DEfusion.org.uk » Quick Link

Where to Start With, open to all & new feature

Dave — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 21:16:07 +0000

Just a very quick post to let you all know that my community-driven music recommendation site Where to Start With has just left private beta. Not only that but we have launched what we think is a killer new feature, there is a lot more detail (and a screencast) in the blog post over at our Where to Start With blog.

Quick Link: Dead simple task scheduling in Rails

Dave — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 11:23:04 +0000

I’ve just come across this post on dead simple task scheduling in Rails by the guys at intridea. It looks like a really nifty way to setup scheduled tasks in your Rails app, previously I had my tasks in rake files which I would then hit with cron.

While that is working perfectly adequately for my current setup it does have one downside, when I setup a new server I will have to setup the crontab file too. With this method when I deploy my app my scheduled tasks would get deployed and be running out of the box. Nice.

Quick Link:Where Does Money Come From?

Dave — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 23:14:04 +0000

Dave Gorman asked the question "Where does money come from?" earlier today, obviously the economy is on a lot of peoples minds at the moment (and not least my own — more on that another time). It was a simple question and there was a couple of really great links in the comments: Money as Debt video on Google Video, which is also available from moneyasdebt.net and a quick summation of the "Money as Debt" video.

I, like many others no doubt, thought that it was all based on the money that we deposit in banks; they invest some of that and keep some aside to let other depositors (and me) have access to some of that. But that still didn’t answer the question as to where the rest of the money comes from but the video does a great job of explaining it.

And if after watching that you’re not a little concerned then you must be a banker.

Quick Tip: Automatic checking for forgotten attachments in Thunderbird

Dave — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 09:15:23 +0000

It seems that recently I’ve been sending quite a few emails that require me to attach things to them. I’ve always had a bit of a problem, which from my experience of receiving emails also seems to be quite common, of writing the email first and then forgetting to add the attachment.

This usually results in me (just seconds after sending the email) having to write a short follow-up email saying how I’d forgot to attach them and ensure with the attachments included (as it’s really bad when you forget the attachments on this second email).

I remembered seeing that Gmail labs have added a forgotten attachment feature recently, so I did a quick search to find a plugin for Thunderbird that allows me to do the same (as I use Gmail over IMAP most of the time).

The plugin I found is called Check and Send which allows you to check quite a few things (or prompt you to manually double check every email before you really send it – which I disabled straight away) but most importantly it has the following check:

whether the words you pre-defined exist in the message and the message does not have any attachments

Bingo, that’ll do nicely. Now whenever I write ‘attached’ or ‘attachment’ it will let me know if the email doesn’t have any attachment. It even ignores any quoted text.

Quick Tip: If Parallels Suddenly Goes Slow

Dave — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 15:31:01 +0000

I’ve noticed a few times that my Ubuntu VM, running in Parallels, suddenly goes slow.

First time round I was totally confused and re-booted the VM (I access it via SSH), that didn’t work, and was also really slow. So I shut it down and then I noticed when I returned to Parallels to stop the VM that a dialog box was waiting for me (telling me there was an update or something). It turned out that this was the issue. It seems to happen to me for any dialog box as just now I’ve had the same issue when there is a dialog box asking if I want the VM to connect to a USB device.

Seems silly to me that this should slow down the VM, but just thought I’d mention it.

Quick Link: Online Throbber/Loader Graphic Maker

Dave — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 08:30:38 +0000

I know you, just like me, has looked for a cool throbber/loader graphic for your web application more than one. Go on admit it.

Well there is no need to search any more as I’ve found a site that lets you create one from many available styles: AjaxLoad.info. Fantastic!