Programmer are lazy. Right? Well, I am lazy. Therefore, I often go out of my way, spending extended amount of time and effort to improve small process and increase productivity… Most people would find this ridiculous.. but you know, geeks are geeks.

Geeks vs normal people

Anyway, I recently published a gem with my friend William Estoque called Google Terminal that allows you to use Google Search directly from your terminal. You don’t want to have to switch windows, click on the address bar and type your search, right? That would be too much effort.

Here is how to install it:
gem install google_terminal
Then simply type your search right from the terminal with the command “google”.
google what is the meaning of life?

Example of google_terminal use

Chrome in action

The gem will open Google Chrome for you and google your search terms. Magic!

Of course it is just the first step. It would be nice to be able to choose which browser to open, it would be nice to have this working on windows, etc.

This project is open source so feel free to get involved and send us pull requests. (main project is here, my fork is here)

The notion of Transaction is really important in software development. If you are using Ruby on Rails, you are probably familiar with the ActiveRecord transactions that let you wrap actions in a block and only perform the actions if all are successful (if not, they are all rolled-back). You might have also noticed that before any database INSERT, UPDATE or DELETE Rails would do use BEGIN and eventually COMMIT. Here is an example:

What is that all about?

Most of the time when you query your database, a transaction wouldn’t be needed because when the update is performed doesn’t matter. However, in some cases, you need to execute several queries at the same time because they are related and you can’t just execute them synchronously one after the other as another agent could be reading values that would then be erroneous.

Read More >>

Just a quick post to say that I’m busy… which is annoying because I’ve been thinking of writing a few entries about Google Buzz, passwords security, programming frameworks, Israeli startups and so on but I never have time to. Too many things going on and too little free time. Oh well, let’s tweet about it then! (haha)

Yesterday, the now traditional Santander pitching competition was held at the Edinburgh Entrepreneurship Club. Six passionate entrepreneurs pitched their ideas to a panel of judges in a Dragon’s Den format: 5 minute presentations followed by questions from the judges. I noticed that the competition is getting tougher, as most participants were experienced and three of them had their startups running with prototypes to back up their claims. Some of the ideas were really interesting and innovative.

Read More >>

Who never felt awfully frustrated after a long and useless phone call to the customer service department of a large company (ISP, Phone Carrier, Bank, etc.)? This feeling is even more common with public organisations/administrations which are famous for their low efficiency and terrible “customer service”.  Large private companies seem to be really good at disappointing people too, even though they largely have the means for providing efficient customer service. So what can we do about that? And what can these companies or institutions do to improve customer service?

Read More >>

Today I decided to share with you a few of the most interesting (or most crazy) link I come across every week. I will begin now with the one from last week.

Why do people vote against their own interests?
This sociological article explains that people don’t like to be explained what would make them better off. It seems that politicians who tried to do so have usually sanctioned in the polls by the electors. Interesting.

Read More >>