miceda

The Problem

Your trying to deploy a Rails app using Deprec on Ubuntu running behind a proxy server and getting connection errors.

Possible solution

You need to tell apt-get about your proxy server. Here’s how I did it:

1. Create a file ”/etc/apt/apt.conf”
2. In the file add the following:

Acquire { Retries "0"; HTTP {Proxy "http://YOURPROXY:PORT";};};

Now edit the proxy information in ”/etc/wgetrc” by uncommenting “use_proxy” and setting “http_proxy”:

use_proxy = on
http_proxy = http://YOURPROXY:POST

Finally add the proxy to ”/etc/bash.bashrc”

http_proxy = http://YOURPROXY:POST
export http_proxy

Once I did this, everything worked great!

The other night my daughter was telling me about some interesting facts she read in one of her school books. One fact in particular caught my interest:

Orange and Silver are the only two words in the (American)English language that do not ryhme with any other word

My first thought was “How the hell did they figure this out? Did someone go through the entire dictionary and test each word?” Then I thought, “you can probably automate this task with software; but how? What makes two words rhyme?” To me, a rhyme is when two words sound the same. But maybe there is an obscure rule in Grammar I can use to programmatically test a set of words to see if they rhyme?

A Google search turned up this information on using phonetics to detect rhyme The blog talks about using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to translate words into their phonetic equivalent and then inspecting the words for a match. Check out this example

Aha! I’m getting close. Now if I could just capture the IPA in code and use it to translate words on the fly I’d have the next killa app. However, there’s just one problem. After grabbing the IPA chart it was obvious the translation is based on how something sounds. Even for a human it appears extremely difficult considering accent, dialect, and other factors.

So it seems ( at least right now ) it’d be nearly impossible to write software to detect rhyme.

Thinglink.org provides a nice place for Makers to register and publicize their products and/or designs. When you register an item on the site, a unique ThingLink code is created (like a SKU) . This code is registered in the ThingLink open database and is intended to “stick” to the item for life. This is a neat idea, and appears they’ve put a bit of thought into the format of the code.

A ThingLink is a 6 character code that is intended to uniquely identify an object for life. The code follows a particular format: The first 3 characters are numbers (0-9) and the next 3 characters are letters (a-z), case doesn’t matter. So you may end up with a code like 345JrD. In fact, you can generate your own code here. The format - numbers then letters - seem to make it a bit easier to remember. And for some reason, I don’t know why, but the URL for a ThinkLink, gives it a bit of cool factor: http://thinglink.org/thing:123Abc