I’ve been reading the book Advanced Rails by Brad Ediger. I first met Brad way back in 2006 when we were first trying to get our local Ruby user group going. He is a very smart fellow, and his newest book is definitely evidence of that. There’s a lot in there that’s over my head, but that’s nothing a few rereads can’t solve. :-)The book has everything from optimization to deployment, from security to metaprogramming (my brain is still spinning from that one). Brad does an awesome job of including plenty of code and real-world examples.

OneBody now has a real, bona fide blog of its own. Thanks to WordPress.com, creating a new blog is waaaay too easy, evidenced by the fact that I now have 37 (just kidding). Our little project continues to grow and improve. I’m still waiting on that influx of talented, eager volunteers to make it awesome, though :-) For now, it will continue to be Tim’s pet project, though I refuse to stop referring to the development “team” as “we” and “us.”

Long title, I know. Here’s how I did it… sudo apt-get install fetchmail postfix cd ~ vim .fetchmailrc Add the following to the file (replacing everything in CAPS appropriately): poll pop.gmail.com with proto POP3 and options no dns user 'YOUR_GMAIL_ADDRESS' there with password 'YOUR_PASSWORD' is 'YOUR_UBUNTU_USERNAME' here options ssl Now: chmod 710 .fetchmailrc sudo vim /etc/crontab Add the following to your crontab file: 10 7 * * 1 YOUR_UBUNTU_USERNAME fetchmail -k This will run fetchmail every Sunday and grab your email. It seems either fetchmail or gmail limits each connect to something around 400-500 messages, so to get started, you can run fetchmail -k a few dozen times to download all your mail, then let crontab do the rest on a weekly basis.

Just saw this in my referrer logs… You can search on Google for all occurrences except in a certain site. Many know about adding site:timmorgan.org or similar to only search within a certain domain. Well, maybe it was obvious, but now I know you can do -site:timmorgan.org to search everywhere but that domain. Nice.

Starting around mid- to late-2006, I started a little project for my church. The idea was to rewrite our existing online membership directory to make it more searchable and to take a stab at creating something somewhat social, where people can easily communicate with each other and also see their interests and such. Plus, I was dying to build something significant with Ruby on Rails, my new favorite web framework.

I used Wordpress.com’s nifty domain mapping feature and moved my blog to its own domain. Now, after I write that killer blog post that gains me tons of Google juice, I can use my newfound popularity to redesign my blog with AdSense and make beaucoups of money. /dream

It seems the Gmail team has quietly slipped in a minor upgrade to the revolutionary and still yet after more than 3 years, best web email system I’ve ever seen. I have to use Outlook at work and yearn for the day that it will properly thread replies as Gmail does, but I digress… Anyway, is it just me, or is the slightly “improved” Gmail actually dumber? Here are some pet peeves I’ve aquired in the last week of using the new Gmail: For one, the drop down menus (you know, for selecting an action on individual and/or selected email) are no longer real select lists; they’re instead some DHTML kind of thing that has a scroll bar that feels flimsy. When I use the scroll wheel on my mouse, the whole page scrolls. It’s just weird. It crashes Firefox. Every. Time. When navigating away from Gmail, it always asks me if I am sure because I may lose data. What? Just let me go already! Dangit, I don’t want chat mixed with my email client! Stop turning that thing back on. When I log in for two seconds to check my email, I don’t want some long lost friend [I’ve been avoiding] starting up a chat with me. This is sort of a meta-peeve. Since I dislike the new version so much, I clicked “Old Version” in the upper-right. But that setting isn’t saved from browser to browser from session to session. I keep having to click it to go back to the old version.No doubt, Google will be removing the old version, but only if a majority of the users are happy with the new one. Let your hatred be known by switching to the old version with me.

You can script Microsoft Word using COM and the Ruby win32ole library. First, create a plain Word document with text to replace like this: Here is some text of my document. This will be replaced with [name]. Today’s date is: [date]. Then, run the following code. The text in square brackets will be replaced with the values in the code, and the file will be saved as a new name.

The new Ubuntu rocks, let me tell you. For one reason: things just work. This is the first time I’ve ever installed a Linux OS and didn’t have to crack open the terminal to tweak XOrg settings or to manually install graphics drivers, etc. My wireless card worked, upgrading my graphics drivers was as simple as a few clicks in the GUI, and turning on Compiz effects was as a dream.

There seems to be a general dissatisfaction with politics amongst people my age. We have a bad taste in our mouths. We’ve grown up watching a political process that seems to only happen on our TVs. And we feel we have absolutely no power to influence it. Because it’s a one-way channel. In some ways, the whole process is like a bad television show. The things we learned in grade school and high school (at a time when we were too young to participate) made the system seem beautifully complex and perfectly designed. There was a pride accompanied with our nation and its government, branches, and elections. The people have the power to change things, we were told.