Friday, November 19, 2010

Are you green?

Are your friends?

Take the quiz to find out...

http://practicallygreen.com/ The Quiz...

Cloth Diapers?

Well written, with very nice pictures -- a view of one families transition to cloth diapers.

http://babymakingmachine.blogspot.com/search/label/cloth%20diaper%20experiment

locked out of drupal?

I was given a site which had maintenance mode turned on, needed to turn it off, so I needed these urls.


http://localhost/drupal6/?q=user
http://localhost/drupal6/?q=admin/settings/site-maintenance

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Rails and Ruby Learn interactively

Two great sites to give you a great quick start learning ruby and then rails.

Learn Ruby
http://tryruby.org/

Learn Rails
http://railsforzombies.org/

macports removing old bits

I noticed lots of duplication when I looked at my installed ports using the command,

$ port list installed


I needed to clean out the old builds. First I needed to see the old builds using the command:

$ port installed


Then remove the old bits using the following commands:

$ sudo port clean --all installed
$ sudo port -f uninstall inactive


use $ du -sh /opt to get the size of the /opt directory before and after removal of ports.

Based on information in the blogpost at cleaning-up-macports

Before I install new packages, or update, I like to update macports itself, and then update outdated packages.

$ sudo port selfupdate
$ sudo port upgrade outdated

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Wool Dryer Balls - Faster Laundry Drying Time

Wool Dryer Balls gift set.


Wool dryer balls are popular gift for this year. They work for everyone, and are a very useful 'green' gift. You can add scents to the wool using essential oils, or go the unscented route.

Dryer balls help with the tumbling action of the laundry, and are great for use with items such as cloth diapers.

They are available in colors too.

Wool Dryer Balls - Where I found them.

Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 - Mactech Benchmarks

http://www.mactech.com/2010/11/16/mactech-releases-office-mac-2011-benchmark-results

MacTech benchmarked the performance of Microsoft Office versions 2011, 2008, 2004.

See MacTech chart of comparisons of the components of office.

















There has been one update so far to the office suite November 9, 2010.

Visual Basic and Outlook are changes in this update.

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

OSX R.app Ruby

I want to use ruby, and later a rails application to work with the R statistical application. CRAN R.app home.


  1. sudo gem install simpler
  2. OSX Snow Leopard 10.6 already has ruby installed.
  3. OSX includes Preview.app for viewing pdf documents.
  4. Run an example.

$ irb
>> require 'simpler'
>> r = Simpler.new
>> x = [1,2,7]
>> y = [3,4,8]
>> r.pdf_viewer = "open /Applications/Preview.app"
>> r.show!(x,y) {|xr,yr| "plot(#{xr},#{yr})"}

resulting image shown in preview...


This code is from the info on github.
https://github.com/jtprince/simpler