January 2013
1 post
3 tags
March 2012
1 post
FreeAgent hackfest: App-wide Search
At FreeAgent we had our first hackfest a short while ago and I got off and played with ElasticSearch to build an app-wide search.
Here’s my short review from the Hack week round up post on the FreeAgent Engineering blog:
As we are about to move to Elasticsearch for indexing our logs, my Hack Week idea was to experiment with building an app-wide search function. It is just a prototype...
October 2011
1 post
Selling my MBP
Update: Sold !
I have befriended my trusty MacBook Pro for a lighter Air and I’m now selling it. It was my main computer for a year and a half and enabled me to make a living out of it.
It’s a 2010 15” MacBookPro
2.4GHz Core i5
4GB RAM (upgradable to 8GB)
GeForce GT 330M 256MB (StarCraft 2 works fine ;) )
320 GB HDD
15.4 inch LED-backlit glossy widescreen...
November 2010
1 post
October 2010
1 post
2 tags
Summer in Edinburgh
July 2010
1 post
June 2010
2 posts
London photo stories →
January 2010
2 posts
1 tag
Learn you some erlang →
… for great good!
I’ve long been wanted to learn Erlang and I found a very good guide (isn’t as thorough but for an Erlang-noob it looks perfect).
The syntax is kind of strange but the most difficult part is thinking in a functional way. Hopefully I am going to write some toy projects in Erlang and get accustomed with it.
Another article I’ve been reading is a hands...
Stanford iPhone Dev Class →
Stanford started the Winter quarter class which now covers iPhone 3.0.
It’s a nice opportunity to play a bit with iPhone apps and learn Obj-C (which at first looked weird).
Get the videos from iTunes U.
November 2009
1 post
2 tags
Processing logs in real-time
I thought about how to process logs faster than using a cron job to poll for updates and I found mkfifo which you can use to get what’s written in real time. It makes a FIFO pipe which acts like a regular unix file except it has to be opened for reading (using fopen) before writing to it. I tested it on Snow Leopard, it is the same in linux as well.
After getting the updates in real time...
October 2009
2 posts
2 tags
Homebrew
After a clean install of Snow Leopard I decided not to use MacPorts but to go with homebrew. Its main advantages are no duplication (macports installed its own version of ruby, python and other libs) and the path layout: packages are installed into their own prefix (eg. /usr/local/Cellar/wget) and then symlinked into the Homebrew prefix (eg. /usr/local).
And because all of the formulas are in...
Manchester
It’s been one month since I arrived in Manchester and I really like it. The University is great, I only have 5 courses and 20h per week (and lunch breaks).
But the thing that I like the most in Manchester are the user groups. I’ve been to North West Ruby User Group, GeekUp and want to go at the next Manchester Free Software talk and to Python North West. I will probably talk at the...
September 2009
1 post
June 2009
1 post
mr. penumbra’s twenty-four-hour book store →
May 2009
1 post
Google Wave Hackathon at Mountain View
I wish I was at I/O to get the opportunity to play with Google Wave. I love the idea, and I think it’s limited only by what robots/gadgets makers think of doing with it.
jaggeree:
At I/O there were some really interesting Office Hours sessions where you could go and talk to the engineering teams about questions and issues. I wanted to find out a bit more about Wave and so went along to...
March 2009
3 posts
Quick jump to folder
Another script I stole from evilchelu is j.sh. It enables you to quickly jump to a folder that you often access by writing a small part of its name. I use it to quickly cd to my projects or other repositories with “j <a few letters>”
To install it save it somewhere (I use a bin/ folder in my home) and add “source <path to j.sh>” to your .bashrc or...
I'm a ninja →
As I said on twitter, I now switched to Vim (MacVim specifically). I am using evilchelu’s vimrc which has FuzzyFinder (my favourite TextMate feature). It wasn’t that hard to get productive at acceptable level.
Any tips and/or recommendation ?
Videos and podcasts
I wanted to share with you a list of videos and podcast that I listen to when I have some time.
About videos I posted earlier with recommended talks. Here’s some courses that I have seen (I got them from iTunes U):
Stanford Programming Abstractions (iTunes U)
UC Berkeley The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (iTunes U)
Scaling Rails series
I listen mostly to Ruby...
February 2009
5 posts
Acts_as_conference videos
Just saw Innovation in Rails by Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer (RailsEnvy guys) where they talked about the new things in the past year in the Ruby and Rails world. Confreaks posted high resolution 720p videos of the conference on their site.
Gregg showed how to use a reverse proxy cache to speed up your application. You can find links about the discussed topics on the RailsEnvy blog. Earlier...
3 tags
Clearance - login with username
For my Rails projects currently I’m using Thoughtbot’s stack (Shoulda, factory_girl) and now I switched to Clearance. I love it because it’s tested and it’s easy to extend. One such modification that I need is to allow users to login with username. I wrote a demo app and here’s a tutorial on how to do it yourself:
1. Install clearance and run the generator
2. Test...
Valentine's day
mihai$ date -r 1234567890
Sat Feb 14 01:31:30 EET 2009
Translation: The Unix time will be 1234567890 on this year’s Valentine day (actually just in Europe, in US it will still be Feb 13).
Update: Somebody made a countdown.
2 tags
WatchJust saw a very interesting science talk on TED.com (if you don’t know about TED, it’s an awsome conference with an equally impressive motto: Ideas worth spreading). It’s about a researcher that had a massive stroke and had the oportunity to conciously self analyze what happens when the brain functions start to fail.
puts "Hello world"
Trying out tumblr, seems pretty clean for a blog.
I’ll try and post more often here about what nifty things I hacked or used or about ruby gottchas that I encountered.
Feel free to comment :)
And don’t forge to subscribe do the RSS feed.
