Rodesia.org

Well, after some big headaches try­ing to recover from a mix of my provider — Blue­host — silently updat­ing my server setup to Apache2 and my Mephisto instal­la­tion just “automag­i­cally” fail­ing with­out me doing any­thing, I man­aged to get the time and patience to refresh the instal­la­tion and now every­thing works again!

My apolo­gies to the peo­ple who have tried to access some pages that became unreach­able dur­ing this period.

Let’s see if I have the time and patience to keep this weblog more reg­u­larly updated.

One thing I have yet to do is cre­ate my own busi­ness card: shall I make it under­stated or over­stated, mono­chrome or colour­ful, ver­ti­cal or hor­i­zon­tal, serif or sans serif…

Any­how, while look­ing for inspi­ra­tion I stumpled on this page, full of really cre­ative ideas: Cool Busi­ness Card Designs

This is an inter­est­ing Busi­ness Week arti­cle that gives an overview of sev­eral pop­u­lar blog sites and how much money they generate.

I hate the fact that I like the kit­tens site…

How Top Blog­gers Earn Money

Google Image search has a lit­tle secret fea­ture, if you search for a per­son and add imgtype=face to the url, it will only dis­play faces!

For exam­ple, search for “john” faces: http://images.google.com/images?q=john&imgtype=face

I won­der what other hid­den fea­tures exist in Google search…

The Moleskine’s are my favourite note­books, I use them for notes, draw­ing and one is always with me while traveling.

And it looks like they can have other uses: some­one decided to turn one into a hard­drive cas­ing, result is just brilliant:

Read more about it here: The Geek­ster Moleskine

Found this nice web imple­men­ta­tion of the Mac OS X search­box: http://www.brandspankingnew.net/archive/2005/08/adding_an_os_x.html

For those who haven’t seen one yet, it looks like this:

Recently I found out a great site where peo­ple can list the appli­ca­tions they use, iusethis.com. It’s a bit like the con­cept of Digg applied to appli­ca­tions. Each appli­ca­tion has a badge show­ing how many peo­ple use it, cou­pled with a descrip­tion and even­tual com­ments from users.

MacI­ago is also there, here’s how its badge looks like:

It is now a uni­ver­sal binary and has a resiz­able board. Source code is avail­able at google code, check it out if you’re into it.

MacI­ago Home­page.

After more than 50 000 down­loads and 4 years of devel­op­ment inac­tiv­ity, I’m work­ing on a small update for MacI­ago. This new ver­sion will have the choice sev­eral board sizes and a slightly improved arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. I’m also plan­ning to release its source code.

This game was orig­i­nally meant to help me learn Objec­tive C, and I never thought it would become as pop­u­lar as it did. It got trans­lated in 7 lan­guages, and it became spe­cially pop­u­lar in Japan, closely fol­lowed by the US.

For this new ver­sion, I’ll again need a cou­ple of strings trans­lated, so if you would like to help, please send me an email.

It’s not a com­pletely triv­ial instal­la­tion, so here’s what I did:

• Login to your account (you need to have ssh access)
• Install Sub­ver­sion on your machine http://www.bluehostforum.com/archive/index.php/t-134.html
• Cre­ate a data­base for mephisto

• Install Mephisto:

  cd
  mkdir rails
  cd rails
  mkdir mephisto
  svn co http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/mephisto/trunk mephisto
  cd mephisto/vendor
  wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/12582/tzinfo-0.3.1.tar.gz
  tar xzvf tzinfo-0.3.1.tar.gz
  rm tzinfo-0.3.1.tar.gz
  cd ../..
  rake rails:freeze:edge
  

• Update your config/database.yml

• In config/environment.rb uncomment:

  ENV['RAILS_ENV'] ||= 'production'
  

• Back in the ter­mi­nal, setup the database:

  cd ~/rails/mephisto
  rake RAILS_ENV=production db:bootstrap
  

• Cre­ate a sym­bolic link to your rails mephisto install

  cd ~/public_html
  ln -s /home/YOUR_USERNAME/rails/mephisto/public mephisto
  

• Cre­ate a sub­do­main ‘mephisto’ with cPanel

• That’s it! Your blog should be acces­si­ble from http://mephisto.yourdomain.com
• Go to http://mephisto.yourdomain.com/admin and login with admin/test to start your weblog.

Feel free to replace the name mephisto for the name you want to give to your weblog.
If the link to tzinfo is no longer cor­rect, go to http://rubyforge.org/projects/tzinfo/ and get the cor­rect one.

Good luck with your instal­la­tion, and let me know about any prob­lems, or just post a link of your new blog!