After a period of downtime the new gravatar site has been released. It looks as if it has been developed in rails and utilises cutting edge web programming methods such as REST. In case you dont know the gravatar site describes best what one is.

A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an 80×80 pixel avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites. Avatars help identify your posts on web forums, so why not on weblogs?

This all helps for you to enhance your online identity, spanning across the modern world of distributed blogs and forums. Would be great if this could be used to integrate with authentication systems for forums and blogs. One gravatar account which gives you a login to all gravatar authentication enabled forums.

Maybe we will see something like this in the future?

My Subaru impreza doesnt have the best fuel econony. It goes through tyres at a swift rate and the insurance group 13 means that it isnt the cheapest to run month to month.

Classic shape impreza parts are also not as dirt cheap as the scirocco parts I used to buy all the time.

However, on Friday night I was driving from Glasgow to Aboyne on my own. I decided to drive over the Cairn O’Mount road in a snow storm. I realised it wasnt the best route at the time but was keen to see how the scooby would handle slippery, deep drifting snow.

All was quiet until I reached the summit of the mountain pass where the switchbacks arrive and where the true impact to the council not bothering to plough this B road in winter kicked in. There were a number of cars being pushed over the summit and skid marks all over the snow.

I had the fogs on, and full beam with Mika on the stereo and just plugged the gearbox into diff lock mode and away I went past all the sliding cars with a smile on my face. I am interested to see what a difference a set of winter tyres would make to the performance of the car on snow.

So I would thoroughly recommend a decent 4×4 (not a volvo) if you often travel in adverse weather conditions. However, if you are only into driving the kids to school, or sunday motorway driving then head on down to Arnold Clark and buy yourself a Ford Focus.

I wrote a white paper for Mercurytide, the company I used to work for almost a year ago titled A life online: living decentralised and it is still hot according to google blog search.

Essentially it discusses “how to use Web 2.0 applications to create an online platform”
http://www.mercurytide.com/whitepapers/life-online/

sudo gem install rails --include-dependencies
ERROR:  While executing gem ... (NoMethodError)
undefined method `refresh' for #

Interestingly both Rails 1.2.1 and RubyGems 0.9.0 were released within days of each other. The essential RubyGems release was to fix a security vulnerability.

There are now warnings popping up all over the place in rails complaining about how require_gem is obsolete. Hopefully rails will be further updated to fall in line with this new release of RubyGems.

Warning: require_gem is obsolete.  Use gem instead.

I bought a load of bike parts the other day to fix Helen’s bike. When the shop assistant was ringing them up at the till I thought to myself, “Apparently, this is when I ask for a discount.”.

So I asked the guy, “Can I please have a multi-buy discount or any money off at all?”. So the guy immediately takes of 15% and saves me like £15. This is only because I asked!

Lesson learned, I will always be trying to get discounts when making large purchases in the future.

Props go to West End Cycles