At dib creative we recently were give the opportunity to work with Spark Farm and Swoon on bring a new brand online.

Uwezo generates scholarship funds for Empower African Children and opportunity for East Africans by reinvesting its revenues in Africa.

Check it out and go buy some shoes.

Uwezo Brands

I have had the free version of Pandora for years, and I just upgrade to the paid account. This happened just as so many options are starting to pop up and compete for my digital music listening habits.

Pandora is the right one for a couple of reasons.

1. I am too old to know what is current or new. Pandora gives me the opportunity to explore the genres that I am interested in.
2. Some call the music that I typically listen to monotonous (electronic, jazz), but if I hear the same songs over and over, I get distracted. There always a new station on Pandora.
3. I usually listen to music while I am working, so having something fresh in my iTunes everyday will get really expensive. Pandora is quite affordable.
4. iPhone, iPad, and AirPlay.

This is the new dib creative toy (actually Clay’s toy). I need to figure out what to call it. 1980 Land Rover is all I know. It is very utilitarian, but in an awesome way.

Cool vim plugin for distraction-free editing

This seems to be a good write up for understanding some of the components of the Cedar stack from Heroku.

When using Heroku Cedar stack, we have to use this to get the caching we need for a fast web application.

PGError: ERROR: invalid byte sequence for encoding “UTF8”: 0x95 PGError: ERROR: invalid byte sequence for encoding “UTF8”: 0x92

~~~ruby

!/usr/bin/ruby

require ‘rubygems’ require ‘mysql’

my = Mysql::new(“127.0.0.1”, “redmine”, “froUc6oagoaQiuwi1T”, “redmine_production”) res = my.query(“select id, description from issues order by id”) puts “=”*80 res.each do |row| if !row[1].scan(/\x92/).empty?

puts "#{row[0]}"
puts "#{row[1]}"

end end ~~~

This looks like a great app to try when we want to get really customer design-centric maps going.

Presentation Software

Heroku workers are really expensive for the work that I need to do. I am setting up a really simple email newsletter for a website. Sending 100+ emails in the request would not be a smart thing to do, so I am looking at an alternative to using a worker.

The first option looks to be cron. By cracking open the delayed_job source code, I discover there is a class method that will do exactly what we want to do. We want to create a command to execute that will process a few jobs then exit.

I create the cron.rake file in /lib/tasks and the contents looks like this:

ruby task :cron => :environment do Delayed::Job.work_off(200) end

The option that is passed to work_off is the maximum number of jobs to process. When configuring this, remember that Heroku limits cron execution to 30 seconds. You can do lots of small jobs, like sending email, or you can can do just a few jobs that take more time.

SDK for making cross platform mobile applications

This looks like a good site that would help us still use Harvest.