My Game Jam post is waaay overdue but some stuff happened this week (impromptu upgrade, server migration) so I’ll only get around to post about it probably later today.

Anyway, this post is just about the new version up over at RailsFTW. This experimental build is based on TCS’s patched Ruby build which boasted a ~200% increase in performance.

See it for yourself:

Still hung-over from Global Game Jam 2012 (mini-write-up later) when I went to the RailsInstaller site on a whim.

Noticed that it still isn’t using Rails 3.2. So I decided to update my own to be ahead again.

Hopefully this would be the last RailsFTW version (hoping Luis would be able to convince Wayne to include MySQL to RailsInstaller so I won’t need to this anymore LOL).

That little app/wallpaper we made at the code retreat? I’ve published it and it’s now free for download at the Android Marketplace.

At the moment it’s not properly indexed in the Marketplace yet so searching “Game of Life Wallpaper” won’t return the link. A workaround is to search it using the search terms “code retreat“.

So I’m gonna be recording rants for the next few weeks to figure out and fix my vocal problems. I’m ok with topic suggestions but I’m not really expecting any.

Will be posting the recordings on this site until I get to setup another page for the recordings (probably a wiki).

Episode 0 – Intro

Episode 1 – Pizza (pt1 of 2)

Episode 2 – Pizza (pt2 of 2)

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UPDATE

Podcasts now posted daily at http://bry-rants.tumblr.com/

Thanks to a Battlefield 3 Beta losing streak that I blame on my sucky internet connection, I’ve decided to update my hack-job of a standalone Windows installer for Rails.

Now there are two separate installers, a Ruby 1.8.7 + Rails 3.0.10 installer and a Ruby 1.9.2 + Rails 3.1.0. Here’s a table to give a quick comparison between these two installers with RailsInstaller thrown into the mix:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://blog.bryanbibat.net/$1 [R=301,L]

I’m still keeping the .com site for possible future usage. I might install Moodle or whatever captures my fancy this year that doesn’t require the power and flexibility of a VPS.

As part of making my “freelance” status semi-official, I’m currently migrating stuff from www.bryanbibat.com to this site, www.bryanbibat.net. You might have noticed that I’ve already merged my old blogs to this single blog as well as modified the links in my portfolio pages to point to here.

Another change is the shift from using my Gmail/Yahoo Mail account to bry@bryanbibat.net, and this is what I’ll be talking about today.

Setting up e-mail for your domain

I originally thought setting up a personal e-mail based on my domains was going to be a hassle until I stumbled upon a comment somewhere (I don’t know where, probably Lifehacker) where the guy mentions that his e-mail is handled by Google Apps, saving him the trouble of setting up spam filters and the like.

A bit of searching lead me to this page: Google Apps Standard Edition.

It’s actually pretty easy to setup Google Apps for your domain. You’ll just have to upload an HTML file to your server so that Google can verify if it’s really yours.

I think the only tricky part is how to setup the MX (Mail Exchanger) record settings in your domain. It’s still pretty straightforward though. In my case bryanbibat.com is hosted by MSWEB and uses cPanel for site admin tasks. To change the MX settings, just go to MX Entry

then modify the settings as instructed by Google.

On the other hand, bryanbibat.net is hosted by Linode. The process is pretty much the same, just set the MX Records under DNS Manager page.

After configuring the MX settings, it’s all a matter of waiting for Google to confirm the MX entries and preparing your inboxes for you.

Consolidating E-mail

So now I have two new e-mail addresses, bry@bryanbibat.com and bry@bryanbibat.net. Of course, it can be a pain if I would have to check those two along with my Gmail and Yahoo Mail account. The Yahoo Mail is fine because I have YM! on most of the time, but I have to consolidate the Gmail accounts to make my mail checking easier.

Thankfully, Gmail supports receiving and exposing mail through POP. Under the Accounts settings, you can configure the “Send mail as:” and “Get mail from other accounts:” to consolidate all of your mail to one single Gmail account.

I’ve designated bry@bryanbibat.net as my main account. Here’s the current Accounts settings for that account:

And that’s it. Hopefully by next post I’ll be able to post something more “normal”, less “Site News”-y.

As mentioned in my earlier Tweet, I’ve begun streamlining my sites to make them more functional instead of just being yet another outlet for my thoughts (we’ve got social networking sites for that).

First thing on the list was to replace my Sweetcron Lifestream with a single page portfolio. The reason behind this is simple: when people go to my website, they would expect to see information about me and not a stream of all of my social networking site activity.

As to the design of the page, I only had two main points to keep in mind:

• It has to immediately convey “I’m Bryan Bibat, software engineer. Here are my works, and if you want to hire me, contact me here.” Anything more than that would make my site less useful.
• It has to reflect my identity.

The identity part is a bit tricky, though I could summarize it as “simple, yet subtle”. As you can see from the redesigned bryanbibat.com, everything is simple. No flashy graphics, just a clean one-page HTML site. The subtle part is the inclusion of jQuery for the scrolling and the lightbox — both unexpected features.

I think the more subtle (or should I say, more “bry” ) part of the whole redesign is the “mirror” gimmick. The image above would spoil you already but anyway, here’s the gimmick: visit both bryanbibat.com and (my newly rented site) bryanbibat.net.

Yup, each is an opposite version of the other. The symbolism behind that, I leave to the reader. Heck, I might just be screwing around with the visitors and there might not even be a deeper meaning behind it.

The fun part? The HTML code for both sites are exactly the same.

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That’s pretty much the biggest change that I’m going to do for this streamlining thing. The other stuff is mostly invisible to my network anyway.

Will spend the rest of the week in UP Diliman for Y4iT starting tomorrow. My planned schedule was posted here.

Will try to post short comments about the event either here or my Twitter account (I don’t want to pollute my Plurk with IT stuff ).

(Logo c/o Y4iT site)