Author Archives: madhatter

Don’t look back in anger¹

Posted by on 2011/11/08 1 comment

The Quest is over. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how I have been looking for an alternative to del.icio.us‘ bookmarking service, because they new guys running it wanted to rebuild it without keeping the old version available as well.

I found one. As already mentioned in the previous post, I have been thinking about giving pinboard a try. I have been afraid to spent money on a service I am not able to test anyhow upfront, but because there did not seem any good alternatives around I hadn’t checked already… what are my opportunities?

I signed up for about $10 a few weeks ago as far as I can tell at the moment, pinboard is the best alternative to the not-longer-available service of del.icio.us. (sigh!) If you are looking for a service like delicious used to be (i.e. working), you might want to give pinboard a try, too.²


¹ “Schiller’s Reel: Don’t Look Back In Anger”
² No, I don’t get any money for telling you this.

Why you learn nothing from tutorials

Posted by on 2011/10/27 No comments

Maybe you do that: you want to learn something new and you are wondering where to start. Everything seems so strange and different. You are heading to Google and ask for a good tutorial to learn it by example. Of course you find lots of hits, because most people ask somewhere for a good tutorial to learn something new.

But I am wondering: did you really learn something from a tutorial yet or do you just keep asking, hoping to find any good one day which will really help you get started?

I don’t believe in tutorials anymore. I did a lot. I am pretty sure that everytime I started to learn a new programming language I looked up a tutorial and tried to learn from that. But it always became as hard and unfulfilling as it could get.

It always starts very simple and often you get lots of hints on what you will be able to do, when you will have finished the tutorial one day. Adrenalin is running out of your nose as you can’t wait to learn about all that crazy stuff, so you are heading to the next chapter.

Now there are three types of tutorials:

  • Simple – You start at Zero and after a few pages you are asking yourself if the author thinks that this might be the first time that you ever try to write some code. Or that you might be totally retarded…
  • Steep – You have difficulties from the first page on to follow what the author might be up to. Code examples are loaded with lots of stuff new to you and most of it is not discussed at all.
  • Bo-ho-ring – Lacking examples that might give you an idea what this is all about the author seems to be busy rambling about the history of … the alternatives to … the additional documentations on …

Of course there are those that trick you at the beginning and you get the feeling, that this might be the first or maybe the only tutorial that is different. And then, just a couple of chapters later you realize that it is just one of the three above or a mixture of them.

The worst about a tutorial is, when you kind of enjoy what you are doing, but you get the feeling that it might be good to do something else with your time. Or you feel derailed in your progress, because the author seems to have different priorities than you.

My consequence always has been to find a good reference book or sample code from others. What you need next is an idea what you want to achieve. A small application, solve one simple task, … It should be something small, should not involve forking of processes or metaprogramming in the very beginning.

Then, just start hacking.

Why did you break delicious?

Posted by on 2011/10/05 2 comments

I have been using delicious since 2003. I have been early adopter and enjoying it from the very beginning. And while I already had some concerns when Yahoo bought delicious in 2005, I stuck to the service as there was nothing else available that simple and fulfilling around.

When I read that Yahoo planned to sell delicious again without putting to much effort in enhancements ever, I have been hoping that there will be changes that will get useful features for the users who stayed while lots of others seemed to have jumped on new services where you are able to store links for offline browsing with previews and categories depending on the content (images, videos, music files, documents, notes, …).

Now changes came. And everything I liked about delicious are gone:

  1. The simple but efficient design is gone and has been replaced with some crappy modern web2.0-like design (everything is round and new colors have been added).
  2. Tag groups (I can’t remember if that was the real name) have been removed, so I don’t have such categories like “database” (tags like “oracle”, “mysql”, “rac”, “mongodb”, …) anymore.
  3. The bookmarklet now opens a new post page, which is not able to auto-complete my tags, so that I have to remember if I always used the tag “hacking” or “coding”.
  4. I am not able to manage my content that well. At the moment there does not seem to be an easy way to remove or rename already used tags. I have to search for all links tagged with the faulty tag and remove it from it.
  5. There will be more, if I take the effort to think about it.

I am pissed. So I have been looking for delicious alternatives lately. But as most users seem to be like using one tool for everything there seem to be more services around like evernote or Zootool.

Don’t get me wrong, I use evernote, too, but I don’t think that it is the best service for easily bookmarking URLs and looking them up everywhere. I prefer the UNIX way: one tool for one thing, that does it well, instead of one tool for everything, that does everything only a bit.

As I did not know too much about Zootool I tried that, too, but when I tried to bookmark the first page with it, I got a site with all the images from that site where I could choose from. I don’t need that.

