Joel's Pointers

Something to do just for fun: create a printout of your CakePHP models and their relationships. My current project has grown quite large and complicated so it’s useful to have a graph every once in a while.

1. Download this and put it in your vendors/shells folder:  https://github.com/mamchenkov/CakePHP-GraphViz-Models
2. Install Image_Graphviz - (sudo) pear install Image_GraphViz
3. Install Graphviz - (sudo) apt-get install graphviz (for Ubuntu, change to your package manager)
4. Run the shell! - cake graph
5. Enjoy graph.png

Paul Graham describing why entrepreneurs often shy away from the biggest ideas.

(via parislemon)

(via shitthatsirisays)

(via shitthatsirisays)

Chrome has a new detached “add tab” button in the latest Dev release. Looks pretty slick! (this is with a theme activated, slightly different without)

So there’s this thing going around Facebook telling people to unsubscribe from your Facebook feed because you don’t want your friends to see everything you comment on. 

Firstly, the post is already outdated, I don’t have an option that’s mentioned in the post that says “Comments and Likes”, it now lists “All Updates”, “Most updates” or “Only important”.

Secondly, the point is you’re sharing this information whether or not I subscribe to it. Isn’t it a little backwards to ask people not to see what you’re sharing anyway? It’s like asking people to close their ears while you read your PIN out loud. Reading you PIN out loud is a bad idea, asking people not to listen a worse idea. 

The solution is to post things to “Friends only”. Just checked this, and am 99% sure that if you make it “friends only”, only your friends that see that post can see that you commented on something. If you then comment on something I can’t see cause I’m not a friend of the same person, I won’t see it in the ticker. You only see comments on the ticker you have a right to see…

To make that practical: Joe posts a status and Bob comments on it. Jill is a friend of Bob but not Joe. If Joe’s status is set to “Friends only”, Jill won’t see Bob’s comment in the ticker. If Joe’s status is set to “Friends of Friends”, Jill can see it, cause she can also see the original comment. Facebook is nice enough to have a little icon by each status showing the status, a world for “everyone”, two people for “Friends of Friends”, and a wheel for “Custom”, a specific subset of friends, or all your friends. 

UPDATE: Regarding the first part: apparently I’ve got a new version, talking with others has confirmed they see a different UI for the right hand dropdown box.

Fabric is a cool little package to script (remote) commands and can be very useful for things like deploys to a variety of servers. I’m using it to deploy my Django app.

I run windows (64bit) however, and it took me a while to find the right links to all of the right binaries and packages. This “recipe” however has the following assumptions:

• You have python installed (2.7 in my case)
• You have pip installed 

If you try “pip install fabric”, you’ll likely get an error about a crypto library missing. Install Pycrypto and Paramiko from here:

http://blog.victorjabur.com/2011/06/08/modules-python-library-compiled-for-windows-32-and-64-unofficial-windows-binaries-for-python/

Note you’ll have to run the installer as administrator (right click, “Run as Administrator”), because the installer will crash if you don’t.

The third required package is the win32api. That package is available here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pywin32/files/pywin32/Build216/ Be sure to pick the right python version and architecture (pywin32-216.win-amd64-py2.7.exe in my case).

Now you can run “pip install fabric” and have a happy fabric install. Happy deploys!

What is the world coming to?

“It isn’t official till it’s on facebook” has a completely new meaning this way.

TIL the Batman logo is all just a formula… Math is taking over the world!

(TIL = Today I Learned)