Just a quick update adding the latest version of RubyGems (1.5) and Rails (3.0.4). Also chose not to remove the cached gems to make bundle install run faster.
Category: Brain Dumps
Why Diets Make You Fatter
Why Diets Make You Fatter — And What to Do About It via AlterNet
Stumbled upon this article yesterday. It pretty much sums up the current state of weight control science. TL;DR:
- Fad diets work. But most of the time, the weight goes back once you stop i.e. yo-yo dieting.
- Caloric restriction (eat less, exercise more) will make you lose weight. Duh. That’s why fad diets work: follow a regimen that takes away 3500 calories from your weekly calorie intake = lose one pound a week.
- “Eat less, exercise more” isn’t as simple as it seems. You have to take into account a lot of factors in order for you to manage your weight to healthy levels. (And yes, it’s not just about losing weight.)
So while stuff like Paleo Diets (gluten is evil!) might work, weight control (and personal fitness as a whole) is still very much trial and error. Don’t be excited about the latest fad, but at the same time, don’t be discouraged if the results don’t appear as fast as you expect it to show.
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Yoyo pic from XuliánConX via flickr
RailsFTW v0.5s out
Not really a major update on the main installer: just updated a couple of gems and included the command line shell for SQLite3.
The big update is the addition of a Ruby 1.8.7 installer. As mentioned in my previous post, RailsInstaller is a bit faster than RailsFTW because of 1.9.2’s slow performance. Because of this, I decided to put up a 1.8.7 option for RailsFTW.
At first I thought it was going to be an easy task. Unfortunately, mysql2 wasn’t cooperating when used it in combination with Rails and I had to ask for help. Fortunately, Luis Lavena pointed me to a recently discovered bug in the mysql2 gem and I was able to make it work. The downside is that the patch isn’t official yet so I’d have to mark the 1.8.7 version of RailsFTW as “experimental”.
Anyway, just head over to http://railsftw.bryanbibat.net to find the latest installers.
RailsInstaller (and obligatory RailsFTW comparison)
The true successor to InstantRails is out: Wayne Sequin of RVM fame, with the help of Dr. Nic Williams and RubyInstaller‘s Luis Lavena, has just released the first version of RailsInstaller.
Now I can finally stop worrying about how to find time to maintain RailsFTW. :D
Continue reading “RailsInstaller (and obligatory RailsFTW comparison)”
[Follow up] CD-R King’s Cheap Solid State Drive
Last year, I bought two really cheap SSDs from the unlikeliest of sources: CD-R King.
Everything about it was just screaming BAD IDEA. Someone over at HardOCP’s forum even suggested the drives will have “gone to shit” in just 4 months.
Let’s see how much the performance has degraded a year later:
As expected, the drive has degraded a bit, its performance half of what it was last year. For reference, here’s the HD Tune performance just after I first installed them (with a brand new OS and all) last year:
A 50% drop in performance might be disappointing, but when you take into account the expected performance of top non-SSD hard drives, it’s still pretty impressive. Here’s the graph of the comparison drive last year (Western Digital 10K RPM Raptor):
So no, performance still hasn’t gone to shit yet.