If you are reading this post on my blog using Readability, then you are probably gonna love this. For those, who have not heard about Readability, it is a nifty little tool by Arc90, which transforms a webpage or blog post you are looking at to something very friendly to your eyes, or just increases the ‘readability’ as the name implies. From day one, I’m in love with it. If you haven’t yet, go check it out.

Coming back to the post, I discovered this really nice tip that helps to get Readability installed on NetNewsWire (yeah, your favorite news reader), using Applescript. It is very useful because you probably read all your news subscriptions on your news reader. So here you go!

Hint: I recommend adding a shortcut to the script once you have set it up. See this post if you’d like to know how you can do that.

While following the keynote at Engadget last Wednesday, I was sure that I’m never going to buy it. I thought to myself, that this was never going to be useful for me. But lately I’ve been thinking over it. I’m a freelancer and mostly work from home. I code for the web, read my RSS subscriptions, catchup on emails, read stuff on the internet, all on my MacBook Pro. Apparently, I spend the whole day sitting on my chair in front of my mac. So, why not just get a tablet and separate my work stuff from things I don’t really need my mac for.

I’m starting to break-up! I might get this one when it is in India IF the price is right, which I don’t really hope is Rs.29K ($499).

A while back Friendfeed posted a blog post explaining how they changed from storing data in MySQL columns to serializing data and just storing it inside TEXT/BLOB columns. It seems that since then, the technique has gotten more popular with Ruby gems now around to do this for you automatically.

So when is it a good idea to use this technique?

If the application really is schema-less and has a lot of optional parameters that do not appear in every record, serializing the …

Continue reading at MySQL Performance Blog.

(Via The Ruby Reflector)

If anyone of you is using Dropzone app, I’ve made a small script to post images to the fun blogging platform – Tumblr. If you haven’t used Dropzone, it is a very useful mac app that lets you easily drag and drop files to perform customizable actions on them. For example, to upload the file to remote destinations, like your own FTP servers, Flickr, Posterous, Twitpic to name a few. But it is not just limited to file uploads, other uses include zipping and emailing the files you drop on it, install mac apps easily, share code on Github Gist or Pastie etc. Smoking Apples has a good review on the app.

I mainly use it to quickly share screenshots I take while on work, and also to quickly share a file with someone else on my FTP server.

The very good point with Dropzone is that the developers have made it very easy to extend the app with its API. If you are fine doing away with Ruby, then you can build your own destination scripts. I’ve just tried my hand on it, with a simple script that uploads the dropped image to Tumblr. I tried both the Net::HTTP method and also using Curl. However, using Curl seems to be quite faster.

The code is at my fork of Aptonic’s user contributed scripts at Github.

I believe that this app has got great potential and hope to see more extended scripts in the future and also will try creating my own if I get the time.

Easy.

(Via Pastie)