Quack IA Weblog

You are working on a mac? You need access to data on other, remote linuxish machines? Buy Expandrive. It’s awesome. Really. (It’s cheap, too).

Hat tip: Jo.

For a few years now I am a huge fan of Rails. Rails again introduced me to Ruby, which is really the coolest scripting language ever.

I am using Rails for several Web-Interfaces, both at kooaba and in my research. Currently I am working on some massively distributed processing, which requires access to the relational databases but no interface. So I started using Ruby with Active Record without Rails. Here are some learnings to make it work:

Basic usage:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'rubygems'
require 'active_record'
require 'logger'
	
ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(
  :adapter  => 'mysql',
  :database => 'db',
  :username => 'johndoe',
  :password => 'ggrrr',
  :host     => 'some.host.com')  
	
ActiveRecord::Base.logger = Logger.new(\"mylog.log\")
ActiveRecord::Base.table_name_prefix=\"pf_\"

Problems really started when using the table prefix. Now you want to add your models you are also using in Rails - it turns out you have to add them AFTER the code above, otherwise the prefix is not added to many-to-many relationship tables. No idea why, but it’s the way it is, at least in Rails 1.3.

So, add your models (after the segment above) like this:

require 'mymodel.rb'
require 'anothermodel.rb'

That’s it, you’re ready to roll.

Some more background: I am calling instances of may ruby scripts with condor. Defining a logfile (logger) as above helps debugging later.

Last year Herbert won and represented us for kooaba at Venture leaders in Boston - this year I congratulate especially:

Remo
Stefan
Mael
Paul
Mark
Christian

Have fun in Boston, guys!

Managing your email can be a pain. Recently I stumbled over Remo’s remark mentioning that he got his mails done in 2007.

This reminded me of the GTD book that I had read a few years ago, but never implemented, since changing a system needs time. Managing at least e-mail after the GT principle seems reasonable, though. So I asked Remo for his actual implementation, which he posted swiftly on his blog. Thanks Remo.

Since I use Apple Mail and I wanted a sligthly adapted version, I browsed the web and found a wealth of info, the best maybe this video of a Google Tech Talk, called Inbox Zero:

So, I started my own implementation. Inspired by both Remo’s version and the above Google talk, it consists of 4 folders:

According to the GTD principle and the video above, with each mail you decide what to do (Do it now and Archive, Delegate, Defer, oder Delete. Just two folders required, Archive and Deferred. I added two other folders, Receipts and Logins, which are here to collect these items. Other than that just a single Archive folder for everything else - search is good enough these days!!!

To make things more efficient, you need keyboard shortcuts to apply the GTD action to each mail. Since this option is not integrated with Apple Mail I used Mail Act-on. My rules look like this:

That’s it. I have tested it for a month now. And it works perfectly for me!

This is interesting: an on-line tool for competitor analysis, Rivalmap. It seems there is a web 2.0 tool for about anything by now . It’s an interesting concept though, especially for collecting information such as blogposts etc. related to the competition. Also, the comparison charts look really nice.

For the interface it clearly borrows from Basecamp - which is certainly not the worst when it comes to interfaces for on-line business tools.

Upgraded my macbook to leopard a few weeks ago - and I am not happy

- it’s alot slower booting up, spotlight is also slow
- Cisco VPN doesn’t work anymore, even after reinstalling. Good bye free wifi through Switch
- Word and Power Point PDF export suddenly produce several hundred MB large PDFs (for a source file of only a few MB)
- And I have the caps lock and numlock on bug, I am not the only one

arrrrrrggghhhhh.

Cool: In November I wrote that Xing should add the facebook-like newsfeed. And now they have it. Nice!

However, you only see the last three events. To get the rest you have to be premium member. Typical Xing, I would say.

As of today, we have set up poster printing with Zazzle. Which means worldwide mosaickr poster delivery to your door. Plus, you can choose from a range of printing options, including printing on canvas or custom framing. Awesome!

How about a nice mosaick poster of shared memories to your loved one’s for Christmas? Here are some tips to get the best results:

1) Choose a master image with large, uniformely colored areas. Faces are good, for instance. Crop the image so that the face(s) cover most of the image. Bad are images with fine structures, such as trees etc.

2) In mosaickr, choose the setting large and add as many tile images as possible, 500 or more is best.

This should give you nice results.

Observation 1: facebook is spreading rapidly in Switzerland. Everyday more and more people I used to go to school with sign up. I guess local players like klassenfreunde will be obsolete soon. What about StudiVZ? Not sure …

Comment 1: the real killer app in facebook is the Newsfeed. Seeing what has happened in your network since you last logged in is just awesome. Plaxo is doing the same with their “pulse”. And Xing really should add that feature. I want to see when people change their job. smile.

Comment 2: the developments towards open social platforms continues with the Google Open Social API. But what’s really missing is the data perspective, see also Tim O’Reilly’s post here. Ideally I would like to see some repository where I store my social data and my network … since I feel my social network is my personal property.

Comment 3: the other big announcement last week was obviously the Open Handset Alliance by Google and others. Cant’t wait to use it at kooaba.com.

Comment 4: finally, congratulations to Marc and amiando. For being part of the Google Open Social API and for their business-model of organizing whole events including ticket printing etc. Nice.

so, yepnep is online …

mmmm, ok … it really is hotornot.com all over again

See also my earlier post here and what techcrunch has to say.