kilic.net

Windows Live Writer

2012-04-24T11:43:29Z

This is a test post from Windows Live writer.

Rails on Ubuntu

2012-04-18T12:10:39Z

I've finally got my home Ubuntu server running Rails on Passgenger + Apache2. After several attempts at getting this going there were some modifications that I needed to have made in the production.rb file for it to work. Those lines that needed to be changed are:

config.serve_static_assets = true

config.assets.compile = true

Both lines are set to false for a default installation. This post serves more as a reminder for myself when deploying Rails app.

MS DTC - Enabling Network Access

2012-04-16T13:04:52Z

Here's a little note if you run into MS DTC problems outside of your development environment. For a recent project I was using the TransactionScope method to wrap multiple operations around, pretty standard piece of code and all worked in the dev environment flawlessly.
If like most people you're development environment consists of both SQL Server and IIS on the same machine you're likely not going to run into any issues with the transaction controller. However, once you split out the database and the application to separate servers you'll start getting some nifty error messages like "network access for Distributed Transaction Manage (MSDTC) has been disabled" etc.

Turns out that if you are using transactions from within your .NET code not only do you need to ensure that the MSDTC service is actually running you need to make sure that it is running on both the client (i.e. application server) and also the database server!
Depending on what server OS you are running checking getting to the settings page changes slightly, but it's basically via Component Services, and you right click on My Computer and select the MS DTC tab. Microsoft support has details on doing so for Windows Server 2003.

Ideal Notebook

2012-03-31T09:54:30Z

Having had my eyes on a portable Windows machine for a while I thought I'd spec up what I would want in such a machine. Here's my shortlist:

13 inch screen, with a resolution of 1600 x 900 or greater
8gb RAM
256gb SSD
Backlit keyboard display
USB 3.0 and Bluetooth 4.0
Core i7 processor

There is one that fits the bill, the sexy looking Sony VAIO Z, but at price of around $4,000 it's a little steep. The next closest that I've found are the Samsung Series 9 (albeit with a 1366 x 768 resolution screen) and the Asus Zenbook UX31E (albeit with only 4gb of RAM) notebook. Both of these machines are around the $2,000 price point which is considerably less than the Sony.

Know of any notebooks that fit the criteria above? Drop me an email.

Seth

2012-02-04T10:43:29Z

Via Seth's blog:

Can I see your body of work?
Are you leaving behind an easily found trail of accomplishment?
Few people are interested in your resume any more. Plenty are interested in what you've done.
The second thing you'll need to do is regularly note what you produce in a log or find some other way to keep track.
The first thing is more difficult: If the work you do isn't worth collating and highlighting, you probably need to be doing better work.

Openness

2012-01-03T11:13:40Z

The openness and transparency of "uptime" being reported by 37 Signals is exemplary. It reminded my about the series of blog posts from Ryan Carson on the sale of their product, Dropsend.

GoDaddy and SOPA

2012-01-01T07:47:22Z

You would have by now read about SOPA and how it is set to destroy the very Internet we use and rely upon every day (excuse the dramatics). All of my non .com.au domains were managed through GoDaddy, they were easy and cheap.

However, I've never been a big fan of them, especially when it comes to the suggestive advertising and Mr. Parson's wildlife trips to Africa. Them supporting SOPA was the last straw.

I've started to move my domains over to Hover, the whole transfer process is easy (other than GoDaddy trying it's best to make it not so) and hope to be rid of GoDaddy in the near future.

Movie reviews with hReview

2011-12-31T03:10:49Z

Having taken a few days off from work it's given me some time to watch some movies, rather than list the movies in an unordered list there exists a better, more semantic method, to markup reviews using the hReview microformat. Here's one of the latest movies I've seen marked up with hReview:

Serdar Kilic, December 31st, 2011

A Dangerous Man

★★★☆☆

Your typical action packed Steven Seagal movie. One for the fans.

p.s. Did you know that Steven Seagal also has a running TV Series named Lawman, and that for the last 20 years he's also been a Deputy Sheriff which is what his TV show is based upon? What a badass!

Telstra modem and Android Devices

2011-12-31T01:45:29Z

We recently moved our home Internet to Telstra and with that received a new ADSL modem that also features a Wireless-N router. The setup was quick and simple and we were up and running in no time.

