Monthly Archives: August 2008
Facebook like autocomplete
Not sure how many people subscribe to our development blog at RoRCraft. We just release some cool stuff recently – A Facebook like autocomplete implemented on scriptaculous. Check out the demo.
Quicksilver, Enso to Firefox Ubiquity
I’m a big fan of keyboard navigation these days. I found that having 1 monitor screen with keyboard navigation is more productive than two big monitors with a mouse. Although I have to admit I still like using the Macbook multi-touch trackpad quite a bit.
The Quicksilver interface was definitely an step up innovation from Apple’s spotlight. Although since Leopard it hasn’t been very stable, I still use the Triggers function for shortcuts to my applications. There’s also another alternative – butler, but I haven’t tried it. Last year, I’ve been following this usability company called Humanized and they released a Quicksilver equivalent, Enso, for the Windows Platform. Later it also became free and they ported alot of this idea onto the Firefox mozilla platform.
That is how Ubiquity was born.
I recommend everyone to check this out. It’s definitely natural to a developer to use this kind of interface. I’m glad all the effort that went into Enso was not lost. The response on the mozilla blog post is amazing.
Humanized also seem to be doing some interesting things for Firefox mobile, check it out.
2 weeks left before my big day.
Can’t believe it is finally happening. Organising a wedding is definitely not easy (when you try to work and have a life at the same time). It reminds me of the Uni days when I’m rushing to finish projects before the deadlines. Its going alright so far, hopefully it’ll be a happy day for everyone.
We took some pre-wedding photos, just thought I’ll share with you. Since we announced our engagement on the web as well. These are taken by our lovely photographers at Fotoexpresssion.
Startup Camp Sydney
I’m happy to see TechNation keeping up its regular posts on Austrlian tech startups. An Australian specific tech blog is long overdue before TechCrunch‘s Arrington became a star. Something caught my eye the other day, it’s another Australian’s first – startupcamp. Railscamp has had 3 successes already and barcamp also has 3, since 07.
I would love to do it, but I have my wedding coming up and if anyone has gone through one, it’s rather stressful..
Especially when I’m doing a startup at the same time.. There’s always a next time for these things, but not for a wedding. So I’ll have to skip this one. Kudos to Bart Jellema as well, for setting up startup-australia.org, it’s got a good list of Australia startups on there. It’s really gathering steam now.
Here’s the details I quote:
1. The first StartupCamp Australia will be in Sydney only and will be a small event (numbers are limited so make sure you sign up early)
2. The date has been changed to the 5th-7th September because…
3. Geekdom has kindly made their boardroom available on those days.
Beijing Olympics withdrawal
As you may know I work from home, I’ve actually been able to watch alot of the games this time around. It still feels like its finished in such a short time, maybe because I’ve been so god damn busy. The success of this Olympics has made me very proud of the Chinese as the host nation as well as top country in the gold medal tally. There’s also some new things I’ve learnt from this Olympics.
- Its very classy watching the Olympics muted with classical music
- Yao Ming is the best Chinese Basketball player
- I’m starting to hear metaphors like “The Michael Phelps of rubyfu” just like saying “The Michael Jordan of table tennis”
- If Australia has the same population as China, they should get 784 gold medals
- If you liked the artistic beauty of the Opening and Closing ceremonies, directed by Zhang Yimou, you should visit Hangzhou’s Impression Westlake or Yunan’s Impression Lijiang
Here’s some Chingrish humor when I was in Hangzhou:
Saw this on ABC’s MediaWatch just last night as well. How poor is the Australia online streaming of the games!? Yahoo7 streams 2hrs out of 24 hrs vs CBC Canada’s website, for example, where you could find live coverage of up to nine events at a time.
http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s2346180.htm
The Australian appetite for viewing live streaming has not reached the penetration of the US or Canada.
— Email from Kath Hamilton (General Manager, Media, Yahoo7) to Media Watch, 22nd August, 2008
Stumped by multiple ssh key pair on github or unfuddle?
I’ve been using git in my new projects these days, just because it’s cool — and it’s FAST! We use unfuddle to host our projects but some of our clients prefer to have their own accounts. You can only associate one ssh key pair to each unfuddle account. So thats fine, you can setup multiple ssh key pairs, github has some good explanations.
Here: http://github.com/guides/multiple-github-accounts
Basically you tell your ssh to use different keypairs for particular hostnames in ~/.ssh/config like so:
Host rorcraft.unfuddle.com
User git
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_dsa
Host ankoder.unfuddle.com
User git
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_dsa_ankoder
NOTE: If you’re using passphrase and you’re on OSX Leopard or if you’re using ssh-agent. You have to kill your ssh-agent process first.
Leopard has keychain integration built-in for ssh key passphrase by using ssh-agent. This will stop your configs working. Either don’t use passphrase or don’t store it in keychains.
ps xa | grep ssh-agent | grep -v grep
1240 ?? S 0:02.36 /usr/bin/ssh-agent -l
Took me a bit of time of figure this out.. but I still love git.
Rex Chung 