DIVID Technology Riffraff & Whatnot

Ryan Bates posted a nice episode of Railscasts covering RVM and setting up rails 3. Very helpful for managing different versions of ruby and gems. Get it at the usual place, railscasts.com.

Like it a lot. Turned it off because it doesn’t really help me get anything done. Try it if you like eye candy, it’s quite entertaining.

http://bumptop.com/mac/

These are demos of Gordon – An open source Flash® runtime written in pure JavaScript with SVG.

http://paulirish.com/work/gordon/demos/

Fun decorator article shows how you make a perfectly good kitchen vomitously sport Warhol. (no offense to Andy, who made art pop).

http://www.jonathanfongstyle.com/decor/warhol_kitchen.html

Added myself to flickr group to show solidarity for web standards. http://www.flickr.com/photos/technicallyhesright/4148347836/in/pool-1216050@N25

Edit: Facebook changes made the FB pidgin plugin sketchy in this download, but has been fixed farther up the tree. Growl 1.2 also seems to work fine, no need to run 1.2.1hg in debug mode. If you merge this or build your own, let me know.

This version is based on a nightly build from 11-18-09, has twitter support and newer libraries, no localization or legacy stuff, and debugging is off.

Download
PS. I’ve had good results running this with a growl release from the 1.2.1 development channel, which you can get from here: http://code.google.com/p/growl/downloads/list Adium bundles an older version of growl, so run this after you install it.

Coolbook rocks for keeping your Macbook fans quiet and making your CPU run more efficiently. These settings work for me, but as they say YMMV. Oh, and don’t forget to RTFM.

UPDATE: Keep your kernel at 10.6.1 until there’s an update for this app. Version 2.15 is current at time of writing. More here: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2227825&tstart=0

Typefaces can appear a bit darker in Safari under OS X 10.6. Toggling the LCD (subpixel anti-aliasing) option doesn’t seem to have any affect. This is noticable in Safari 4.0.3 on certain web pages where the font-weight is over 600. I assume this is related to the GPU-driven UI, so I’d be interested to see if this appears on your screen too.

This is relatively new. Microsoft has a release candidate beta of a one-click installer for common technologies like CMS, ecommerce, utilities, and gallery web applications. Application developers may employ it on newer servers running IIS 7 or later. Some of these applications are rather useful, such as the SEO toolkit.

Go here for more info and a list of applications: http://www.microsoft.com/web/downloads/platform.aspx

Telerik Sitefinity, where are you on this list?

When planning to implement better web technologies, one may wonder if the extra up-front work will pay off. One of the benefits, less maintenance going forward, will buy us time later. Of course, we don’t measure results of preventative nature. That makes it a thankless job in a way, but one that, rather than making us look good in the future, can prevent us from looking bad.