Notes on Life, ‘Puters and Hawaii

Sending email messages via sms to mobile phones

I find it incredibly simple and handy to send application alerts (and sometimes friendly notes) via email to an sms-enabled phone. Most of the big carriers have an email to sms gateway. Here are the email addresses of the top 6 carriers.

T-Mobile
phonenumber@tmomail.net

Virgin Mobile
phonenumber@vmobl.com

AT&T
phonenumber@mmode.com

Sprint
phonenumber@messaging.sprintpcs.com

Verizon
phonenumber@vtext.com

Nextel
phonenumber@messaging.nextel.com

Amazon’s EC2 GUI for Firefox

Amazon released an XUL GUI for EC2 a few months ago that plugs right into Firefox. I had been using the command line for everything but I now do some of the tasks in the GUI. Mainly I do this because it’s just easier to look at rows and rows of data in [...]

Webistrano: GUI Rails Deployment with Capistrano

Jonathan Weiss just released Webistrano. I had it up and running it 5 minutes flat and deploying to my beta servers. If you have been avoiding Capistrano because of the learning curve, it just got smaller.  When you are done configuring and deploying your app, you can “Export” the standard capistrano delpoy [...]

Editing Ruby with Eclipse Europa and DLTK

Eclipse Europa (Eclipse 3.3) was recently released this summer. It has a “blessed” Ruby development plug-in that comes in the updates. Look under Help -> Software Updates -> Find Updates -> New Features. Select the Europa Discovery Site and the look for DLTK Ruby.
This editor is completely different than RDT (used [...]

Make perfect bootable Mac OS X backups with Rsync

With a littile work you can back up your mac every day automatically to an external, bootable drive partition without paying for backup software. All you need is a firewire or USB external drive, your OS X installation disc and a little patience.
First, get out your external drive and open Disk Utility. Click [...]

Superferry, Coqui frogs and Mongoose = Disaster

I’m bummed out about the new Hawaii Superferry. Superferry, in case you haven’t heard, is Hawaii’s first inter-island ferry system for cars and pedestrians. Great!, you might say. But wait. It was approved without any environmental impact studies. Why is this important? Lets think about this for a [...]