No Pressure

How to load a feed with Google Feed API and JQuery

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 10:13:00 +0000

Here is a quick and dirty way to load a xml feed with Google Feed API with Jquery. Enjoy!! :)

First step include the necessary external calls:

Second step your javascript function:

Third and last step, add a div into your code to contain the results:

Super quick!! Enjoy!!

Quick and dirty search in Rails

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 17:32:08 +0000

Ever wondered how to quick have a search function in your rails app?

Here is a super quick and maybe a lil dirty way to achieve so.

First step:

The view

<%= form_tag("/searches", :method => "get") do %>

<%= text_field_tag :keywords, params[:keywords] %>


       
  <%= submit_tag("Search") %>
           <% end %>

Second step:

search.rb model (app/models)

class Search < ActiveRecord::Base


  def self.find_results(search)
    if search
      Item.find(:all, :conditions => ['name LIKE ?', "%#{search}%"])
    else
      Item.find(:all)
    end
  end
end

Third step:

searches_controller.rb (app/controllers)

class SearchesController < ApplicationController


  def index
    @results = Search.find_results(params[:keywords])
  end
end

Fourth step:

index.html.erb (app/views/searches)

<% @results.each do |result| %>


             
<%= result.name %>

Done :)

Just don’t forget to add resources :searches, :controllers => ‘searches’ to your routes.rb!

Ruby headaches pills

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 16:33:09 +0100

If:

script/rails generate controller Hello

Is failing, try to remember that you have probably installed more than one version of rails in your history, so you might need to call:

rvm use 1.9.1 —default :)

"The future is distributed!"

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 14:23:33 +0100

“The future is distributed!”

Hire the hackers!

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 10:53:00 +0100

Hire the hackers!

ckck: Control panel at IBM. San Jose, California, circa...

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 18:39:58 +0100

ckck:

Control panel at IBM. San Jose, California, circa 1958.

Photograph by Arnold Del Carlo.

Home abroad

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 13:18:56 +0100

Home abroad:

I still treasure my memories of two weeks spent in Buenos Aires almost 3 years ago, and this article has brought all of them back again :)

"Work smarter, play harder"

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 09:19:30 +0100

“Work smarter, play harder”

- Never got why we have to work hard… ;)

"Schmidt says definitively: the next generation of leaders and startups to emerge will involve..."

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 12:53:31 +0100

“Schmidt says definitively: the next generation of leaders and startups to emerge will involve mobile, local, and social. He explains that we’ve exhausted the limits of the PC as a platform, the future will be mobile first.”

- Reinvent the future, everything else will follow.

Dublin sunset

Sat, 27 Aug 2011 15:53:26 +0100

Dublin sunset

Creative destruction

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 13:17:37 +0100

From Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper, 1975) [orig. pub. 1942] by Joseph A. Schumpeter, pp. 82-85:

Capitalism, then, is by nature a form or method of economic change and not only never is but never can be stationary. And this evolutionary character of the capitalist process is not merely due to the fact that economic life goes on in a social and natural environment which changes and by its change alters the data of economic action; this fact is important and these changes (wars, revolutions and so on) often condition industrial change, but they are not its prime movers. Nor is this evolutionary character due to a quasi-automatic increase in population and capital or to the vagaries of monetary systems, of which exactly the same thing holds true. The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers, goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates.

Quick start on Amazon AWS.

Sun, 14 Aug 2011 22:38:00 +0100

How exciting! Amazon has started to offer free tier 1 year account to their AWS services. So why not try the services out with a small project or a new web app?

The Ubuntu EC2 starter guide gives you some hints and tips to using Ubuntu’s official images on Amazon EC2.

To summarize:

1. Create your account on Amazon, if you don’t have one already. Go to http://aws.amazon.com, and select Sign-up Now. Sign in to your existing Amazon account or create a new one. Go to http://aws.amazon.com/ec2, and select “Sign Up for Amazon EC2”.

2. After signing up, you should end up at the EC2 console. Create a key pair and download the private key.

3. Click Key Pairs under Networking and Security in the Navigation pane and then click the Create Key Pair button (save it in e.g. ~/.ec2/ec2.pem). This private key is for making SSH connections to newly created instances.

