Author Archives: lantean

San Francisco Muebles: A Website from the 90’s!

Several years ago (1999 to be precise!), i’ve started a simple website for my father’s business: San Francisco Muebles.

This is how it used to look like (thanks god for web.archive.org!)

san-francisco-muebles

Back then, iframes, simple javascript, fancy flash buttons… and some plain html was, pretty much, the gold standard for a personal (OR business) website.

Over the years, my dad’s website has evolved into many different incarnations: i’ve adopted Plain-PHP, Code Igniter, and jQuery to handle fancy transitions.

But at some point you hit a brickwall: how do i make this maintainable by anyone (not just me!) and extremely lightweight?. I do run my own Amazon Box… can i also have an extra backup layer, just in case i break my EC2 instance?

What is Jekyll?
It’s a simple tool, written in Ruby, that allows you avoid HTML duplication: if you’ve got many pages that should look the same way, you simply get to write a template, and reuse it all over.

Why Jekyll?
Jekyll is the engine behind Github Pages, and it simply caught my eye.

What is so great about having a website in Plain HTML?
Simply put, the resources required to host a Plain HTML website are extremely low.

Plus, you get to use Route53 Failover Mechanism: your website is constantly monitored. If anything goes wrong, Route53 takes over, and maps your domain elsewhere. In my case, Amazon S3 will just kick in, and serve the site.

Conclusions!
Implementing Jekyll has been a fun (and quite successful) experiment. It just took under 8 hours to do the whole thing.

However, some knowledge is still required: you need to execute a script, and upload the output to the server. Which is okay, but… there are many ways in which things can go wrong.

Bottomline: there is nothing easier, and more parent-friendly, than WordPress. Which is precisely the reason why the next incarnation will be WP based!

Orchestrated Objective Reduction

This is old news, actually. I came across an article posted on January 2014, that talks about a theory… i had just no idea existed, and it blew my mind.

It’s called Orch-OR: the idea? you cannot model consciousness with just a huge neural network. There’s an orchestrated quantum effect that affects synapse.

This theory was proposed by Roger Penrose in the early 90’s, and… cool thing is that, precisely, quantum vibrations inside brain neurons have been proved to exist.

(I know, 2014, i came late to the party!).

Reference here!

Fish Shell

Installing Fish:

brew install fish

Displaying the branch name in the prompt:

Place the following script here: ~/.config/fish/config.fish

set fish_git_dirty_color red
set fish_git_not_dirty_color green

function parse_git_branch
  set -l branch (git branch 2> /dev/null | grep -e '\* ' | sed 's/^..\(.*\)/\1/')
  set -l git_diff (git diff)

  if test -n "$git_diff"
    echo (set_color $fish_git_dirty_color)$branch(set_color normal)
  else
    echo (set_color $fish_git_not_dirty_color)$branch(set_color normal)
  end
end

function fish_prompt
  if test -d .git
    printf '%s@%s %s%s%s:%s> ' (whoami) (hostname|cut -d . -f 1) (set_color $fish_color_cwd) (prompt_pwd) (set_color normal) (parse_git_branch)
  else
    printf '%s@%s %s%s%s> ' (whoami) (hostname|cut -d . -f 1) (set_color $fish_color_cwd) (prompt_pwd) (set_color normal)
  end
end

Reference here (Thanks for sharing the snippet!)