After a few weeks though we started to have intermittent dropouts which resulted in the modem needing to be reconnected. After a bit of investigation and trial and error I fixed the wireless channel to CH13 rather than it being set automatically.

The only issue we had was with the multitude of Android devices we and our visiting friends have. None of which were able to connect to the wireless network anymore stating that the SSID was not in range. Reverting this back to automatic (this time it chose CH6) and the devices were able to connect again.

Robert Gupta

2011-12-10T00:45:19Z

I have a thing for classical music, and when I say thing I mean by today's hip-hop, rap, pop genre's that I often have in my ear, I'm willing to listen to a few notes from the classics.
I came across this video from TED talks (awesome, awesome stuff there) of Robert Gupta and Joshua Roman playing Passacaglia, great inspiring music ensues.
Also worth the time is Robert's talk on Nathaniel Ayers, whom the movie The Soloist is based on.

Styling search fields

2011-11-27T21:05:12Z

I ran into a small niggling issue whilst building a new site for a friend. Turns out Safari (and webkit based browsers like Chrome) prevent you from styling input boxes with type set to search.
Semantically this is the correct attribute to apply as it matches the function, however, and for whatever reason, they've decided against being able to style the element sans a few properties.
An article on CSS Tricks shows the limited styles that can be applied.

Single Vendor

2011-11-19T23:26:37Z

After switching to an Android handset for almost two years I've transitioned back to the land of Apple. As with the whole Mac vs Windows debate both iOS and Android have their pros and cons. I enjoyed my time with the more geeky, developer friendly Android OS but in the end I have work that needs to be done.
Some of the problems that I encountered in the two years using the Nexus One, and these were more specific to the hardware rather than the software, made me decide to switch to an iPhone and also to Apple as my "preferred vendor". I won't elaborate on the issues here but just to say that this isn't a swipe at Android or the handset I was using, the Google Nexus One.
Yes I believe Android is more open, and I'm using that term loosely. By "open" I'm talking about having less restrictions on what I can do from both a hardware and software perspective and not who owns the source code. For now I'm happy to work within the confines of the Apple ecosystem. Everything just works when you go with the same vendor, vertical integration if I may. For example I'm now using iWork instead of Google Docs, iTunes instead of Google Music (the older non-geo restricted version of the player), and, iPhoto over Picasa.
My content is synced to the plethora of devices that I own so my content is accessible as much as possible, but only on Apple devices. Dropbox also fills some of this void.
Once you start crossing borders you run into small niggling issues, e.g. I wasn't able to sync my contacts to both iCloud and Google. Little pestering issues like this help make the decision to a single vendor stack .
I'm hoping that in the end that this will fare out well and I haven't locked myself into some corner. It also means that I need to keep up to date with the Apple products to ensure my content isn't locked out by later versions.

Rediscovery

2011-09-18T09:16:34Z

(After the initial version of this post was swallowed somewhere between Ecto and MovableType I'm reposting a more condensed version of what I previously wrote).
I'm going through a rediscovery phase of Old Skoolers, listed below. It's great to see they've continued to blog throughout the years

Katia and Kylie Mac to whose podcast I've resubscribed to are hilarious and always remind me of my time in Paris.

Adam Curry ran one of the earliest podcasts that I could remember, called The Daily Source Code. It ran for around 40mins (good length) and I always looked forward to the weekly episodes.

Scott Hanselman's tools page was the go to site after paving any of my Windows boxes.

Molly.com was one of the first sites I got my Web Standards fix from, great to see her back writing some more.

On Blogging

2011-04-02T03:43:34Z

Kudos to those bloggers who have followed through and have updated their blogs for Project 52. Here's some snippets that I've collected over the last few weeks:

Tim Bray has a good writeup for bloggers over at his OnGoing weblog.
Adam Curry plays with an rssToBlog feature with the OPML Editor
and, Brent Simmons with Dave Winer discuss "baked blogs"

iPad

2011-02-25T11:10:11Z

I was lucky enough to have been gifted an iPad just recently. For one thing, it was good timing, as my impulsive nature would have led me to go out to buy an iPad 2 when it launches next week. For the main purpose of just trying out specific iPad apps what I have is more than enough (I have the 16GB WiFi version). I'm still more inclined to take my Galaxy Tab with me to work as it's the much more portable option - but it'll be interesting to see if that will change.

I'm looking forward to trying out some of the iOS/iPad only applications such as Chalk from 37 Signals and Reeder.