Sweden’s Pionen is the most awesome geek lair ever.

• Originally a nuclear bunker, now a data center with triple-redundant Internet connections.
• Located in central Stockholm below almost 100 ft of bedrock.
• German submarine engines for backup power.

Now they need a guy with steel teeth and a cat babe.

If you’re on OS X, and you do this:

dave@home > sudo gem install mysql

And then you get this:

Building native extensions.  This could take a while…
ERROR:  Error installing mysql:
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/ruby extconf.rb install mysql
can’t find header files for ruby.

Gem files will remain installed in /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.7 for inspection.
Results logged to /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.7/gem_make.out

… it might be because you haven’t installed the XCode library yet.

And now you can rest assured, knowing that you’re not the first person to have made this mistake…

Smashing Magazine rounds up a bunch of Web 2.0 ideas, and it makes for an occasionally frustrating browse.

Still. Pretty neat, pretty cool.

dmidecode drops a whole lot of information about the machine you’re on from the command line.

For other information, check out this fine list of command line applications.

Personally, I’ve been a huge fan of tree for a while, too. It shows file structures in an outline, and lets you manipulate them in a variety of ways. For instance … “Let’s see all of the ruby source files in this directory structure, and where they are.”

Google’s new browser is launching today, and, between a Monday deadline and the Lone Star Ruby Conference, I’m too busy to pay much attention.

bah.

I will say:

• Yay for browser competition!
• Yay for a new, smart-looking browser!
• Yay for testing your browsers on a million sites that people already go to!
• Yay for hiring Scott McCloud to do some of your marketing!
• Yay for using the medium of comics to explain difficult concepts simply!

Maybe six years ago, I wrote a document explaining why Macromedia should use the language of comics to talk to designers and developers — it itself was a comic, although not as pretty as McCloud’s. (Ultimately, the powers-that-be were scared that comics would make them look silly.) I’ll try to upload it next week.

Google. Still smart. Still managing the fear.

Ubiquity is a natural language web service connector for Firefox.

That’s clear. Right? … I can already feel you thinking, “Man! I’ve been looking for one of those!”

What it does is let you bring up a dialog, type “email this to mel,” for instance, and it emails the page that you’re looking at to Mel. (It’s like Quicksilver, if you’re a Mac person — or like a command line for the web, if you’re a Unix person.)

But that’s an easy example.

“translate this page” is another. You’re looking at a page in Japanese, bring up the Ubiquity dialog, type ‘translate,’ and now you can read the page in broken, computer-translated English — but that’s a big step forward.

It also brings the web to, say, your email. You’re trying to describe a location to a friend. You bring up ubiquity, you type “map,” it brings up Google maps, you navigate to the view of the map you want, you click ‘insert,’ and the map is now inserted into your email.

Services (Ubiquity “verbs”) can be developed and provided by any developer — the explosion of Ubiquity verbs is gated only by a developer’s desire to have one.

This is the most exciting thing I’ve seen in web development since RSS. The possibilities are awesome and vast for managing the data on the web and pushing it around the way you want. — Or maybe it’ll just make Twitter even easier to use.

Check it out!

Here’s what Lifehacker had to say.

This is one of my favorite geek tricks ever.

Here’s how it goes:

• You’re browsing Amazon.
• You find a book you want.
• You click a bookmarklet in your browser window.
• The bookmarklet looks up to see if that book is available at your local public library.
• If it is — and you’re in Austin — you can get the book held and sent to your local branch. (Transfer usually takes a few days, and they’re nice enough to send you an email when it gets there.)

The key is this sucker:

Austin Public Library

Drag that link to your bookmarks toolbar. It’s a bookmarklet — like a bookmark, but also kind of like an application. Then go to Amazon (or any place else that has ISBN numbers in the url), and try it out. … Here’s a book.

Neat, right?

Coolness courtesy of Jon Udell. If you live someplace else, you can go to his site and try to find or roll your own.

I’ve added a new category: “things I’ve learned more than once.”

To inaugurate this category, I give you rak, a nice little directory-level search tool.

Need to find all the times you used a method in a pile of code? Searching desperately for the error alert that says, “This stupid file has been changed?”

There are a fair number of tools for this — rak is based on ack, for instance, which is probably based on awk — but rak is nice because it’s pretty. And Ruby. Line numbers! Color! Automatically skips most version control files!

Dave says check it out.

Hell, yeah!

I’m registered, and signed up for the “thoughtbot’s Rails Best Practices” training course, which should be killer.

Particularly enticing was this bit, “In addition to gaining real world experience and knowledge that will prove invaluable during your next Rails project, you’ll be armed with the following: The full source code to a small Rails application - useful as a base for your next project. Printed material outlining and explaining all of the concepts covered above, [and] a thoughtbot t-shirt to impress your future clients.”

mmmm. code, documentation, and a t-shirt. awesome.

All that, plus Matz!

from my geek cave, I stab at thee, SXSW/I.

My favorite Firefox plug-in of the moment is FaviconizeTab, which takes your tabs and makes them iconized.

So this:

becomes this:

… which is probably only important if you’ve got 25 tabs open at any given time. But, I do, and I think it’d be better if you surfed that way, too. (Remember life before tabbed browsers? There was so much waiting then…)

There’s a setting that will auto-iconize pages from a particular site, so if you’re always in Gmail, you just hand it “https://mail.google.com/*” and everything Gmail is iconized all the time.