While42

This week I got in contact with Sylvain from while42. It’s a social network for french tech engineers, but with a special touch on it. There is no facebook page or google group. They intentionally decided to be irl-first. For people that are most likely to be online all the time, this sounds so therapeutic! So, I decided, with Thomas from Gandi, to setup a Taiwan chapter. If you want to know more (and are french, engineer, and living in Taipei) just drop me a mail.

Traveling ruby

This is a project from the Phusion people, called Traveling ruby. Its purpose is to make it easy to build auto-sustaining tarballs for ruby programms, including ruby binary and all gems in it. That way you can publish a tarball and your customer/user will just launch whatever you put in it. No need to install ruby or any gems.

I gave it a try yesterday on my zabbix-ruby-client gem, and after a few tweaks (mostly because I wanted to use an unpublished version of my gem), it all worked pretty fine. Result is a tarball of 8M. Uploaded to the server (an old squeeze), it just ran the self-contained ruby 2.1.5 with no hassle. It reminded me a bit of the feeling when you upload a go executable on the server. Really neat.

Palm control

There are tiny things that can change a lot. My recent tiny thing is the palm control technique. Every sunday when I prepare Green Ruby I do a huge amount of copy pasting all over the place. Recently I found on a post about keyboard someone talking about the palm control technique for avoiding the copypaste fatigue.

Well, you need to have a keyboard that makes it possible. Mine is a Logitech washable k310. I already liked its look, and even better, it’s perfect for this palm thing because keys are prominent. Use the palm to push control and then it’s only a matter of hitting c or v with the index. Honestly, it changed my life!