Posts

[Updated: 2013-01-08 - A lot of people asked for Postgres instructions]

After my faithful Macbook Air went down hard in Tonga, I was really surprised at the number of outdated posts, misinformation and general number of questions (even on Stack Overflow), on how to install a Rails dev environment from scratch on a new OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion machine.

This HOWTO runs from zero to getting you to what I consider a naked dev environment where you’re good enough to start and source control a project and issue a rails new command. It starts from a totally fresh install of Mountain Lion with all system updates.

Some quiet holiday time has finally given me the chance to polish up the code I wrote earlier this year and finally release my blog engine.

Kobayashi is finally out in the world in at least a first release form with a few tests, a basic theme and working code.

I wrote more extensively about why I’d write a blog engine here .

Kobayashi’s built to handle large blogs and still be damn fast and cache and act as if the entire site was static so (hopefully) hold up under high loads with highly optimized caching using memcache and etag http caching. The whole thing runs on heroku with a simple push.

While getting my new system back to the way my old system was configured, I’ve been very surprised at the amount of old, outdated information on setups floating around the web.

For example, a few months back Chrome provided a new way to have both mailto: links and your default system mail handler in OSX set up from the browser. Google searches still point to the outdated and cumbersome methods to do it. Here’s the easier way…

This clip is just amazing. I have to admit swimming with wild dolphins at Kaikoura was perhaps one of the most amazingly enjoyable things I have ever done, but I would have lost it seeing this video footage.

Even more amazingly, the whole thing was captured with a simple GoPro camera (a Hero2 with the dive casing and a home-built “torpedo”, apparently.). In any case, just watching this puts you in a better mood. Dolphin amazingness starts just after 1m30.

Stunning spoken word video with some great imagery and music mixed in by Jason Silva on The Biological Advantage of Being Awestruck .

Definitely one of those full screen, dim the lights and turn the volume way up kinda of things. Some very cool sentiment on what it means to be human and awestruck.

(though personally don’t know if I would have gone for the Hubble as the penultimate written expression of awe, though “mainlining the whole of time through the optic nerve” is definitely something I’m filing away for future conversational use at a swanky cocktail party… =] ).

OK, kinda love this to scale comparison of the various planets of the solar system. Kinda cool to remember how much bigger some of the other planets in the neighbourhood are than good old Earth. Despite me starting off in astrophysics, it’s never top of mind how big Uranus and Neptune are.

One of my goals this year was to up my foundation dev skills and a (sort of) semi-SMART goal of getting up four progressively more difficult apps I’d be scheming about releasing over the course of the year.

Kobayashi, which powers my re-christened blog Tundramonkey, was one of those apps. Yeah, I know… blog software? Can’t you do that in, like… 15 minutes? I mean, there’s a Rails screencast and everything… Well, actually… no. What I found once I got going was that it ended up being quite the little project and while the basic coding behind getting core functionality up was quite easy, the vast collection of details that goes into migrating over eight years of posts and the functionality you’ve actually used means quite a bit of detail sweating.

Pretty fantastic cosmological simulation from the Big Bang to the formation of a Disk Galaxy with “rich merging” and plenty of collisions from NASA’s N-body shop (makers of quality galaxies). Slightly hypnotic to watch and would be much better with a nice soundtrack (and a drink!) to accompany it imho, but cool nonetheless.

Likey? You can also check out a video simulation of a Milky Way like galaxy forming .

Incredible timelapse of ISS photos of our big blue marble. Beautiful. Especially love the way the Aurora Borealis looks with the stitched together shots.

Watch it in full screen in a darkened room with the sound turned way up.

Put together by 18-year-old Croatian Tomislav Safundžić, from photos taken aboard the ISS.

(via Like Cool )

Kinda loving this excellent campaigning video from the Taronga Zoo . Love the wet ink animation style and just the general tone. Great execution (and the zoo is an awesome cause btw. They do fantastic work.).

Only problem is no solid Call to Action on the end.