Shanti’s Dispatches

What’s the most popular term people use when searching for these?

… and the winner is: Pictures.

Hat tip, Charles Coxhead!

In the tradition of American Movie comes The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters:

While Waiting for Guffman owns the mockumentary genre, there’s something visceral, engaging and hilarious about “spoofing” the serious / deadpan.

Of course, these films don’t have to “spoof” anything — the people being filmed just don’t realize how ridiculous they might seem to the outside world (not at all like bloggers…ahem).

The best from this genre: Borat, American Movie, Air Guitar Nation and The King of Kong (that is, if it’s trailer is any indication).

I just posted this to the TextMate users mailing list, but blogs seem to be a great way to harness the wisdom of crowds as well…

In Rails 2.0, the new default for view extensions is ‘html.erb’ instead of ‘rhtml’, and ‘builder.erb’ instead of ‘rxml’.

The only problem is that TextMate uses a generic white icon in the project drawer for all files with the ‘erb’ extension. I’d much rather have sexy icons in the project drawer for each distinct file type, as ‘rhtml’ files have currently.

What I’ve Tried

See this pastie as to how I modified TextMate’s Info.plist (XML tags were not getting escaped by WordPress).

Saved Info.plist, then Quit completely out of TextMate. Next, opened up an existing rails project, but the ‘index.html.erb’ for example, still showed the generic TextMate icon in the project drawer, not the tiny blue globe one that ‘rhtml’ files use. (I really like the way it strikes the eye… what can I say?)

Any ideas?

ps. this is probably completely unrelated, but I also went through Finder and did the ‘get info’ -> ‘change all’ trick to open all ‘ html.erb’ files in TextMate, yet the icon in Finder remains the generic white OSX one, not TextMate’s. Figured that’s an OS X thing but thought I’d mention it just in case.

Next up… flying cars!

Without Digg (left). With Digg (right).

Just 7 hours worth of stats. Digg remains a monster traffic-driving force to be reckoned with.

Serving that much traffic would not be possible without nginx and mongrel (thx Zed).

Update: up to 450k pageviews for the day… wowzers.

The other night I stumbled across Financial Hack, a very down-to-earth blog on entrepreneurship, earning a living online, etc.

There’s so much hype and cheese in this arena that it’s refreshing to see someone who’s really earning a living online…

… oh and, not simply by the virtue of it being a pyramid scheme. (i.e. read my ‘make money online’ blog, which is the only reason why I make money online…. :))

Here’s a great post on cool business cards that people never throw away. (my idea: unique 1 of a kind biz cards with pics of lolcats on them!)

Just came across this post which talks about automating Facebook interaction to perform a request in a Facebook app.

Their ruby code is here (much of it based originally off mine — which is so cool).

For the longest time I didn’t get open source… why anyone would give away their hard-earned time (in the form of code) to everyone else.

It’s not some hippie thing though. The benefits are:

* expands your “street cred” in the community
* allows other people to enhance what you’ve done, and possibly, contribute back to the project
* fosters even more giving back by growing pie — it’s not a zero-sum game, as many would believe

In my case, I’ve almost always already written the software that becomes open source. Without releasing it, the code would simply rot on the vine. Usually within 2-3 hours (though I’m getting better), I can have the code cleaned up, tests added (if applicable) and released as an open source project.

The original Facebook automation article is here: HOW TO: Automate Facebook Interaction using Ruby and WWW::Mechanize.

More recent open source work: Sexy Temp Passwords (rails plugin), Dynamic File Store (rails plugin), and The Hydra Project.

Amazon S3 is dirt cheap and infinitely scalable. Every month I’m paranoid this willspike up to hundreds and thousands of dollars, but instead it only steadily rises just $1-2 each month:

I’m using Amazon S3 for:
* daily/weekly/monthly backups for 10+ sites (ranging from big to tiny)
* serving photo galleries for a site that does ~ 10k daily uniques
*sometimes used to serve static assets like “style.css”, “prototype.js”, etc

It can be especially handy as a rails static asset host:

An asset host is another server, somewhere on the internet, where you store your static files. These can be javascripts scripts, CSS stylesheets, images, static html files and anything else that doesn’t change often. Basically, anything that lives in your public directory.

So, why would you want to use an asset host? It turns out that many browsers limit the number of simultaneous connections to a host. For Internet Explorer, that number is two. If you are serving a lot of small images, or you haven’t bothered to bundle your scripts or stylesheets, this can be a real bottleneck.

Read more about setting up static asset hosts in Rails here.