Hello Apple. The party’s just begun!

I read a recent JavaLobby article titled ‘So Long Apple. The Party’s Over‘ where the author goes on about how he’s selling his Mac hardware, or installing Windows, because of the poor Java support. See, Apple didn’t include Java 6, er or is it 1.6?, in OS X 10.5 Leopard. Even James Gosling has given up his Mac in favor of Solaris because of the lack of Java love…

Delivering Java apps to the desktop is a pain. Similarly to how Apple locks down the hardware choices of their computers in an effort to maintain reliability, I can understand them wanting to lock down desktop languages. Who wants a bunch of broken apps or apps that look like swingtacular crap? (Yeah, I realize you can make good looking swing apps. You can also write clean PHP code.) Eventually the perception rubs off on the hardware and OS.

When one party ends another starts. One of the noted 300 new features of Leopard is Ruby on Rails support. Or as Apple describes, “Ruby on Rails: Work in a developer’s dreamland. Leopard is the perfect platform for Ruby on Rails development, with Rails, Mongrel, and Capistrano built in.”

I wasn’t going to blog about this but a funny thing happened to me today in a bookstore. I’m looking for Ruby books in the ‘Programming’ section but couldn’t find any. WTF? After more desperate searching, and I mean desperate, I found that they had the misfortune of spilling into another section that apparently has extra room. If the same Java guys find out, they’ll boycott bookstores and go back to cuneiform.

November 4th, 2007 | No Comments »

Atlanta Ruby Users Group

A great group that I really enjoy attending, the Atlanta Ruby Users group. Shot taken October 2007 - just seven hours before my second son was born! Good thing the meeting didn’t run too long.

October 15th, 2007 | No Comments »

New gadget - DSLR!

Yesterday my new gadget arrived, a Nikon D40 digital SLR kit. I was a bit of an SLR geek in high school and even handled dark room duties for much of the school paper but I’ve been confined to point-n-shoot ever since. Man does it feel good to use an SLR again. The D40 is a great, affordable DSLR.

April 10th, 2007 | No Comments »

Outrageous

“Outrageous” is what the mayor of Boston and other high ranking officials call the Aqua Teen Hunger Force promotion. I think their reaction is what’s outrageous. I guess they must be trained using 1960’s Avengers movies because who in this age is going to make an LED-board bomb? Oh, right you have to have the big LED countdown to explosion, right? I wonder how long before the remainder of these go for big $$ on eBay…

You should be more afraid to see a cell phone laying on the ground than one of these. Unfortunately officials will eventually learn this and then they’ll arrest and torture people who misplace their phones.

maybe the lights were blinking out of sequence…

February 1st, 2007 | 2 Comments »

‘New’ search site

Today I learned about a new search site called searchmash. This thing is slick. The UI is really smooth and offers a lot of features that I’ve not seen elsewhere. Even that page about the new features is more useful than usual in that they’re collecting opinion data from you about the usefulness of each feature.

So with the search market dominated by behemoths like Google and Yahoo, who could possibly compete? How about Google! searchmash is operated by Google. They can get people using a totally new UI without changing their current one and offer the proven accuracey of the Google search engine. They do so almost annonymously - you can’t tell that this is from Google without clicking into a non-inviting terms of service link. This is good for usability testing since people are less likely to be biased. Now the Google developers have a product where almost anything goes without risk to their company’s core. The core can later inherit the proven features and/or the two sites could co-exist. A simple concept but this is from a company who has proven that simple works.

October 4th, 2006 | 1 Comment »

Save me solid state!

So two weeks after my network storage drive incident and my ipod harddrive goes out… click of doom while listening to The Residents at work. I liked that ipod, it was the 40gb clickwheel monochrome and a gift from my wife.Monochrome rocks - you can see it easily in daylight and I don’t want to watch movies, I just want to listen to music and podcasts. My wife rocks too and this will only deepen her dislike of Apple.

Replacing the drive will run ~$120 (it *should* work…) and who knows how long the battery has left on this two year old, heavily used companion. The apple refurb site has some decent deals on the 30GB video and 2GB nanos but I think I’ll wait with replacement until after the rumored release of new apple products on Sept 12. I’d say a flash-based ipod with hefty storage is what my disk-dooming self needs.

September 1st, 2006 | No Comments »

Hard drive revival!

CLICK… CLICK… that was my network hard drive a few days ago. Physically dead. The NSLU2 could not recognize it, it was hot as hell and doing nothing but clicking. It mostly had music that I could retrieve from my ipod but uh oh - what about those old photos! Baby pictures of our only child - gone because big daddy didn’t back them up. Well actually they were on my laptop. The laptop that I just recently wiped to install a dedicated Ubuntu desktop (which rocks!) doh!

I started to weigh the value of these precious memories -vs- the cost of professional data recovery. Googling around for the cost of such services was discouraging at best. But then I stumbled upon someone’s description of reviving an otherwise physically dead drive by placing it in their freezer. This reaked of urban legend but I had nothing to lose. It’s really late but I remove the drive from it’s USB enclosure and pop it in the freezer for about 20 minutes. Connect it back to the NSLU2 and it’s recognized! Proper readings on the volume name, capacity and free space. Before I finish my celebratory boogie, there it goes - CLICK! CLICK! CLICK! There I go @$*#!!! @$*#!!! @$*#!!! Time for me to crash too.

The next day I try it again - there was definate promise. This time I keep the drive in the freezer for about 2.5 hours, wrapped snuggly in a freezer bag. I connect the drive again but this time keeping it in the freezer bag and enveloping it with ice packs. I felt as if I were transporting a vital organ from a fresh motorcycle crash.

The NSLU2 recognizes the drive. Good but I’ve been here before. Besides, skeptics at work who far out-nerd me in hardware predicted that even if freezing allowed the parts to move again, the disk was bound to be scratched and the data unrecoverable.

Shazam! A directory listing! HA HA. I copy the photos as soon as possible not knowing how long she’d be able to hold on. Transfering was slow but steady. The photos were backed up and I had enough time to pull over 170GB of music, movies and other perfectly legitimate content. The drive held up until I shut it down 3.5 hours later. It melted the ice packs but was still working.

The freezer hack actually worked! At least for me… this time.. long enough to migrate data.

August 15th, 2006 | 1 Comment »