How to search with Google Chrome using the omni bar

I’m writing this post because there doesn’t seem to be much instruction about how to search effectively from the url bar or omni-bar as the google folks call it.

The way its supposed to work is that if you type in a keyword for the search engine then the search query and hit enter, the search will execute using the search engine you specified.

so if you type 

“amazon.com Art of Rails” 
(note the space between amazon.com and the query)

into the omni bar then hit enter, your search will execute on Amazon.com.

To know that you’re doing it right, after typing in the keyword (amazon.com) and space, the url should look something like this

(more…)

Add comment September 11th, 2008

Google releases new Browser … its sexy

Yesterday I awoke to news about Google Chrome … EVERYWHERE.

And being the non-conformist I like to think I am (like everybody else in the universe), I wasn’t even going to give it a look until I stumbled onto this brilliant marketing tool that they had put together. Its a 40 page comic book walking you through the thought process behind why Google Chrome came about, and how it is different from everything on the market already.

What makes this puppy different?
The main philosophical difference between this browser and others is that fact that, instead of running the browser in one memory space, each tab in the browser has its own process.

(more…)

Add comment September 3rd, 2008

andlinux = Fail (rant)

Its admirable what they’re trying to do, but I installed the software and couldn’t get it to run. (Strange “could not connect” errors)

After screwing around with their rather unhelpful help thread and losing 2 hours of my life I gave up and uninstalled it. Don’t waste your time like I did, until they at least figure out how to make the darned thing work right out the box.

Thats probably why I hadn’t heard about them until a few days ago, and then, entirely by accident.

Add comment August 22nd, 2008

Use BREAD not CRUD

From Paul m. Jones

“I don’t recall where I first heard the term BREAD; it stands for “browse, read, edit, add, delete”. That covers more of what common web apps do, including the record listings. It even sounds nicer: “crud” is something icky, but “bread” is warm and fulfilling. That’s why I tend to use the term BREAD instead of CRUD …”

I like BREAD.
:)

Add comment August 20th, 2008

Ginormous external hard drive storage with drobo

Had to write a blog post on this …

Drobo allows you hotswap SATA hard drives in and out of it.
Just pop it open (yes … while its plugged in) and switch out hard drives as you wish. (more…)

Add comment August 20th, 2008

gem install error - ‘cl’ is not recognized as an internal or external command

If you’re here,  you are probably getting an error like this during a gem install on a windows box.

cl -c  -nologo -O1 -MD -Zi -DNDEBUG -DWIN32 -D_CONSOLE -DNO_STRICT -DHAV
E_DES_FCRYPT -DPERL_IMPLICIT_CONTEXT -DPERL_IMPLICIT_SYS -DPERL_MSVCRT_READFIX -
O1 -MD -Zi -DNDEBUG    -DVERSION=\”6.4\”  -DXS_VERSION=\”6.4\”  -IC:\Perl\lib\CO
RE  BitVector.c
‘cl’ is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.
NMAKE :  U1077:
Stop.

The fix is easy if you have visual studio or the .NET SDK installed.

If you don’t then either go download Visual Studio Express or the .NET SDK (anyone out of 1.1, 2.0 or 3.5 should do)

Now, do a search on your local machine for ‘cl.exe’ (more…)

Add comment August 18th, 2008

Zed Shaw is a fan of Phusion Passenger (modrails)

Its old but I stumbled onto this just today. Zed Shaw (the creator of that ol’ faithful Ruby server mongrel) is a fan of the Apache Passenger (modrails) guys

I also met the Phusion Passenger guys and holy fucking crap are they on to something. If anyone is going to actually take on Mongrel in the hosting area it’s Passenger. The developers are super cool nice guys (unlike me) and even DHH likes their stuff. He really never liked anything I built, so hopefully those guys get more support. About the only thing keeping them from taking over is that they use forking so a few libraries that keep resources open will have serious problems. They’ll probably have to think up some kind of thing for that soon, but I think most Rails deployments could get pretty far with Passenger. (more…)

Add comment August 16th, 2008

New mod_rails/passenger memory tools and cool tutorial

I’ve been mucking around with passenger quite a bit these days. I’ve got two staging servers running it for two different projects and another running a production version of one of those projects.

In digging through the documentation I discovered two new command line tools that come included with the 2.0 version of Passenger.

From the documentation
passenger-status

One can inspect Phusion Passenger’s internal status with the tool passenger-status. This tool must typically be run as root. For example:

(more…)

Add comment August 15th, 2008

Quote of the day - nothing wrong with doing nothing

There is absolutely nothing wrong with doing nothing as long as it is done in moderation.

— From Freelance Switch
Become More Efficient By Simplifying Your Life

Add comment August 15th, 2008

Frameworks vs. Libraries in PHP (why I choose frameworks)

David Otton (who I’ve never met) has an interesting take on the old Framework vs. libraries debate, that I identify with.

I went through the same struggle (in my head) months ago. However, after having that internal struggle that David went through, I came out on the side of frameworks.

Why? (more…)

Add comment August 12th, 2008

How to persevere … correctly

I just had to steal this 37 signal blog posting

How’s this for tenacity? John Dane is 58 years old and has been trying out for the Olympic sailing team for 40 years. He finally made it this year with his son-in-law, Austin Sperry.

Dane missed qualifying for the Olympics 4 separate times, each by a few minutes. He didn’t give up after each loss, he just improved his sailing skills. It would have been too easy to give up after losing one or two qualifying races. John Dane took the more difficult route and persevered.

(more…)

Add comment August 12th, 2008

New Netbeans release - version 6.5 Milestone 1

New in this release is support for PHP

There is a new feature list here

A couple of interesting Rails enhancements

About to check it out.

Add comment August 4th, 2008

ReCaptcha kills wordpress spam comments dead!

Just wanted to celebrate the fact that after installing the Recaptcha wordpress plugin I’m down from 200 - 300 spam comments a week to 0.

Rockin!

 

Add comment August 4th, 2008

Current Active Scaffold Rails plugin (1.1.1) not compatible with Rails 2.1

If you’re seeing errors like this

... gems/activesupport-2.1.0/lib/active_support/core_ext/module/aliasing.rb:31:in `alias_method': undefined method `find_full_template_path' for class `ActionView::Base' (NameError)

You’re not crazy.
Active Scaffold (1.1.1) doesn’t play nice with Rails 2.1!

Go here to get an Active Scaffold version (master) that does.

Add comment August 2nd, 2008

Fixing the libxml-ruby gem error: uninitialized constant XML (NameError)

I found the highly recommended libxml-ruby gem but was having a lot of trouble getting my sample code below to work

1
2
3
4
require 'libxml'
doc = XML::Document.file('http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=obama')
root = doc.root
puts "Root element name: #{root.name}"

I kept getting this error

uninitialized constant XML (NameError) (more…)

Add comment August 1st, 2008

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