Andrey Mikhalchuk’s Blog

I recently switched to a different computer and got all gems in the system updated approximately at the same time. Not sure what exactly lead to the problem, but debugging the app in NetBeans became impossible because it stopped stopping on breakpoints. To add some confusion, breakpoints were still working in tests, as I discovered later, just not when I was doing something in Firefox. I tried all recipes including

• Upgrading Netbeans to the most recent version supporting RoR (Netbeans sropped Ruby support and the latest version still supporting it is 6.0.1)
• Checking the extended attributes of all folders. Apparently in MacOS if the project folder has an extended attribute NetBeans can’t debug it. Every time you use “extended” HFS+ features like changing background color of a directory in Finder MacOS adds an “extended” attribute to that folder. You can see it but running “ls -l” and noticing “@” character in the file permissions.
• checking if rdebug is running fine. I used telnet and wireshark to see the communications between rdebug and NetBeans and saw all breakpoints set properly.

So nothing helped until …

Blinkx is a powerful audio and video search engine. It’s main competitive advantage is a speech recognition engine. What that means is if someone says “hot dog” in your video blinkx will hear this and show your video when someone will be searching for hot dogs on blinkx website. Cool, right?
YouTube is … well, you know what youtube is.
How to merry these two awesome technologies? Unfortunately not that simple. The only way you can submit your video to blinkx is using “media rss” feed. I’ve heard some time ago youtube was providing media rss feeds for all channels, but for some reason stopped doing that. So here is how you can do it despite this inconvenience …

Hi!
I’m sitting here at the Rails conference (has nothing to do with trains) and watching at the presenter struggling with the equipment. This leaves me couple minutes to start this post about how to do great presentations and not to do bad ones.

Recently I’ve got a worldlock cable lock for my bike. Skimming thru the guide pictures included with the lock I tried to understand how do I open it for the first time and didn’t find anything saying “default password” in big bold red font. Quick google search also gave nothing. Yeah, this is how this works with some customers like me – they better go search in web instead of carefully reading the manual. Anyway, looking at the pictures I started thinking about what could be a way to open the lock without knowing the password. A few moments later I came up with an idea …

I like this photo frame alot! Samsung SPF-83V not only does have excellent 800×600 resolution, but it also supports content retrieval from other computers and directly from the Internet RSS channels via WiFi. Of course it is not perfect, it is not the easiest photo frame to set up, all content retrieval technologies are Microsoft-oriented, but the most frustrating feature is that for some reason Left and Right buttons are reversed!! Why would anyone do that I have no clue. Here is how to fix the problem.

You’ve probably heard about Pleo – the greenest and coolest dinosaur available on today’s market. My daughter got one for her birthday recently from her loving parents. She enjoyed it for a few days and then just got bored because it was the same moo, mrrr and urf and not much walking at all. Well, two more days of interest were raised with additional downloadable personalities, but that was it.
I tweaked the dino into something more interesting and made it wireless, so you can issue commands to it remotely (via bluetooth). Ok, one more day of fun. Then I wrote something a bit more usable then Dinomite and other tools available from Ugobe website. The development was going well until one day Pleo didn’t wake up …

I don’t know exactly what causes the problem, but I’m unable to download anything from HP (Hewlett-Packard) website. I tried downloading using multiple FTP clients from different platforms and it appeared that Safari under MacOS can download the files, while Firefox under both Windows and MacOS can’t. Right now I tried to get the same file from two XP computers using FireFox and one was able to download the file, while the other one wasn’t. It’s not about firewall settings and not about passive/active mode. If someone knows the reason and how to fix the problem I’d appreciate a comment on this post.

If anyone else is experiencing the same problems use the following solution: copy the URL of the link you’re trying to download the file from (in FireFox right-click on the link and choose “Copy Link location”), paste the link into the browser’s address line, replace “ftp://” with “http://” and hit enter. This will download the file using HTTP protocol.

I’m moving to another place. Right the next day I submitted the notice to the leasing office my kids, being under great impression of “Blue’s Clues” TV program, started playing clues. Soon they invented that the best clues can be made with marker on walls. I spent about 1 hour trying different substances on the walls, but the wall-marker combination was much stronger then Soap, Magic Eraser, OxiClean, rubbing alcohol and other pretty powerful substances. Only in a few weeks I recalled what I was studying on chemistry at school and solved the problem in seconds.

Many people are dreaming about consolidating all media files (video, music, pictures etc) in a single place. For some it is a huge full of DVDs, CDs and photos. Others buy hardware media servers and store all files in them. I chose a solution based on Archos 605 WiFi and a Linux Server running UPnP Media Server. Here’s how it works …