Archive for April, 2007

Mac Display Clarity Problem

Friday, April 27th, 2007

I just went through troubleshooting a bizarre Mac display problem. The symptom was that on my LCD monitor, the pixels coming out of the Mac weren’t lining up with teh pixels on the monitor, so it would look clear on the left side of the screen, but fuzzy in two spots across the screen.  Seemed […]

Today’s Vista Woe

Wednesday, April 25th, 2007

I have an external USB drive that I use for backups.  This morning I went to update my backup, and plugged the drive into the PC as usual.  Vista responded with this prompt:  “You need to format the disk in drive N: before you can use it.” This is my backup drive.  The drive I […]

Facebook vs Email

Monday, April 23rd, 2007

The vortex of Facebook junkies around me have sucked me into the Facebook abyss as well.  My wife’s family started it, but now a lot of people I know are using it.  I just found out that in Ottawa, approximately 1 in 10 people is using Facebook. Email has been becoming increasingly useless.  So have blog […]

Wal-Mart and HD-DVD

Friday, April 20th, 2007

I predicted Wal-Mart would back HD-DVD for backwards-compatibility and shelf-space reasons.  It seems I was right.

Rails Notes

Friday, April 20th, 2007

I got interested in Rails a year or so ago when I first started hearing the hype, and I dug into it a little bit.  At the time, I came to the conclusion that while the Ruby language was pretty slick, Rails itself was basically a code generation engine that would become more hindrance than […]

Rails Growing Pains

Tuesday, April 17th, 2007

I’ve been playing with Rails recently, developing a site mostly for my own amusement.  There are a few issues I’ve run into that I think are growing pains related to Rails’ rapid evolution. First, there’s the question of plugins, generators, and engines, and 3rdPartyLibs.  If you want to extend your Rails application using canned functionality, […]

How could you not want it?

Saturday, April 14th, 2007

It’s got ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY EIGHT MEGS!

Startup, Locality

Friday, April 13th, 2007

Found this bizarre feature on the Vista Compatibility Blog:  SetThreadPriority from Run key. So they’ve hacked something in Windows to keep programs that launch at startup from raising their priority for 60 seconds at bootup. This seems like a bizarre address-the-symptom kind of fix.  The problem is that every app wants to launch something at […]

Living "The Life"

Tuesday, April 10th, 2007

I’ve toyed with this idea for years – the idea that someday I’ll write some software that I’ll be able to sell and quit my job and live life as an independent developer.  I’ve written and sold software before, and made a few dollars at it, but never enough to live on, and even with […]

XBox 360 Spring Dashboard Update: Yawn

Monday, April 9th, 2007

Major Nelson released some info on the Spring 2007 Dashboard Update for the XBox 360’s firmware, and basically it’s a big yawn.  A couple of nice little touches, like being able to see the name of an achievement you’ve just earned without having to hit the guide button, and MSN Messenger integration, but where are the […]