Musings

Scripting Screencasts Castanaut is a DSL and library to script ScreenCasts in Ruby. Nifty! while_saying "To install it, drag it to your bookmarks bar." do move to_element("a.button") drag to(88, 106) pause 0.5 hit Enter end Scripting the Shell What if you could use Ruby instead of the shell? You can local_dir = Rush::Box.new('localhost')['/Users/adam/server_logs/'].create servers = %w(www1 www2 www3).map { |n| Rush::Box.new(n) } servers.each { |s| s['/var/log/nginx/access.log'].copy_to local_dir["#{s.host}_access.log"] } Rush - the Ruby shell ...

Opera Kestrel Mac Blog Opera used to be my favourite Web browser. That is until they started Kestrel (9.5) alphas. A lot of crashing… The advent of the new Opera Mac Blog also marks a new release… I have been using Firefox 3.0 beta 3 for some time now and actually have started to like it (unlike the old versions, that I generally hate) Family My father would have turned 98 today. Happy birthday. Tobias cried in your memory yesterday. ...

Free Memory I have too many applications open all the time, and only 2 GB of memory. The memory management of OSX just doesn’t seem to be able to handle this, without regular reboots. iFreeMem seems to be the solution. Downloaded trial today, let’s see, how good it it. Current status: Arwen:files jcf$ uptime 8:26 up 4 days, 23:59, 8 users, load averages: 0,41 0,70 0,76 Twittery iPhone Have your iPhone twitter its current location every now and then, in case it’s stolen (or you want to track someone?). iPhone LoJack does this for you. ...

Today we launched a new website for one of our customers: Zollinger-Samen.ch. Zollinger Samen is a family owned business, that cultivates more than 200 plants (vegetables, flowers, herbs) and sells the seeds. They have operated over 20 years and have been pushed into the internet age by their sons. The website was built with Rails and and a heavily extended Radiant for the catalogue and the shop. The wonderful design was inspired by the 20 year long history of printed catalogs and implemented by HTML and CSS wrangler Keith Bingman. We spent a wonderful time working with Zollingers on transferring catalogue and brand from print to the web. Personally, this was one of the most rewarding projects to work on, because I believe that the work Zollingers are doing on keeping genetic diversity up and cultivating the old, non-hybrid plants is very important. I have trouble with seeds that will not reproduce, so that they have to be bought again and again. ...

meta note: I sure hope this isn’t turning into a regular feature I got the news from a friend this morning. Viviane, my girlfriend before I met and married my wife, decided to end her life yesterday. We spent a bit more than a year together, including a wonderful 4 week vacation in the US and Hawaii (including a very memorable hike to Hipuapua Falls with no guide, the sunset in Grand Canyon, Mr. Gottschalks Restaurant in Flagstaff, Vegas, Monument Valley) and many weekends in her families house in Brissago. ...

Today at 12:35, Florians Brain Tumor finally took his life. Florian died in his sleep. I am so sad that he has left us. In September 2006 I visited him in hospital and left very thoughtful. That day I said I’d write a book, if I knew I only had a year left to live. I actually do hope, I have a bit more time, but it turns out, I got my chance. All going well, my book on Rails development “Ruby on Rails in der Praxis” will be published in January 2008. ...