Tumbles of Many Thoughts

Listening to "The Mamas & The Papas - California Dreamin"

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 00:16:00 +0300

Listening to "The Mamas & The Papas - California Dreamin":

A memorable old song that is still as good today as it was 45 years ago.

"We are living in a far from perfect world. Despite the progress of civilization, the law of the..."

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 22:43:25 +0300

“

We are living in a far from perfect world. Despite the progress of civilization, the law of the jungle, unfortunately, still prevails.

Might is considered right and the strong do not refrain from exploiting the weak.

Self-advancement, greed and lust for power sway the conduct of the individuals as that of nations.

”

- Message to the Pakistan Scouts on 22nd December, 1947 by Muhammad Ali Jinnah

Ruby on Rails failed support for Windows Platform

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 22:18:00 +0300

I recently started working with Ruby on Rails and the biggest issue I encountered was the lack of support for it on the Windows platform and since I work with .NET and a lot of other tools which are windows only a switch to Linux or Mac was out of the question.

I went to great lengths to setup an Ubuntu server running inside of VirtualBox with port forwarding’s between the Gust and Host OS for the HTTP, FTP, SSH and MySQL protocols so that I could develop on a supported Linux platform and still not have to give up Windows.

All though it worked great when I was using it with Vim over PuTTY or other code editors over FTP but it was unusable with IDE’s like NetBeans and RadRails.

At this point I had become frustrated with these problems as I had spent enormous amount of my time on getting Ruby and its ecosystem fully working on the Windows platform and I had all most given up on it.

I was just about ready to make do with the virtual machine solution that I had setup before.

But then I found the BitNami RubyStack which turned out to be the best solution that I have tested on the Windows platform by far. It includes packed and ready to run copies of Apache, MySQL and Ruby on Rails with all their dependencies upon its installation.

I have been using it for about a month now and so far I have not encountered any problems or issues that I could not solve but keep in mind that the stack is still running on top of Windows so you will encounter occasional problems especially while installing some gems & plug-ins.

It’s a real shame that there is no official support for the Windows platform because if it was supported it would open Ruby & its ecosystem to a large number of developers that can’t switch to other platforms or might be hesitant of the mess that awaits them if they decide to use it on Windows.

If you have done any Rails development on Windows or other platforms then don’t forget to drop a line sharing your experiences.

Destroying perfectly good retail merchandise

Sat, 09 Jan 2010 13:46:55 +0300

A lot of people are talking about this story, which condemns H&M and Wal-Mart for destroying unsold clothing rather than donating it to a charity or simply throwing it away unharmed to accommodate dumpster-divers.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone who has worked in a retail store.

Many stores have arrangements to return any unsold or outdated merchandise to their suppliers for credit. With this arrangement, the stores take little risk, so suppliers can convince them to stock new or short-lived items. For items of significant value, like electronics, it works as you’d expect: the stores just ship them back.

But many items aren’t worth shipping back, so the stores and suppliers have a wasteful but effective arrangement: the stores simply tell the suppliers how many of each item didn’t sell, the suppliers give the stores credit for them, and the stores must destroy them.

When I worked at Staples briefly in college, we had to destroy most open-box customer returns of inexpensive items, like reams of paper and USB cables, and old versions of software (so many copies of Norton Security Whatevers 2002 when the 2003 versions came out).

“Destroy” doesn’t mean that everything needs to be completely obliterated — it just needs to be damaged enough that it’s not usable. So we’d cut the (perfectly good) USB cables in half, tear a bunch of the pages from the reams of paper, and scratch the software CDs with a box cutter. Then they’d all get thrown away. No part of this was negotiable with the managers. (I tried.)

Have you ever seen a book or magazine that said something along the lines of, “If you received this book without a cover, the author hasn’t been paid for his work”? That’s because book and magazine publishers have a similar arrangement with their vendors, except that the publishers often required in the past (not sure if it’s still true) that the store tear off and send back each credited item’s cover before throwing away the rest.

It’s all incredibly wasteful, but on some level, I can see why they do it: if the “get credit and destroy” system changed to “get credit and donate”, it would really become “get credit, say they were donated, then take them home and sell them on eBay”.

(A lot of retail mechanics are dedicated to reducing theft by their own employees.)

Given that Wal-Mart has a machine dedicated to punching holes in unsold clothing, and they sell nearly everything on consignment and take no risk of unsold stock, they almost certainly have a credit-and-destroy arrangement with the supplier of the clothing in this story.

It’s unfair to criticize these two companies for a practice that’s incredibly common in the entire industry, spanning nearly every product category and nearly every major retailer.

The wastefulness of this is disgusting, but I’m not sure who’s really at fault, if anyone. When you consider the entire story, rather than the narrow view presented by a sensational, low-information New York Times article, it’s hard to come up with a better solution that’s realistic, practical, and economical for the involved parties.

via deplorableword - marco

2010 - The beginning of a New Year

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 23:25:06 +0300

2010 is barely 40 minutes away and with it comes the promise of a new year were we can perhaps do things differently.

I for one will take a different path this time around and avoid the mistakes made in the past.

At the end of 2008 I set 3 New Year resolutions for myself to complete in 2009 and fortunately I have been able to complete at least 2 of them while I have gotten better at the 3rd one but not as good as I wanted to be.

