Urban Puddle

I've been using XFCE for a while, but I've heard a few things about LXDE and my curiosity got the best of me. Since Linux is so forgiving I decided to take a while and install it. Here are my impressions.

The other day one of my customers had the misfortune of getting thousands of Mail Delivery errors. The reason? Some spammer had used his email address in the 'from' field when sending out spam. The only thing you can really do to stop that sort of thing getting through is implementing Sender Policy Framework. What it does in a nutshell is provide recepient servers with some extra information to let them know if the mail they just got from example.com really came from example.com. If not, they can silently discard the mail and go on their way.

It's been a while since I had anything interesting to write about ruby, rails, linux, or tech. I've been busy implementing all the cool stuff I've learned over the last year into the sites I've done in order to bring them up to speed. In the meantime, here's a free download for you to enjoy from a band called Yellow Fever out of Austin, TX. It's called Joe Brown.

If you spend some time googling for Rails plugins to interface with Flickr, you'll no doubt run into rflickr. Dig a little deeper and you'll find that it hasn't been updated in a while. There is a fork of it up on Github, but unfortunately that doesn't work with Rails 2.1 either. But, there are two plugins that I have confirmed work with Rails 2.1 AND Ruby 1.8.7. At the time of this post, the documentation was a little lacking in some areas so I'll save you some time in case you decide to pursue flickr integration with your Rails app before the maintainers do some writing. Let's move on..

It's been a long time since I posted a free music download. I had some rare downtime today (Saturday) so I took the opportunity to expand my music collection and discover a cool new band at the same time. The result is this track from Embarrassing Fruits called The First Time. These guys are a trio out of Chapel Hill, NC. You can check out their MySpace page here and then click this link to download the MP3.

There are lots of great instructions out there for using Git so you may not be interested in another one. Mine is no doubt imperfect as well, but I didn't find a front-to-back tutorial for getting rolling with Git on your own centralized server. I ended up cobbling information together from a bunch of sources (which I will list below). Mostly for my own benefit, I'm posting what I learned here. Feel free to ignore or read on as you desire.. By the end of it we'll have installed Git on a server, created a repository on that server, and checked in code from our local machine.

I had a hardware failure on my Dell XPS 1330. This time I didn't drop it.. it's a known issue with the display and motherboard. Looks like I'll be getting a replacement shortly but in the meantime it's back to the Mac. In trying to get my MacBook up to speed I ran across a couple of useful links I thought I'd share in case anyone is interested.

First, how to get Visor running on OS X Leopard. Courtesy of the Ars forum.

Second, the easiest instructions I've seen yet on getting Git installed on OS X. Thanks to Thomas Aylott.

If you're running Leopard and haven't gotten around to either of these tasks, I promise it's super easy with the above links.

About a month ago I wrote a post about converting Railscasts to PSP video using a simple bash script. Well, with the help of my friend Lou, it's now been converted to a Ruby script instead. The files are posted at Github and the public clone url is git://github.com/vince/mp4-to-mobile-video.git so feel free to hack at it and improve it in any way you like. For those too lazy to check out the code, there's a copy/paste version (which of course will not be updated..) below.

In particular I'm posting this to help those familiar with Ruby get started with Ruby scripting since there are some methods you may not have used before if you've only used Ruby via Rails programming.

I've been using Ferret to do searches in BuyIndie for a quite a while now. It works ok but I know there are better solutions out there. One of those that I'm experimenting with is Sphinx. If you want to play along and install it along with the Thinking Sphinx plugin, here's how you do it.

I'm starting to use Shoes for a project I'm working on. I've never done used it before so this is all new. Going through the tutorials page I ran into one called Running with Shoes. Problem was I couldn't get the basic code running. The error I got was a daunting one considering I had only 12 lines of code.:

undefined method 'text' for app