You will also need to set up your Amazon API credentials. Go to Account->Security Credentials

Click X.509 Certificates tab -> Create a new Certificate

Download the private key and the certificate (save them in e.g. ~/.ec2/cert-XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.pem and ~/.ec2/pk-XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.pem).

Make your credential files private: chmod go-rwx ~/.ec2/*.pem

4. SSH to your instance:

ssh -i ec2.pem ubuntu@ec2-54-47-71-42.compute-1.amazonaws.com

Now you are ready to play with your instance a little bit. So we will install ruby:

sudo apt-get install curl git-core ruby

This was to grab the basic dependencies. Then we can install RVM as per the instructions on: http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/rvm/install/.

Should you have some issues with rvm, please remember, also as a general practice to:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install build-essential

A complete guide on getting started with ruby on rails on Ubuntu is available here.

Also if you’re installing Passenger (aka: mod_rails) and you hit the following error at the stage in which you run passenger-install-apache2-module:

sudo: passenger-install-apache2-module: command not found

it means is that you don’t have the gems bin directory in your PATH so do this instead:

sudo /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/passenger-install-apache2-module

I hope you have fun with your free Amazon instance :)

Dublin tonight

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 21:03:41 +0100

Dublin tonight

Former Google CIO: LimeWire Pirates Were iTunes’ Best Customers

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 11:02:14 +0100

Former Google CIO: LimeWire Pirates Were iTunes’ Best Customers

Video

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 14:24:16 +0100

Skate this!

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 14:03:00 +0100

Skate this!

Every pirate wants to be an admiral.

Tue, 31 May 2011 14:36:00 +0100

Every pirate wants to be an admiral.

Every city has its own way to make rimes all through the night..

Sun, 29 May 2011 01:23:35 +0100

Every city has its own way to make rimes all through the night..

Milano tonight

Sat, 28 May 2011 17:56:42 +0100

Milano tonight

On the nature of Innovation

Thu, 26 May 2011 12:48:00 +0100

Innovation is in a way at the hearth of the pirate’s spirit and probably the first weapon against competitors. Finding something totally new, grasp a revolutionary idea and taking it into practice, it is something entrepreneurs and companies alike are often obsessed with.

It is often believed that innovation goes hand in hand with creativity, and the quality of being able to find unusual, or totally new solutions to common problems. What is creativity though? Apparently agreeing on this simple concept it is something scientists and psychologists alike find quite difficult.

Dr. R. Keith Sawyer, a professor of psychology and education at the university of Washington in St. Luis, wrote an interesting book about the matter: “Explaining Creativity. The Science of Human Innovation”.

Explaining Creativity is actually the first book in this field, aimed to summarize all the recent finds on creativity, psychology and related fields.

There are different definitions of creativity that have been established during the years. Scientists for example would consider creative a work of genius to solve an unusual problem in a new or unique way; behaviourists on the other hand would rather look for a kind of social recognition, while human beings, would in general rather associate creativity with the idea of an original work that breaks conventions and sets new rules and standards.

All definition would have something in common, but would as well miss something by treating creativity as something really personal, with almost a kind of religious reverence. It is instead important to understand that creativity is not a trait or quality of an individual. Nature itself is very creative in its evolutionary processes, but also groups, societies, networks, can all be very collaboratively and creative, despite the individual properties and qualities of the entities forming the group, the society or the network.

Innovation as creativity it is something that has been debated upon by sociologists, scientists, psychologists and business people alike. Many have almost mystified innovation as only a leap of genius in finding what everyone else has failed to see. On the contrary innovation is often the product of a rational analysis, rather than an inspirational process.

In the imaginary of people for example, all great discoveries are a product of some accident: a sudden realization, like for Newton and his apple, or Einstein and his bicycle.

Yet innovation is in a way different from just discovering something new.

Something innovative would in fact, have an impact on society, or in business terms, on the market.

An organization (or an individual) to create innovation and hence being innovative would have to understand that the market is in constant mutation and that it is constantly reinventing itself and the economic structure from within, hence at the same time destroying (or overcoming) the old models, and creating new ones.

These concepts are outlined by Joseph Schumpeter in “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy”, where he explores the concept of Creative Destruction.

The process of Creative Destruction is at the very core of Capitalism itself. In just a few words, our economic system is based on constant change and every organization or entrepreneur has to live in this constantly evolving climate. Capitalism is in fact the new Tortuga for modern economic pirates.