Casual Code

A new tools released by Google allows Mac users to search you online Google documents.  With this new tool the accessability of Google Docs has increased.

Precipitate Project Page

Google recently released a new open source tool called “Protocol Buffers.”  Protocol Buffers allows developers to store and tranfers structed data.  Claims have been made that Protocol Buffers can be upto 10x faster than XML.

It always nice when Google gives back to the open source community and this is a great project.

Lately I have been having some minor readabiltiy issues with my Terminal.app.  After some Google searching I came across a nice set of step which help you improve your Terminal.app.

I have been having some problems debugging some of my cron scripts and when I went looking for the cron log file it didn’t exists. By default, Ubuntu disables the cron log.

The following steps will enable the cron log to allow for better debugging details.

1. Edit /etc/syslog.conf and uncomment the line starting with cron.*
2. Run /etc/init.d/sysklogd restart
3. Run /etc/init.d/cron restart

Source

I am a recent Mac convert and one annoying thing about Terminal.app is that the Home/End/Page Up/Page Down keys do not function properly. Luckily, I ran into a blog which outlines the fixes for this issue.

Fixing Page Up and Page Down Keys in Leopard’s Terminal.app

Fixing Home and End Keys in Leopard’s Terminal.app

When I was trying to install a ruby gem the other day on Ubuntu, I ran into the following error:

extconf.rb:1:in `require’: no such file to load — 

mkmf (LoadError)

After doing some research I figured out the following command will get things working in my favor:

sudo apt-get install ruby1.8-dev

Source

Been having some problems with my Samsung Cell Phone and a hard reset seemed to have solved the problem.

Just input the following: *2767*3855#

Use at you own risk! It worked for my Samsung t809 and Samsung X105.

I just finished with a Google Interview for an internship. I must say it was a very challenging phone interview. I will see the results of the phone interview in about a week.

I am also one of eight students to receive the UNCF / Google Scholarship for 2006 - 2007. I greatly appreciate the efforts of both Google and the UNCF.

I was working on a quick program to read and write data to files in Ruby. I am new to Ruby so here is a quick lesson in basic Ruby file operations.

Reading Files

Writing Files

This is a pretty straight forward example. I make use of the “r” and “w” I/O modes. You can find out more about the I/O modes at the Ruby API site.

I had some problems with TortoiseSVN 1.4.1 and Windows Vista Ultimate. TortoiseSVN would complain about the status cache. It got really annoying. After installing the latest nightly build, everything has been working just fine.