The MIT Media Lab has launched a new research initiative to develop a $100 laptopa technology that could revolutionize how we educate the world’s children. To achieve this goal, a new, non-profit association, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), has been created. The initiative was first announced by Nicholas Negroponte, Lab chairman and co-founder, at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland in January 2005.

This rugged laptop will be WiFi-enabled and have USB ports galore. Its current specifications are: 500MHz, 1GB, 1 Megapixel.

laptop.media.mit.edu/laptop-images.html

I was looking for the rails offline documentation. In the end I did run rake over the latest rails code, but hey, I could have saved a bit of time. Maybe one day I should start to RTFM.

Download.

Synopsis: Imagine that you meet a very old man who—you eventually realize—knows literally everything. Imagine that he explains for you the great mysteries of life—quantum physics, evolution, God, gravity, light, psychic phenomenon, and probability—in a way so simple, so novel, and so compelling that it all fits together and makes perfect sense. What does it feel like to suddenly understand everything? God’s Debris isn’t the final answer to the Big Questions. But it might be the most compelling vision of reality you will ever read. The thought experiment is this: Try to figure out what’s wrong with the old man’s explanation of reality. Share the book with your smart friends then discuss it later while enjoying a beverage.

Scott Adams made it free to boost his hard to market book. I have not yet read it, but heard good reports.

Enjoy and help the project! Oh boy, I do feel young again :-).

It allows two replicas of a collection of files and directories to be stored on different hosts (or different disks on the same host), modified separately, and then brought up to date by propagating the changes in each replica to the other.

Unison shares a number of features with tools such as configuration management packages (CVS, PRCS, Subversion, BitKeeper, etc.), distributed filesystems (Coda, etc.), uni-directional mirroring utilities (rsync, etc.), and other synchronizers (Intellisync, Reconcile, etc). However, there are several points where it differs:

• Unison runs on both Windows and many flavors of Unix (Solaris, Linux, OS X, etc.) systems. Moreover, Unison works across platforms, allowing you to synchronize a Windows laptop with a Unix server, for example.
• Unlike simple mirroring or backup utilities, Unison can deal with updates to both replicas of a distributed directory structure. Updates that do not conflict are propagated automatically. Conflicting updates are detected and displayed.
• Unlike a distributed filesystem, Unison is a user-level program: there is no need to modify the kernel or to have superuser privileges on either host.
• Unison works between any pair of machines connected to the internet, communicating over either a direct socket link or tunneling over an encrypted ssh connection. It is careful with network bandwidth, and runs well over slow links such as PPP connections. Transfers of small updates to large files are optimized using a compression protocol similar to rsync.
• Unison is resilient to failure. It is careful to leave the replicas and its own private structures in a sensible state at all times, even in case of abnormal termination or communication failures.
• Unison has a clear and precise specification.
• Unison is free; full source code is available under the GNU Public License.

 /usr/bin/find /tmp/ -name "ruby_sess*" -cmin +600 -exec rm \{} \;

Stefan Kaes setup a blog about his activities related to his efforts in improving the speed of Rails apps.

It can help to avoid a lot of browser reloads and so ultimately speed up developmpent even further. It’s a great debugging tool, and it’s fun to play with your objects in real time. But even better; you can use it to get work done. You have full access to your models.

 >> u=User.find_by_username('m94asr')
 => #<User:0x23b34b0 @attributes={"username"=>"m94asr",
   "firstname"=>"Armin", "id"=>"1", "surname"=>"Roehrl", "password"=>"XX"}>

 #reload your code
 load 'sample.rb'
 sample.do_sth

Start the console with the console script:

 ruby script/console

If you start it without arguments the script will start the console in the development environment. To get to the production DB type

 ruby script/console production

Basically you need to enter:

 mysql> SET PASSWORD FOR
     -> 'some_user'@'some_host' = OLD_PASSWORD('newpwd');

The Ruby on Rails application framework provides several options for storing session data. Each option has its advantages and disadvantages which may not be readily apparent. The tests outlined in this document attempt to lay some groundwork which should help when determining which storage container is most suitable for your application.

I highly recommend reading it!

Simply click on the top-left on Add Content.

Then click on "Create a Section" and add the right feed. For this blog:

 http://www.approximity.com/cgi-bin/blogtariAgile/index.rb/synopsis.rss

and for Futurometer:

 http://www.futurometer.com:3001/rss.xml

Now it will show up. Thanks to Ajax you can move the sections around with the mouse. Enjoy it!

Stefan added the red markings used inkscape an open source scalable vector graphics editor.

After some searching and experimentation I recommend Adium on os X. On Linux I prefer gaim. Adium uses libgaim.

• the entire screen: Command-Shift-3
• region of the screen: Command-Shift-4; Then click and drag the cursor to mark the area you want to capture.

The files are normally saved as Picture-* on the Desktop.

Further reading: MacDevCenter about more fancy capturing using timers, etc.

In the next few years, venture capital funds will find themselves squeezed from four directions. They’re already stuck with a seller’s market, because of the huge amounts they raised at the end of the Bubble and still haven’t invested. This by itself is not the end of the world. In fact, it’s just a more extreme version of the norm in the VC business: too much money chasing too few deals.

Unfortunately, those few deals now want less and less money, because it’s getting so cheap to start a startup. The four causes: open source, which makes software free; Moore’s law, which makes hardware geometrically closer to free; the Web, which makes promotion free if you’re good; and better languages, which make development a lot cheaper.

To get from the local max to the big max one has to have the guts to go through the pain of point C.

GoboLinux is an alternative Linux distribution which redefines the entire filesystem hierarchy.

GoboLinux is a Linux distribution that breaks with the historical Unix directory hierarchy. Basically, this means that there are no directories such as /usr and /etc. The main idea of the alternative hierarchy is to store all files belonging to an application in its own separate subtree; therefore we have directories such as /Programs/GCC/2.95.3/lib.

To allow the system to find these files, they are logically grouped in directories such as /System/Links/Executables, which, you guessed it, contains symbolic links to all executable files inside the Programs hierarchy.

To maintain backwards compatibility with traditional Unix/Linux apps, there are symbolic links that mimic the Unix tree, such as "/usr/bin -> /System/Links/Executables", and "/sbin -> /System/Links/Executables" (this example shows that arbitrary differentiations between files of the same category were also removed).