So this is just a small site I built as part of my undergrad coursework. The basic idea was to build any sort of publically “useful” mashup using Ruby on Rails.

My idea is a simple site which aggregates a bunch of feed URLs, picks the most popular keywords among them all and them displays them in a cloud. Also, user interaction alters the scoring so that things keep updating themselves as people use the site.

Anyway I know it’s not much, but having this link here might help it’s ranking ever so slightly.. plus if you randomly stumble across this page, please do click so I can register some website hits

Thanks… What’s Buzzing Malta

So I bought an iPod Nano a while back, it’s actually a 1st-generation model. I was happy using it with iTunes for a while, but as time went by I started to hate iTunes (on Windows) more and more.. to the point where I got rid of it once and for all.

I resorted to Windows Media Player, which is actually pretty decent and BLOODY FAST! Compared to iTunes… I mean there’s absolutely no contest.

Anyway I wanted to use my iPod but would absolutely never install iTunes, so was looking for a good way to manage my iPod files without it… and lo and behold, I found SharePod.

SharPod is absolutely wonderful – there’s no installation, you just run a single executable which does all the config work for you, and all you do is drag and drop your music to and from your iPod, just like it was a normal non-closed-off-by-Apple personal music player.

Lovely… I definitely recommend it! Oh, plus it’s completely free – but not the “ok what’s the catch” sort of free, but the “all the best software is free” kind

So I was having this problem where WordPress would display a blank editor for large posts when viewing visual mode. I could get it to work by using the HTML view and refreshing the page, but never in visual mode.

Anyway turns out to be the result of some modest PHP pcre regex defaults. Thankfully all it took was changing a few setting in PHP.ini. A bit thanks to the following blog post, which turned a nightmare of a bug to find into a quick and easy fix.

Sudden empty / blank page for large posts with WordPress | Under My Hat.

So I’ve been building my first Ruby on Rails site for an assignment. For hosting, I’ve found Heroku which seems absolutely lovely. They have a free service but if things keep going well I would gladly pay for an account there.

Anyway, I tried following the upload instructions on Windows through Aptana RadRails, and had nothing but problems.. mostly I blame RadRails, it’s letting me down more and more.

But I finally did find this great guide, which goes about things through Cygwin. I still use RadRails for development, then just run a few shell commands in Cygwin to get it uploaded. Anyway the link is below, and deserves major “props”.

Getting Started with Heroku on Windows : b#.

Enjoy!

Like lots of people who use Thunderbird, I was getting irritated when receiving emails from Outlook users with the smiley’s replaced by J’s.

Unsuprisingly, it’s Microsoft’s fault because they just simply don’t care about other clients and standards. Anyway, here’s how to fix it:

j’s in Thunderbird emails Outlook smiley faces | The Swan Song.