James Badger’s Personal Site

Lighttpd + Mongrel + Rails + Windows

Posted James on April 25th, 2009 | Filed under Local Talk, Ruby on Rails | 3 Comments »

I recently worked on a project that required me to host a rails application on Windows XP Home, something I had no experience with but took on as our options were limited. We wanted a load-balanced server running a Rails app with a MySQL database. An XAMPP install was also being used by another group on the server, through which we had MySQL access.

I learned quite a bit trying to get it working, and I hope I can help someone else with how I did it. I started this last fall, so some of the software may have been updated. Also, I would like to thank Joseph Jaramillo for his post on Deploying to IIS with lighttpd and Mongrel which was a huge help setting this up.

Cut Wifi Login Times (University of Calgary)

Posted James on March 5th, 2009 | Filed under University | Comment now »

Those at the University of Calgary with laptops know that there is a public wireless network available for students. It’s unencrypted, but requires a login through a portal before internet services are provided. I found that whenever I moved between classes or left my laptop off for more than half an hour, I had to login again, which is not very efficient if you have to do it five times a day. What if you only had to do it once? What if you had a program to do it automatically for you?

Someone undoubtedly thought of this, and created Devicescape. A multi-platform application that will automatically log you into (certain) wireless networks, one of which is the UofC network. It’s simple to use, just hop over to their site and download the Devicescape client. Sign up for an account, load up your airUC credentials, and the program will do the rest. As soon as your device connects to airUC, Devicescape will login within seconds, allowing you to skip loading the login page in your browser.

One of the best parts is how well it integrates with your OS. On OS X, it sits in the menubar and notifies you when it is logged in or out. No dialogs, no preference pane, no clunky application. It also runs on most mobile devices, take a look at the list to see if yours is supported. Be sure to also check that the networks you want to connect to are supported as well.

Quicksilver + iTunes + Growl

Posted James on November 28th, 2008 | Filed under Local Talk | Comment now »

One of the most handy tools for Mac has to be Quicksilver. It does 90% of my application launching, and has a plethora of plugins and other features too, like triggers. Triggers work like global hotkeys. For example, I can press control-F8 in (almost) any application and have iTunes skip to the next song.

What I like to do is be able to rate my iTunes music without having to switch to iTunes or fumble around with the dock contextual menu. With a Quicksilver trigger this is easy, just install the iTunes module and a handful of iTunes-specific triggers are added. However, I prefer to have visual notification that the trigger worked, so I made a few Applescripts to automatically set the rating and tell Growl to display a notification that the change was made.

Script below: