Monthly Archives: January 2008

Weekly Roundup

By John | Published: January 28, 2008
Heres the week in review: -Linux Mint home networking is now done and working beautifully. Had some trouble getting the onboard Via Chrome9 Video working correctly, but I followed the instructions here(compiling it from source) and everything was great. I wanted to use the OpenChrome driver instead of the VESA driver because the OpenChrome [...]
Posted in Geeky, Linux, Programming, Royner, Ruby On Rails | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Royner – New Project

By John | Published: January 24, 2008
I’m happy to say that I’m almost done with my newest project – Royner. It doesn’t live anywhere yet, just on my local machine, but heres what it is: Really simple – you give Royner a feed (Atom, RSS, XML) and Royner monitors that feed for some keywords that you define. So, lets say [...]
Posted in Royner, Ruby On Rails | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Linux Mint Media Server – Day 1 – Samba/iTunes Sharing

By John | Published: January 23, 2008
First I apologize, I’m watching Rambo III as I write this (preparing for the new Rambo {!!!!!}coming out this Friday) so I may screw some of this up. This all started with a couple of great deals I saw on slickdeals.net. 1. Got 5 x 1024mb sticks of DDR2 667 Ram for $7 shipped after rebate. 2. [...]
Posted in Geeky, Linux, MythTv | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Markets

By John | Published: January 23, 2008
Since I started my nice cushy “high paying” job, Jen and I have been putting quite a bit of money away (in preparation for the move and for a rainy day) and paying down our debt.  We’ve got some moola stored away in a ingdirect savings account thats collecting a nice 4.1% interest rate, but [...]
Posted in money, stocks | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

iPod = Dead

By John | Published: January 19, 2008
Its a sad day. My iPod finally quit on me. I’m not exactly sure what is wrong with it, but it has served me well(3 years!). Oh well, guess that means I should get an Touch. Or I could just do the cool thing and get an iPhone, but then I’d have to [...]
Posted in iPod | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Rake Leaves

By John | Published: January 10, 2008
Yeah, I came up with this little Rails rake task called ‘rake leaves’. It will just create a text file that has all your tables, column names, and their data types. I’ve always thought it would be handy to have this so you don’t need to switch to MySQL and spend the time [...]
Posted in Programming, Rake Leaves, Ruby On Rails | 1 Comment

Rails: Using Helpers in Your Controller.

By John | Published: January 10, 2008
This morning there was a guy in the rails IRC room asking about using helpers in his controller and I recently wrote an app that used the great pdf-writer gem to generate some pdfs and used helpers in the controller for formatting in the pdf. If you are going to generate very complicated pdfs, [...]
Posted in Programming, Ruby On Rails | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Lowing Credit Card Interest Rates…

By John | Published: January 8, 2008
I don’t know why I haven’t done this sooner, but I called up the four credit cards I have and flat out asked them if I could get a lower rate. Ya know what? Most did. Breakdown: Chase Visa – Down 5%! Dell Credit – Down 6%! Best Buy - No Go, they said they only have [...]
Posted in Debt | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Integrating Google Maps in Your Rails 2.0 App.

By John | Published: January 5, 2008
NOTE:  THIS IS AN OLD POST AND THE INSTRUCTIONS MAY BE OUTDATED. YMMV In my first real post in a year, I thought I’d share some Ruby stuff I’ve recently done – Integrating your Rails 2.0 app with Google Maps. So, here is what we are aiming to accomplish: You are going to provide an address, say [...]
Posted in Google, Programming, Ruby On Rails | Tagged , , , | 31 Comments