots from them, and used them as a daily reference for over a year.

Then, I finally broke down and got the books, and I'm amazed at how much more I get out of the paper book. I think one of the big things is that I can chill out on the couch and just slowly peruse it, without all the energy and distractions of the computer. But in any case, I just love paper books, and I would like you to try out that experiment as well, try absorbing a book as a PDF, and then get the paper version.

If you buy your books at Pragmatic Programmers, they give you a great deal on a PDF/Book combo and they're really nice people too.

puf

puf - Parallel URL fetcher

m

(chaotic): Level 17 HP 75(75) AC -3, meditating.

iq

An online IQ Test. Interesting.

titan

Neat random sness fact:

Titan, the biggest moon of Saturn, has an atmosphere so dense and a gravity so low that if you strapped wings onto your arms, you could fly.

That rocks.

From Astronomy Cast, an awesome podcast about space.

love poem for geeks

roses are #ff0000
violets are #0000ff
all my base
are belong to you

17P Holmes

gossamer

The gossamer rings of Jupiter.

khoi

How to design webpages like Khoi Vinh with Grid Elements.

hover menu

I'm getting a little tired of the same CSS hover menu that I always use, so for Manzanita Restaurant, I'm going to try dynamicdrive CSS menus.

scripteka

scripteka is a set of extensions for Prototype.js.

rspec

rspec impressions from RubyConf.

I love BDD, but found that RSpec changed too often, and it doesn't integrate well with test::unit. Instead, I use test/spec, which I find works awesome for me.

olpc enters production

Sweet! The OLPC has just entered mass production!

wine objectivity

A very interesting article about objectivity and wine tasting.

gmail macros

The new version of gmail macros. I used to use gmail macros, but now with the new version of Gmail, I think they just about got all the keys I use regularly.

buddhist rpg

hmm

if this works, i'll be surprised.

17p holmes

ramen radar

Ramen Radar is a Sony gadget that lets you find the closest Ramen noodle bar to your location. I had a japanese girlfriend whose brother was totally into Ramen, this device would make him very happy.

Leonard Orr Breathing

realtime kernel

I've been using the Real Time kernel patches for Linux with CCRMA for a month now, so that I can record music on my Linux computer. Interestingly, I've noticed that it has slightly degraded interactive performance, so for normal work I've switched back to the normal kernel (Fedora 7), and see quite a speedup. I wonder why this is?

acts_as_stripped

I tend to forget to add the "h" tag to fields in Rails that need to be HTML stripped, and the acts_as_stripped plugin looks like an interesting solution.

turn off beep

turn off the annonying beep in X Windows.

super mario galaxy

A really nice interview with the developers of Super Mario Galaxy

vol1.
vol2.
vol3.

aurora

polar bear playing with sled dogs

new song

I just made another song tonight, comet-holmes-17p. Check it out!

I was just outside watching the comet way high overhead, and came back inside to record a little song with my two doumbeks and a little spoken word, highly distorted over it.

If you like it, please let me know. :)

century of the self