Multi-touch gone huge

Posted by Jorge Bernal September 10, 2008

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Arthur C. Clarke

For a better video and more info about this kind of magic, visit MultiTouch.

Notifications done right

Posted by Jorge Bernal September 09, 2008

My wireless keyboard is running out of battery. When I switched it on this morning I got a warning popup, and then this

I think this “blinking” icon is the most intrusive form of notification that I’ve received from my mac. I barely notice it, just enough to remind me I have to go shopping.

MySQL Conference 2009, I need an idea

Posted by Jorge Bernal September 07, 2008

I had a sad time this year when I missed the MySQL conference, since I had much fun last year in Santa Clara. I can’t miss it next year.

As a MySQL partner, and after almost 2 years doing MySQL training, I sure have interesting things to tell in the conference, but I’m not sure about what.

I will be thinking about this in the next weeks, but I’d appreciate some help. What topics are you interested in?

Is Ubuntu the new Linux?

Posted by Jorge Bernal August 15, 2008

I’ve found this today at the shoes website, and I think it’s not the first time I see someone using the Ubuntu logo or name to refer to a Linux system.

If rms already had a bad time trying to convince people to use GNU/Linux instead of Linux, it seems he is getting more work to do

Store countries with ISO-3166 codes in rails

Posted by Jorge Bernal August 15, 2008

I’ve been trying to give rebirth to an old internal project at my company, abandoned circa 2006, and this is one of the code pieces I think it could be useful to others.

I wanted to store country information as an ISO code, so here is the plugin to make it work

It’s translated using the translation from the iso-codes package, so I guess it’s as good as it can get by now. If you want to contribute, please do it to the iso-codes package and let me know, so I can update it too.

iso_countries - Store countries using ISO 3166 codes

This rails plugin enables you to store country info only with the country’s ISO-3166 code

Example

  class Company < ActiveRecord::Base
    iso_country :country
  end

  c = Company.new :country => "es"
  c.country                 # => "es"
  c.country_name            # => "Spain"
  c.country_name = "France"
  c.country                 # => "fr"
  ISO::Countries.set_language "es"
  c.country_name            # => "Francia"

Download

You can get it from http://github.com/koke/iso_countries/tree/master

eBox premieres new website

Posted by Jorge Bernal July 22, 2008

Since I didn’t have any MySQL public courses planned this summer, I’ve been using my work time from the last week in the new eBox website.

I’m still far away from what I’d like, but I’m proud my design skills have improved considerably.

For those of you who still don’t know what it is, eBox is a server for the easy administration of corporate networks. eBox was included with the last release of Ubuntu. See eBox in Ubuntu

Shop in Amazon from your iPhone with iBuy

Posted by Jorge Bernal July 20, 2008

Yesterday, I wrote a simple web application to buy from amazon using your iPhone. It’s meant to help if you are in a store and want to check the price of a product in Amazon and buy it from there.

That’s why you enter the barcode directly. I’ll probably add some search by title or author, but for now, it works for its original purpose: save money.

Check it out at http://amedias.org/ibuy/

It’s an early release so it can be buggy. If you have found a bug or have some suggestions, leave a comment

More aliases: Firefox keywords

Posted by Jorge Bernal May 22, 2008

I keep on with my productivity little tricks. This time I’m sharing some of my firefox shortcuts. I’m not in the mood for explaining how to actually install these, so check out the excellent article Firefox and the art of keyword bookmarking, if you need help.

# Dictionary search
dict http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=%s

# My delicious (with tag support)
kd http://del.icio.us/koke/%s
as https://www.google.com/adsense/report/overview
gr http://www.google.com/reader/view/
fb http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/myfeeds
ga https://www.google.com/analytics/home/

By the way, I haven’t typed all these urls. In your firefox user dir (~/.firefox or ~/.mozilla), there should be a places.sqlite file.

Some sqlite love actually helps

sqlite> SELECT k.keyword, p.url FROM
	moz_bookmarks b
	JOIN moz_places p ON p.id = b.fk
	JOIN moz_keywords k ON k.id = b.keyword_id
	WHERE b.keyword_id IS NOT NULL;

Introducing my new personal website

Posted by Jorge Bernal May 22, 2008

Yes, you read it right, website. I know that sounds like 90s, and today trends are blogs and social networks, but I felt I needed some semi-static place to hold some info about who I am.

It’s not finished yet, I have more ideas for it, but it’s been sitting in my hard drive in a decent state for a while, and I think it’s time to obey the release early, release often motto.

Go there, if you want: www.jorgebernal.info

Flickr commentr

Posted by Jorge Bernal May 21, 2008

Update: I forgot to mention, the source code for the server part is available at flickr-commentr

flickr commentr is a simple tool to allow you post flickr pictures on flickr comments, or any other forum or blog

To install it, drag this bookmarlet to your bookmarks bar

flickr comment

When you are browsing a flickr photo, click the bookmarklet and you’ll see a popup like the following screenshot, where you can select the size and attributes to show, and copy the HTML code to post the picture.