I am now a proud owner of a brand-spanking new Macbook Pro, thanks to my dear wife’s birthday gift last week ! :o)
And she did not spoil any fun; kept it a closely guarded secret until the midnight hour birthday cake!.
I love you, dear wifey! :)
A stroke of insight - a splendid talk from TED
You must watch this amazing TED video
Thank you, Kiran…
An awesome write-up on Design
I happened on this tweet from Sven Fuchs (@svenfuchs) yesterday:
what a *fantastic* piece about design! informationarchitects.net/blog/learning-… really makes me want to screw code and do more design again (thx @dotmariusz!)
— Sven Fuchs (@svenfuchs) March 26, 2013
And that was so delightful a read, I thought I will linklog it from here.
Adding splash screen to an Ember.js app
Have been playing around with Ember.js quite a bit lately and it’s been real good fun. I have been trying to put together a PhoneGap/Cordova based Android app, for the awesome, open source, continuous integration application - Travis-CI. It is really in its pre-natal stages, but you could see whatever I’ve been doing here.
And I implemented a splash screen for that app using the below technique.
Twitter Cards for Octopress blogs
The first time I heard about Twitter Cards is from the GitHub blog entry announcing they have implemented it for all the GitHub respositories. And if you haven’t heard about them, go to either of those posts and you’d get a quick overview.
Anyways, since the time I read that blog, I have been thinking of trying to implement it here on this blog as well as on the other website I’ve been actively maintaining lately - flickrdownloadr.com. Finally got around to doing it yesterday on the static pages at flickrdownloadr site (even though I am still waiting for Twitter to approve my site).
Start WEBrick Web Server Here
I have started dabbling with Ember.js and it sure looks awesome!
This necessitated a quick and easy way to start serving the current directory through some webserver. And because of the recent adventures with Octopress, I happened to be aware of the presence of WEBrick as a nifty, light-weight server.
This led me to google "start a webrick server at current directory windows" and the first link was to this question on Stack Overflow.
Auto-deploying to my Octopress blog with Travis-CI
A couple weeks earlier, Sergey Klimov (who is @darvin at GitHub) opened the issue #940 at imathis/octopress, which is more a feature suggestion than an issue.
Within that, he has linked to his detailed blog post suggesting how the awesome Travis-CI could be configured to do the rake generate and rake deploy for you, when you add/update new posts to an octopress blog, even from browser-based editors like either the built-in GitHub editor, or a third-party tool like the prose.io editor (which is really awesome too, BTW).
For the uninitiated, Travis-CI is a really nice, open source, free and hosted continuous integration service that could build and run the unit tests for you, on every commit to a GitHub repository. It supports projects in a multitude of languages, as seen here. The service allows you to configure steps that would be run before, after and during the build and test process, with just one YAML file (named .travis.yml) in the root of your repo. Apart from running the many unit tests in the project and letting you know how your latest check-in affected the health of the project, the Travis-CI service could also do custom build tasks like a post-build deployment. And this is what Sergey has tappped into, for use with the deployment of an Octopress blog.
Using keyboard as mouse
Here’s how to get the mouse functionality using just the keyboard (with Numpad) on Windows: One good one to remember is Alt+Left Shift+NumLock
Then you can use your keypad as a mouse. / and - toggle which mouse button 5 is.
Could be useful sometime…
Migrated this blog to Octopress
Update (03/24/2017): The blog has been migrated yet another time - this time from Octopress into Hexo and so, some of the links below will not work anymore.
Update (01/22/2013): Perhaps I blogged too soon! I’m loving the Octopress so much, that the whole site has now been updated to be built with Octopress. So some old blogs (english & technical) get redirected to the corresponding categories on the new unified blog, while some others (malayalam are still on blogger and are not linked from the site for the time being.
This blog had been on blogger since its inception back in 2009, though it really has only a very few posts in those almost-four years. The newly found love for the Octopress blogging platform, thanks to the experience setting up the flickrdownloadr blog recently, I decided to bite the bullet and move my technical blog over.