Marry Me

Date: 2010.09.02 | Category: Funny/Weird Things on the Net, Off the record | Response: 0

You know, I just discovered that my “catchall@danielsmedegaardbuus.dk” address wasn’t really being picked up by my GMail account, so I’m currently wading through hordes of crappy spam e-mails from one.com.

So I got this one just now from wanita,

Hello, am a young single girl never marrid seeking true love for a long term relationship with marriage potentials,i am happy to contact you after going through your profile in ( www . jallers . dyndns . org ) us to be good friends or a lot more,you can contact me through mail so that i will send you my photos,till i hear  from you,bye and kisses!

Oh, wanita. So friendly for no apparent reason. So knowing me without actually knowing my email address. So… I don’t know, so everything! I accidentally wrote every-thong, but hell if that’s a mistake! So what if all my body’s blood is in my penis. She’ll wear TEN thongs for me if I tell her to.

A New Coat of Chrome Just Hit My Desktop

Date: 2010.09.02 | Category: Linux, Tech Stuff, Web | Response: 0

Just did an apt-get update & upgrade, and saw a new version of Google Chrome was being fetched. No biggie, me thinks, happens regularly. Except this one is really different.

This new version that hit my desktop, 6.0.472.53, is quite awesome, to tell the truth. Visually, it’s become even prettier than before, even more screen real estate is being used for content instead of controls, menus and other crap (hello, IE?), and those of us running KDE 4 are obviously happy to see it fitting even better into our Oxygen or Air themes.

An annoying drawing bug that has plagued Chrome for awhile, but only on my laptop with integrated Intel graphics, weird white blocks covering tabs when resizing the window or opening new tabs, is gone.

Font rendering is absolutely stunning. This is funny, because recently I desperately tried to get better font rendering in all of my apps. Had this been Windows, all my fonts would’ve seemed fine, but having Linux, and then being presented to the FreeSans and FreeSerif fonts, DAMN! Nothing else will seem pretty anymore. In Firefox, I forced all font families to FreeSans, FreeSerif and Liberation Mono to get pretty fonts, but this is not really a fix, so I’ve been looking for a proper fix, getting “regular” fonts to render more nicely. With Chrome, I didn’t have the same option to override font families, so I had to settle for proper fonts with strong hinting and jagged edges. This new version, everything looks beautiful!

Oh, and the speed… I mean, was this a minor update? I think not! It’s so extremely fast now that I don’t know where to start. I’m thinking it might somehow have to be related with the fixed font issue, really, and I’m suspecting that maybe now Chrome pulls more from your fontconf and GTK stuff. But really, I’m just talking out of my ass here

Oh yeah, and Ctrl+Shift+I now opens the “Chromebug” pane

Either way, here’s +1 from one happy camper!

If ChromeOS is going to be anything like this, hmmmm… Why not?

Fantastic font rendering, fast HTML rendering, sweet experience all the way

Pretty Fonts in VMware Player and Workstation

Date: 2010.08.31 | Category: Tech Stuff | Response: 0

Don’t know about you, but when the UI of my VMware Player turned all grotesque-looking with horrible serifed megafonts, I kinda thought they’d suddenly decided to go with a completely new and ugly UI toolkit.

But really, it’s still GTK, they’ve just decided to no longer honor system settings and go with their own bundled copy with its own settings.

But you can still get nice fonts! Just go root, and edit /usr/lib/vmware/libconf/etc/gtk-2.0/gtkrc, adding these lines:

Ruby 1.9.2 on Ubuntu/Mint with no Fuss and no Muss

Date: 2010.08.31 | Category: Development, Linux, Rails, Ruby, Tech Stuff | Response: 0

Okay, so I was wanting to try out the newly released version 3.0 of Ruby on Rails, and I didn’t want any of that old and slow Ruby 1.8.x series that has been the default for years in Kubuntu, and probably any other Debian-based distro (I’m on Mint Isadora right now, and it’s the same thing here).

Why? Well, you can take that jRuby and stuff it, because even if it beats the 1.8.x MRI “vanilla” Ruby in performance, it comes nowhere near the x4 performance Ferrari run you get with Matz’ MRI Ruby 1.9.x. Besides, let’s move the fuck on people, the first preview of 1.8 was released in 2002, and 1.9 has been here for three years! Could we just try to not fall asleep, please?

