http://erl.nfshost.com Fri, 21 Nov 2008 03:59:35 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Installing ruby and gem on Ubuntu (Intrepid Ibex) is somewhat problematic because of differences of opinion between the apt folk and the gem folk. If you want a working version of gem on Ubuntu Ibex, the RailsOnUbuntu site has the instructions. Worked for me. http://erl.nfshost.com/2008/11/20/installing-gem-on-ubuntu-ibex/ I've used a number of domain name registars, including GoDaddy, Network Solutions, Yahoo, and the dreadful and defunct Registerfly. After kissing too many toads, I've finally found a princess, gandi.net. Their prices are fair, their site is well designed and easy to use, and they don't try to cross sell, ... http://erl.nfshost.com/2008/11/11/an-excellent-domain-registrar/ One advantage of a distributed version control system such as Mercurial is that any clone of a project is complete. The clone contains the entire history of the project. That makes backing up a repository trivial. Not so for a centralized vcs such as Subversion. If you check out a ... http://erl.nfshost.com/2008/10/27/mirroring-an-svn-repository/ The CEO of the company I work for mentioned that she was having problem with a USB drive containing a bunch of her data. I offered take a look. Sure enough, her Mac could not see the drive. Worse, while spinning up the drive made a lot of odd, periodic ... http://erl.nfshost.com/2008/10/23/dumb-luck-and-disk-drives/ Many email clients share a user interface mis-feature. The user starts to compose an email, and the first thing the client does is put the user in the input area for the to: field. The user dutifully fills in the addressee, and most of the time things work out fine. ... http://erl.nfshost.com/2008/10/17/an-email-tip/ A little over a month ago I wrote about my off and on efforts to get the Leo text editor running under linux with decent looking antialiased fonts. At long last I have succeeded. Not through any heroic efforts on my part, but by waiting for python and tcltk to ... http://erl.nfshost.com/2008/10/11/installing-antialiased-leo-on-ubuntu/ I ran across a  tip I want to preserve and pass along.  The original post is at The Telarah Times.apt-get build-dep <package_name>This will get all the dependencies needed to compile your package - providing that package_name is something that would normally install using a simple apt-get install command.For example:If you ... http://erl.nfshost.com/2008/09/17/apt-get-build-dep/ Mitchell Hashimoto, writing at the aptly named spawn_link blog, has put up a couple of very nice tutorials on gen_fsm and gen_server. It is clear that Mitchell put a lot of thought and effort into these posts. He is a skilled expositor with an obvious enthusiasm for the material. ... http://erl.nfshost.com/2008/09/08/intro-to-gen_fsm-and-gen_server/ Note to self: some handy erlang shell commands for dealing with processes.process_info(Pid)i()erlang:processes(), or better yet, rp(erlang:processes()). Sometimes long lists show "..." to represent the tail elements. Wrapping in rp() shows the whole list.Finally, exit(Pid, kill) to kill the process represented by Pid. For a while I thought that ... http://erl.nfshost.com/2008/09/06/erl-process-handling-commands/ It has been months since I converted my work machine from Windows XP to Ubuntu Hardy. There is only one program I miss, the fabulous Leo text editor. Leo is not just a text editor. If it were only that I would have little use for Leo, since I already ... http://erl.nfshost.com/2008/09/04/leo-font-rendering-woes/