My 2009 New Year resolutions were simple in their nature as they were focused on my professional growth in which I was to learn a new programming language, a MVC framework and graphic designing.

So how much did I accomplish in 2009, I learned a new programming language called Ruby, worked on not 1 but 3(Rails, CakePHP, CodeIgniter) different MVC frameworks for 2 different languages and got a much better understanding of design but I was unable to come up with time for fully learning graphic designing.

Now that said its time to set 2010’s New Year resolutions and they are to:

Find a good decent reputable company to work at and settle down.
Learn Graphic Designing

Although they don’t seem much more difficult than the last year’s resolutions believe me finding good work in Saudi Arabia is not an easy task.

Feel free to share your New Year resolutions; you do have them don’t you?

Stargate Universe - Episode Time

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 18:55:36 +0300

Eli: Well this couldnt get much worse.
Rush: I am afraid thats a failure of imagination.

How would the Earth look like if it had a ring system like...

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 02:58:34 +0300

How would the Earth look like if it had a ring system like Saturn?

"This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our..."

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 21:16:14 +0300

“This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.”

- An excerpt of U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s official statement placed on the Voyager spacecraft’s Golden Disc for its trip outside our solar system, June 16, 1977

davidkaneda: Chris Messina details a new microsyntax for...

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 17:38:46 +0300

davidkaneda:

Chris Messina details a new microsyntax for Twitter, using a slash delimiter to denote metadata (like via, cc, and by). The concept is well described and looks fantastic, but I wonder if widespread adoption is possible—especially considering popular clients like Tweetie employ a different format by default.

I believe that adding metadata to our Tweets is actually a good thing not only will it organize them but it can help to index them much better and be used in a variety of different & interesting ways.

notes-along-the-journey: “Pointing to Polaris” by *tfavretto on...

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 08:45:00 +0300

notes-along-the-journey:

“Pointing to Polaris” by *tfavretto on DeviantArt.

Due to the precession of the equinoxes the direction of the Earth’s axis is very slowly but continuously changing, and as the projection of the Earth’s axis moves around the celestial sphere over the millennia, the role of North Star passes from one star to another. Since the precession of the equinoxes is so slow, taking about 26,000 years to complete a cycle, a single star typically holds that title for many centuries. (Wiki)

Other past and future Pole Stars:
The Pole Star once was Thuban (3000 B.C.), the third star from the end of the tail in Draco. In a little more than 5,000 years from now, Alderamin, the brightest star in the constellation Cepheus, will be the Pole Star. About 7,000 years from now, Deneb, the brightest star in Cygnus, will be the Pole Star for a while. In about 12,000 years from now, Vega, the brightest star in Lyra, will be the Pole Star. Vega will be a brilliant Pole Star some six times brighter than Polaris. There are long periods when there is no Pole Star at all. At the present time there is no Pole Star in the southern sky. (source)

icanread: (by imscared)

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 12:45:52 +0300

icanread:

(by imscared)

A truly spectacular view, I just wish I can see it with my very...

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 06:45:00 +0300

A truly spectacular view, I just wish I can see it with my very own eyes in my life time.

It must be a truly remarkable feeling seeing your home world from space and trying to grasp the reality of the fact that how small and fragile it is when in comparison to the giant star next to it or the vast empty darkness with small dots of light in the ever so distant void which in turn are galaxies containing millions of stars just like ours with who knows how many planets & moons.

One can’t help but wonder if there is life out there other than us in such an immeasurable universe.

But the reality of the world is that if we don’t destroy our self’s with Wars, Global Warming, or many of the other horrible things in a long list of them I highly doubt that we will get to see a view like this in our lifetimes.

Still I will keep dreaming as it’s the one thing that nobody can take away from us and maybe someone someday with such a dream will bring it to reality, I just hope that it will be in my lifetime.

And as words are not enough to describe the immeasurable universe perhaps a video may better illustrate my point here.

Here’s your invoice for ruining my day.

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 01:51:00 +0300

Here’s your invoice for ruining my day.

"How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the..."

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 00:45:00 +0300

“

How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s culture but within oneself?

If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox.

One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse.

There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.

”

- Barry Lopez

"Next time you turn on the TV, think what you could be accomplishing in your business or your life..."

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 01:23:14 +0300

“Next time you turn on the TV, think what you could be accomplishing in your business or your life instead.”

"We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities."

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 01:20:25 +0300

“We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.”

- Oscar Wilde - Irish dramatist, novelist, & poet (1854 - 1900)

icanread: (by fallforyou)

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 19:03:44 +0300

icanread:

(by fallforyou)

An interesting use of Kinetic Typography with a scene from the...

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 15:01:30 +0300

An interesting use of Kinetic Typography with a scene from the movie V for Vendetta.

I loved the movie V for Vendetta but forgot how many words they used starting with V in the introduction speech for V which is acutely pretty cool.

"Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by..."

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 16:52:47 +0300

“Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls. If someone charges you for SEO, you have been conned.”

- Derek Powazek - Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists (via deplorableword)

icanread: (by andwoahalex)

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 08:01:28 +0300

icanread:

(by andwoahalex)