Great Team Basketball

In NCAA Men's basketball tournament, Davidson University played great team basketball games. I just loved the way they played basketball.

Healthy snowboarding brand

After an "Event to build entrepreneurial software in 48 hours over a weekend", I got into a mindset to come up with a new brand a little bit.

That led me to come up with a way of snowboarding in a healthy athletic way.

Often times, many snowboarders are rude and aggressive and do stuff like smoking and drinking excessively.

But if you take snowboarding itself, it's a good sport requires whole body muscles. It has variety of movements - free riding, free styling in snow park, etc. It's challenging, which gives you positive attitude overcoming fear. It's outdoor, often breathing fresh air in the mountains. And on the top of the ski hills, you can see magnificent views, which refreshes your mind.

So I would package all these good features together and brand it as a healthy snowboarding. The image of that brand is like working out in the gym. You eat well with nutritious food and in the daily life, work out and tone up the muscles, in order to give you the best snowboarding performance. A friendly attitude toward other people has the high value. And you progressively improve various snowboarding skills, including free style moves.

Possibility of hydrogen production for hydrogen vehicle

After I wrote a blog entry, "Wind-powered generator on the top of the ski hills - Éoliennes sur le sommet des centres de ski", I was reminded that I live in a place with abundant electricity by hydroelectric energy production.

Then I thought of hydrogen vehicles. As far as I remember Iceland is the only country that can produce hydrogen from water by electrolysis using clean natural energy source, enough to support almost all the vehicles in the country. Maybe we can be next. With the combination with the electricity by wind-powered generator, maybe we have enough electricity needed to produce hydrogen.

REST for various scenarios

The purpose of the article is different but I read it in such a way to learn more about REST.

"Addressing Doubts about REST"

Also the comments are interesting.
And one of them "Resource transformations" is what I'm concerned with most now.

How to set up to access LDAP from Ruby on Rails

Note: This is for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. For other system, change the directory path appropriately.

1. Install OpenLDAP.

 1-1. Install Berkeley DB.
   (OpenLDAP requires this.)

   1-1-1. Download the source. db-4.5.20.tar.gz
     (OpenLDAP only works with the version up to 4.5.
      Don't download 4.6.)
     ("Berkeley DB 4.5.20.tar.gz, with AES encryption(8.9M)"
      in
      http://www.oracle.com/technology/software
      /products/berkeley-db/db/index.html)

   1-1-2. Unpack the tar.gz file. And build it.
     $ cd build_unix
     $ ../dist/make

   1-1-3. Install it.
     $ sudo make install

 1-2. Install OpenLDAP

   1-2-1. Set the environment variables.
     (See the message with "configure --help")            
     $ export CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/local/include"
     $ export LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/lib"
     $ export LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/BerkeleyDB.4.5/lib/"
     $ export CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/local/BerkeleyDB.4.5/include/"

   1-2-2. Build it.
     $ make depend
     $ sudo make
     (make has to be executed as root
      otherwise a permission error occurs.)

   1-2-3. Install it.
     $ sudo make install

   1-2-4. See doc/guide/admin/guide.html for how to use it.
     Especially, "2. A Quick-Start Guide".            

     e.g How to start it.
         $ su root -c /usr/local/libexec/slapd

2. Install ruby-activeldap Rails Plugin.
 (http://code.google.com/p/ruby-activeldap/)
 $ script/plugin install \
   http://ruby-activeldap.googlecode.com \
   /svn/trunk/rails/plugin/active_ldap

3. Install activeldap Ruby Gem.
 (ruby-activeldap Rails Plugin only generates
  scaffold model to access this gem.)

 $ sudo gem install activeldap

4. Install Ruby/LDAP.
 (activeldap is a wrapper for this.)

 4-1. Download the source. ruby-ldap-0.9.7.tar.gz
   (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ruby-ldap/)

 4-2. Unpack the tar.gz file. And build it.
   (See README file under the unpacked directory.)
   $ ruby extconf.rb --with-openldap2
   $ make

 4-3. Install it.
   $ sudo make install
   (It's installed under /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8)

Event to build entrepreneurial software in 48 hours over a weekend

Over the last weekend, I participated in an event to build software product in two days and present it to investors at the end.

My goal of participating the event was to work on Ruby on Rails development and to get familiar with local start-up scene because they are the ones who are using Ruby on Rails most.

Our team lead was very professional in skills, knowledge and the manner he conducted business throughout the project. I was able to enjoy the development fully.

During the event, series of experts in business, entrepreneurship, and technology visited each team and gave us advices. It was very interesting to see how the project was being shaped as a result of this interaction and how the direction changed along the way.

The presentations by investors and accounting professional, etc. at the beginning of the event were very informative also. And I was able to meet various technical people during the event.

My goal was more than fulfilled.