John Griffin is just another media junkie
I have been quietly working away on a new site for a little while and it’s now ready for public access. Splitstate.com is a gaming news site that delivers the most popular stories from across the internet right now on a single page. The hottest stories are always at the top and only highly reported items make it onto the page.
I hope you check it out and bookmark it if you think it’s useful.
Just discovered this today but the URI concatenation in Ruby is fantastic. Fantastic to the extent that you can take a host URL add it to a relative URL and produce an absolute URL for that resource. For example:
[via Eric Hodel]
For those of us who have yet to take the plunge into Ruby 1.9 it can be quite annoying to convert the encoding of a string to utf-8. I’m using couchdb so it’s quite important when bringing data in that it’s utf-8. Luckily there is a handy standard library called Iconv to help, so if you can’t guarantee the encoding of your data I recommend trying this little snippet to strip out the badness:
[via Stack Overflow]
I’m using WinXP virtual machines all the time to test my web apps in different versions of IE so it’s good to see MS including an XP VM with Windows 7. Click on video 3 to see it in action.
Getting this error like this when you deploy your Ruby on Rails app to a production server?
You probably need to upgrade the server to Ruby 1.8.7 like me 
Doh! Luckily moonshine has it covered for this one, I just had to switch from using ree to ree187 in my moonshine.yml file.
This worked for me after a bit of faffing:
Run the final line to blow away the upgrade cache if you run into any problems and need to try again.
UPDATE: Oh and you might need to run gparted to resize your /boot partition. It needs to be at least 300mb!!
The offer UFC made to Fedor today was ridiculous:
If co-promotion is the sticking point then they are just even more stupid than we all realised last time this went down. The only thing M-1 don’t get are their logos on the event and overseas footage rights. UFC are giving them a cut of the PPV and logos on Fedor. It’s so close to co-promotion it may aswell be called that and it’s so much more than anyone has offered them they are nuts to reject it. Hell he’s even in the EA game now!
A bunch of extremely minor technicalities and semantics are preventing this deal from happening. Crazy Russians indeed.
An interesting discussion (via Daring Fireball) regarding a new alternative to Google Reader called Fever. From what I can gather it seems to be a very polished and personalised version of Techmeme – a fantastic site that, at it’s core, uses algorithms based on link behaviour to determine the hotest topics.
In the post Alex talks about how feed readers are dead and how we shouldn’t be spending so much time in them. I agree that we could all cut down on our subscriptions but I don’t see the feed reader as a dead and useless product. Aggregators are fantastic and allow you to uncover and be exposed to all sorts of news, information and opinion.
I recently challenged myself to cut down on my daily intake of feeds. I found that by killing some heavily bloated feeds and carefully filtering others that I regained control over Google Reader. I haven’t seen the dreaded 1000+ items unread since I did it several months ago.
And that’s the key. It’s not that readers are useless or devoid of useful information it’s just they don’t help us manage the information flow. I used a few basic Yahoo Pipes and subscribed to lower volume feeds to do this and there is no reason why that couldn’t have been included as part of the aggregator itself. Google could do a far better job of filtering than I could and I wish they would expand the product in that direction instead of making it more social.
Everyone is coming at the problem from this strange angle that everything needs to be realtime and you should only be shown the hottest posts when all we really need are better, more intelligent tools to filter the noise out.
If you are a Twitter user and have an iPhone you really should consider Boxcar from the app store. It’s not a twitter client but it does hook into two of the best (tweetie and twitterific).
It simply delivers push notifications whenever you get reply or direct message. This is the way it should be done as regular tweets do not require your immediate attention.
It will completely change the way you use Twitter and make you feel more engaged in the conversation. This is what I had hoped push notifications would deliver in 3.0 and boxcar is the fullfillment of that promise.
I took the plunge and treated myself to a brand spanking new iPhone 3GS this weekend. After much dilly dallying I decided to upgrade from the iPhone 3G because cashinmyfone were offering good rates for trade ins that could cover the cost of buying out my contract. Getting the handset proved to be a bit of mission.
After finally tracking one down at the Apple store in Westfields I had to spend 75 minutes in there going through everything. O2 were not very helpful and were trying to stop the buyout from happening in the Apple store. Of course Apple have been doing contract buyouts for a while, it just depends if the call centre worker they call to verify it knows that.
But I have it and I’m happy. It’s fast as hell, it has a compass and the camera is significantly better (there are hundreds of reviews online if you need to know). Oh and now I’m inline with the yearly release cycle the upgrade hit won’t be to bad next year.
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