Darth Vader in the sky

Vader in the sky

The imagination of Star Wars fans has no limits. To promote a fans association/event one of the members got the idea to create a balloon with the shape of the head of one of the most recognizable movie villains.

After getting authorization from Lucasfilm, they start working and 8 weeks later the balloon was ready. The size is 26 meters tall, 21 meters in the widest part and a depth of 24 meters. It can contain about 3000 cubic meters of air and the weight is 320 kg.

Continue reading

Netbeans IDE

Netbeans IDERecently Eclipse has been giving me problems, closing suddenly, troubles to start, too slow to start and when I was updating some plugins it started to some weird things when I write, every letter appeared to the left of the previous one. So I decided that it was time to change IDE and I found that NetBeans has added support to Ruby/Rails in a plugin and the reate of updates and new features is fast, so decided to try it.

From the start it seems to use less resources than Eclipse, and better yet, if you only need an IDE to Ruby/Rails there is a reduced version of the IDE (just 22MB). But what is interesting is that they are constantly adding options and features without letting bug fixing on a side.

Continue reading

Twitter from the command line

Here we go with another post about Twitter of the many in the web every day.

To send a post to your account there are many ways, the most basic is going to the site and write it in the text box provided, or you can add Twitter to your IM account (doesn’n matter which, I think it supports all the clients/IM services) and sent whatever you want as a message which will be posted in your account or you can send a SMS and get the same result.

Mac users has Twitterific, a widget specific for this with some other options, Windows users have several widgets that do the same. This widgets allows you to update constantly (cool for Twitter addicts) and a lot easier than going to the site or sending a SMS, updating thru IM is similar in the sense that usually everyone has their IM client and is a matter of a couple of clicks, writing the message and that it.

But, what about Linux users?, to update we have the same options I mention above and in widgets there are some initiatives like glTwitter which in my case I didn’t want to install it (ok, compile it) in my computer because I needed some dependencies. But it’s not what I was looking for, because implied opening another app and since most Linux users spend a lot of time with console window to type commands I was looking to allow me send a post to Twitter in a quick and easy way and if it’s from the command line what can be better?

Continue reading