Well, anyway, as this isn’t the first time I’ve tried to go the 1.9 way with Kubunuxumutuntu, I kinda expected it to suck, because I’ve never seen it actually just install and run as “ruby”. I’d always add the packages I wanted using apt, then do ruby –version, and be greeted with the all to familiar,

…sigh. Thanks. Of course, this isn’t because ruby wasn’t installed, it’s because it’s installed as “ruby1.9.1″, gem is “gem1.9.1″, and so on and so forth. So do you go with the symlinking approach, possible breaking future package installs that try to install ruby 1.8.x as a dependency, do you try to configure your way out of it and aliasing commands in bashrc, or do you go Googling as usual?

Of course I go Googling, and this time I was actually in for a couple of surprises. First of all, Rails doesn’t even support Ruby 1.9.1, if you want 1.9, you have to go with the brand-new version, 1.9.2! The missing support for 1.9.1 surprised me, because I’d thought “they’d come around by now, what with 3.0 and all”. Anyone who’s tried Railing on 1.9.1 will know that you’d get into some serious trouble getting the gems up and running. Sooner or later you’d be staring at a compiler error taking all the fun and future hopes out of it all.

Second of all, I came across RVM, or the Ruby Version Manager. This sweet, sweet tool will not only automate the retrieval, compilation, and installation of any Ruby version available from Matz, IronRuby, jRuby or whatever, it will also do it non-intrusively, by installing everything in your home dir and no go fudging with system binaries that other, older, and quirky applications may depend upon.

And get this: That’s not all of it, you can also install any number of different revisions to suit all kinds of crazy apps and setups you may have that needs it. Sounds fussy? Fuck no, it’s a piece of cake There are lots of other cool things it can do that, some that I don’t even understand, but either way, just go read about it, then go install it, and set up your Ruby version(s)!

A couple of tips to add to what you read there:

• The documentation claims you need to install a 1.8.x branch before any of the other versions, but I found that doing “rvm –install 1.9.2” twice with a ctrl+c when it starts to download 1.8.x on the first attempt will install just the 1.9.2 branch in the second attempt without any issues (yet).
• You probably want to set a Ruby version as the default after you’ve installed. I did “rvm –default ruby-1.9.2“.
• Remember to follow the directions on packages you need to install, and note that git-core should probably be installed before you start doing anything. You don’t really need vim, either, unless that’s your preference. I use Aptana.

Let’s go Railing 3.0-style on the 1.9.2 Ruby branch motherfuckers! Yeah!

Be Gone, Stupid Aptana Studio 3 Folders in My Home Folder

Date: 2010.08.31 | Category: Development, Tech Stuff | Response: 0

What’s the deal with these automatically, and persistently, created Aptana directories – the ~/Aptana Studio 3 folder, and the other one, the ~/Documents/Aptana Rubles? I mean, hey, fair ’nuff to use some defaults for the first run, we’re used to that from Eclipse, but contrary to Eclipse, we can’t just change this. You’ll find that changing the default workspace and asking to use it and never ask again will do nothing of the sorts. On next startup, same shit, different day

Anyway, fear not: It’s simply a matter of changing a couple of lines in a couple of files.

#1: “AptanaStudio3.ini” in the Aptana program folder. Here we get to define the rubles folder. At the end, add a line like this:

-Daptana.ruble.user.location="/home/daniel/.aptana-rubles"

Windows users would write something like C:\Path\to\My\Shizzles” instead. I prefer to keep this folder hidden, and most definitely not in my Documents folder. These ain’t exactly documents, ya know

#2: “config.ini” in the configuration subfolder of the Aptana program folder. This one sets the workspace folder. Change the line that resembles this to a location to you liking:

osgi.instance.area.default=@user.home/.aptana-workspace

Again, I like to keep this folder hidden, though my projects go into ~/Projects. You don’t have to put your projects in the workspace folder, you know

That’s it! Get rid of the old annoying cruddy folders, restart Aptana, and watch as the folders are not recreated. Yay, freedom FTW!

Chamber of Death

Date: 2010.07.18 | Category: Apple, Off the record, Reviews, Tech Stuff | Response: 0

So this is the damage control for the Apple iPhone 4 antenna shit?

Okay, so because retards spent $100 million on non-real-world testing scenarios and put people in 2001: A Space Odyssey-esque chambers with a phone in their hand to take great pictures, we’re supposed to ignore the facts? What the fuck kind of retarded PR stunt is this? Oh yeah, sorry, it’s the same kind of retarded PR stunt that usually get the dicks hard on Apple monkeys on the prowl for more locked-in bananas.

Screw your pathetic excuses, the problem isn’t your antenna, it’s your attitude.

WHERE’S OUR FLASH? Where’s our freedom?