I then remembered that I already gave blinklist a try when it appeared and re-activated my account my resetting my password. But this process already took me about 15 minutes because the site seemed to be almost down. Nevertheless I imported my delicious bookmarks and tried to switch. But I did not understand how the service should be used as it did not be possible to search the bookmarks efficiently.

Another service I found while searching for alternatives was diigo, which was also able to import all my 1500+ bookmarks from delicious. After the import finished successfully I had the list with my bookmarks and all my tags in diigo, but when I tried to filter by using a tag from the list, diigo was not able to find any bookmarks by that tag. That does not help too much in my opinion.

First I thought that it might be the import’s fault, but bookmarks added by that unnecessary detailed bookmarklet did not work either. They have been added to my bookmark library but it was not possible to look them up again.

Last service I have been testing today sounds a bit like delicious, but did not work too well yet: favilous. I have to admit that I gave up after the initial import of my delicious bookmarks backup stuck for more than 5 minutes and I haven’t been able to get the site back to behave as it should. I really hope I did not break it just by trying to upload a 300 kb file…

What’s next? Right now I am not sure if I am more pissed about the broken delicious service or by looking for a worthy alternative. I have been reading about pinboard, which seems to work pretty well for all who switched since the service started. Only reason why I did not give it a try myself: it actually costs almost $10 to sign up. But because I saw so many web services lately that claim to do a great job (and they probably may do this for lots of people), but did not work for me, I am not sure if I want to spent money and risking that my search won’t be over.

But there are lots of posts available by Google which offer links to much more delicious alternatives, so maybe I will try them all first. Or somebody can name the ultimate delicious alternative and will be able to end my pain…

 

Deploy to Heroku

Posted by on 2011/09/20 No comments

A team mate told me about Heroku today, when I was bashing my buggy hosting.

At the moment I am playing around with Ruby on Rails and I was looking forward to it for a while. This was the initial reason to change my hosting and move to a host who claimed to offer RoR services. But then I noticed that just deploying a very small project did not work too well.

I created a rails project

$ rails new blog
$ cd blog
$ rails generate scaffold post title:string body:text
$ rake db:migrate

Then I initialized git and commited it to github and heroku.

$ git init
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "Initial commit"
$ git add origin git@github.com:madhatter/blog.git
$ git push -u origin master

$ heroku create
$ git push -u heroku master

This went well so far. But the final step did not work that well:

$ heroku rake db:migrate
rake aborted!
Please install the postgresql adapter: `gem install activerecord-postgresql-adapter` (pg is not part of the bundle. Add it to Gemfile.)

Tasks: TOP => db:migrate => db:load_config
(See full trace by running task with --trace)

First problem, there is no gem like ‘activerecord-postgresql-adapter’.

So I installed the regular pg gem which needed postgresql to install without errors (not too remarkable, eh).

$ brew install postgresql
$ gem install pg

I found a few hints on stackoverflow where lots of people seemed to have similar issues and so I went on to add the pg gem to the Gemfile and use bundle afterwards.

group :production do
    # Only gems for heroku
    gem 'therubyracer-heroku', '0.8.1.pre3'
    gem 'pg'
end
$ bundle install --without production

But while moving from stackoverflow to google to heroku to the manpages I missed one very important step. I have been trying to call

$ heroku rake db:migrate

after doing some changes, but with no luck. Then tried something else and again tried to migrate heroku.

Of course you have to commit the Gemfile changes and push ‘em to heroku. (Doh!)

$ git commit -m "Adding the pg gem to the Gemfile."
$ git push -u heroku master

And then the migrate will work with no errors.

Just a few years…

Posted by on 2011/08/19 No comments

It’s been a while since I wrote in my blog… almost four years.

 

A few days ago I went to blogger.com. I have no idea why, but I also remembered my login data and there it was: my old blog I used to write in. Not too regularly, but almost once per month and sometimes even twice per day.

But then I became a father – twice – and switched the job and moved and married and … that’s it I guess. But fact is, I haven’t been crawling the web that much in that time and only coded for the money and not for the fun of it.

 

Because I did not use the blog anymore and did not find the time to answer comments on that old “Oracle on an iBook” article anymore (and I did not own the iBook anymore, too), I removed the blog from my webspace and never thought I might read a word I wrote into it ever again.

I don’t want to migrate the data back here and continue. This is a new blog, right now with a basic theme, as there is not too much content at the moment to have it distributed over and over a again in zillons of categories or pages.  And I will write in  english again, too, as I can’t imagine writing about tech stuff in german.

The tweets below will be in german. Might not be the best idea, but I don’t care.