Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Sent to Menu

I usually spend most of my time on the internet going through my RSS feeds on Google Reader. Reader has a great feature called Send to at the bottom of each post which allows you to send the current article to a list of predefined sites or you can define custom sites to send the article to.

Send to Predefined sites

The included list of predefined sites offers plenty of options, but it is missing entries for Readability.com. I’ve used Twitter, Tumblr and Posterous before, but lately I find myself only using Readability since I’m able to send the article to my Kindle.

In order to add the entries just click on “create custom link” and fill in the box with the following and click Save when done. I created two links, one for Read Later and the other for Read Now. You can add both or just the Read Later.

Read Now

Name: Readability (READ NOW)
URL: http://www.readability.com/read?url=${url}Icon URL: http://www.readability.com/media/images/favicon.ico

Read Later

Name: Readability (READ LATER)
URL: http://www.readability.com/save?url=${url}
Icon URL: http://www.readability.com/media/images/favicon.ico

Here is what it should look like.

Create Custom Link

Screenshot from Readability.com

Since I got my Kindle (Kindle 3) I’ve been using Readability to send articles and post from the sites I frequent over to my kindle. Readability is a great product similar to Instapaper and Read it Later, but it adds a few features specific for Kindle users.

Readability converts web page into a clean and distraction free reading content. At the moment it has extensions for Chrome and Firefox (Bookmarklet can be used for other browsers) and a great mobile web app for iOS and Android browsers. iOS and Android apps are in the works.

On January 10th Readability announced that it was now a free service (before that you would only get your last 30 entries for free) which is great for those who wish to use it as a filing cabinet for articles.

Readability Extension

The Readability extension gives you three options: 1) Read Now, 2) Read Later, or 3) Send to Kindle. Option 1 and 2 will send to output to your reading list on Readability.com  with option 1 giving you the Readability version of the article immediately. Option 3 work pretty much like Read Later but will send the output the your kindle email address. I prefer to use option 2 and have set up Readability to send me a digest of all my articles at 4 a.m. which is set up like a periodical subscription which is replaced each day. The digest includes a neat table of contents on you Kindle so you can browse through your saved items.

Here is what an article would look like after being sent to Readability.com.

Original Article

After Processed by Readability

Here is a short video on what Readability is:

Readability — Read comfortably anytime, anywhere. from Arc90 on Vimeo.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Cover from Feb 2006

While cleaning out some boxes in the closet I came across and issue of CPU (Computer Power User) from February 2006. I really don’t think about it much, but 5+ year in the tech world is a very long time. I’m going to highlight a few things from the magazine which I found most interesting.

It was interesting to see that Rob “CmdrTaco” Malda and Chris Pirillo under the experts page. Haven’t seen much of CmdrTaco after he left Slashdot and haven’t followed Chris Pirillo in a while.

The editorial by Chris Trumble talks about AMD and Intel going beyond dual-core, the upcoming release of a new version of Windows (Windows Vista which was release in November) and the newly release XBOX 360 (has it really been that long since it was released?). Page nine talks about Google Analytics being released and Google not accepting new accounts at the time the magazine went to press.

Digital Economy Page 12

On page 12 it speculates that by 2010 nearly 63 million people would have tried podcasting, Edison Research published in 2010 “The Current State Of Podcasting” with numbers around 70 million people (that’s a pretty close estimation if you ask me).

Top 10 Bluetooth Gadgets. Page 58

Top 10 Bluetooth Gadgets (page 58) puts the HP iPAQ hw6515 as the number one gadget which ran for $500 with a service contract and had a 1.3MP Camera.

Upgrades (page 73), I used to look forward to this section every month and it looks like in February 2006 there were a few must have upgrades to apply:

1. Firefox 1.5
2. Google Talk 1.0.0.78 Beta
3. (Unofficial) Win98 SE Service Pack 2.1a
4. ATI Catalyst 5.11 (I used to hate dealing with ATI drivers)

Chris Pirillo Editorial Picture

Unleash your Inner Torrent by Chris Pirillo (page 79) mentions uTorrent as a new product which “is poised to become the leading Windows-based BitTorrent client”. It also mentions Azureus (now Vuze) as “the client that most BitTorrent neophytes go for”.

I find it amazing how much technology changes in a very short time. This is one of the reasons I decided to make my career in this field. There is always something new and if you don’t keep up, you’ll be left behind. I’ve come across many individuals who are very sharp, but are unable to compete for new positions/jobs because they lack the ambition to keep up with current tech. One of my best tools to keep current is Google Reader where my average list of sites I follow fluctuates between 150 and 200.

Google Reader Stats

First, Zenimax the company that acquired id Software will be releasing the source-code for Doom 3 later on this year. Should start getting some cool games based on the Doom 3 engine soon after the code release.

Next, Xamarin (the company which is now developing Mono) has released Mono 2.10.3 which makes it the first official release of Mono under Xamarin. This release includes support for MacOS X Lion (Mono and Gtk+). There is also a MonoMac add-in for MonoDevelop update which fixes Lion issues.

Finally, Dotan J. Nahum (jondot on GitHub) has released packs an open source implementation of BoxJS, BoxCSS and Boxresizer. All of which are mountable as Rack apps inside Rails or as stand-alone apps. It is also fully compatible with Heroku.

If you’re a developer (especially an FOSS developer) you now have a few new toys to play with.

Sources:

• Doom 3 Source-Code To Be Released This Year
• And we are back: Mono 2.10.3
• MonoMac add-in for MonoDevelop
• packs

I will be installing and using Ruby with RVM (Ruby Version Manager) which is a command line tool which will allow me to easily install and manage multiple version of Ruby. This is a requirement since I will be developing using Ruby and jRuby.

What is RVM

As I mentioned above, RVM is a command line tool which allows us to install, manage and use multiple ruby environments. You can install ruby 1.8.7, 1.9.2, JRuby, etc. and you can also maintain several environments of the save version but with different set of gems installed. RVM handles this by creating self-contained environments isolated from each other. This also allows us to test our applications with different versions of ruby and/or setups.

I think its time to get started with the installation.

RVM Prerequisites

Before we start with the installation of RVM, let’s make sure we have all of the tools used by RVM.

• bash (at least version 3.2)
• awk
• sed
• grep
• which
• tar
• curl
• gunzip
• bunzip
• git
• subversion

Make sure you have these tools installed using your package manager. This is the command with yum (Fedora package manager):

yum install bash awk sed grep which tar curl gunzip bunzip git subversion


I know it might be a bit redundant, but it ensures that I’m not missing anything. In my case I already had them all installed since I had selected a Development Workstation during install, but it was going to perform an upgrade on bash, curl, git, grep and subversion.

Installing RVM

RVM can be installed as a single or multi user. We will be using the single user install as the RVM documentation recommends which will create a self-contained RVM installation under our home directory ~/.rvm (in oder to perform the multi user installation just run the same install command using the root account which installs under /usr/local/rvm)

We will be installing the latest version from git, if you need or want to install a specific version refer to the installation documentation on the RVM site.

Install the latest release

user$ bash < <(curl -s https://rvm.beginrescueend.com/install/rvm)


The install script will give us some extra information and additional dependencies depending on the environments we intend to use:

For Ruby (MRI and Ruby Enterprise Edition)

yum install -y gcc-c++ patch readline readline-devl zlib zlib-devel libyaml-devel libffi-devel openssl-devel
yum install -y make bzip2
yum install -y iconv-devel


For JRuby

yum install -y java


Most Rails install will need the following

yum install -y libxslt-devel sqlite-devel openssh


Now we just need to update or .bashrc file and start installing Ruby. Add the following line at the end of .bashrc

[[ -s "~/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && source "~/.rvm/scripts/rvm"


In my case the script updated my .bashrc file.

Before we continue you can either close your terminal session and start a new one or execute the following command

source "~/.rvm/scripts/rvm"

Installing Ruby and Rails

I’m going to set up two environments, ruby 1.9.2 and jruby. First up is ruby 1.9.2

rvm install 1.9.2

This will install Ruby from source and create the environment under ~/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.2-p180. Next we switch to our new ruby environment and set it as the default and start the Rails installation.

rvm use 1.9.2 --default
gem install rails

Next we install our JRuby environment.

rvm install jruby

JRuby is able to load the 1.8 or 1.9 Ruby API (Defaulting to 1.8). If you need to run with the 1.9 API you will need to export JRUBY_OPTS=”–1.9″ which is not much of a problem if you don’t use it very often. But, if you want to use the 1.9 API as your default it would really be nice to have it done each time you have RVM load JRuby. To do so, we will be using RVM hooks.

RVM hooks are files located under ~/.rvm/hooks/ which are triggered depending on their name. Supported hooks include after_user, before_install, after_install, after_do and after_cd. Each hook has the entire RVM environment available.

We will be using the after_use hook in order to change our JRuby API to 1.9 each time we execute rvm use jruby. create ~/.rvm/hooks/after_use (or update if it already exists) with the following code

case "$GEM_HOME" in
*jruby*)
JRUBY_OPTS="--1.9" ; export JRUBY_OPTS
;;
esac

Now, whenever you execute rvm use jruby you should see the following

Using /home/yourusername/.rvm/gems/jruby-1.6.2
Running /home/yourusername/.rvm/hooks/after_use

Now switch over to JRuby we can now install Rails

rvm use jruby
gem install rails

If you want jruby to be the default environment you use just add the –default at the end of your use command. A neat feature of rvm is that while using jruby you can actually use ruby instead of jruby from the command line.

Resources

• Ruby Version Manager (RVM)
• Ruby on Rails
• Ruby
• jRuby
• Brewing Unix tools in OS X

So what are the big changes?

NOTHING. Absolutely nothing. Sure, we have the usual two thirds driver
changes, and a lot of random fixes, but the point is that 3.0 is
*just* about renumbering, we are very much *not* doing a KDE-4 or a
Gnome-3 here. No breakage, no special scary new features, nothing at
all like that…

Pretty much this is just a renumbering of the kernel.

via: Linus Torvalds announcement on lkml.org