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 […]
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, […]
Adobe’s Apollo platform is, basically, Flex for the desktop. Mike Chambers wrote an article answering the question “Why Apollo?” and it makes a pretty good case for why you’d want to use Apollo and where it fits in. A key point is that Flex lets you write for the desktop and for the browser, using the […]
All this hype about Twitter. If you haven’t seen it, well, Twitter is a site where you can post status updates on your life. That’s it. The only reason it’s interesting is that it’s reached a critical mass – but it’s so obviously *not* got staying power that I’m amazed so many people are so […]
There’s a bit of a thread going on on the Gnome desktop-architects mailing list, where Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, is complaining about the lack of customizability in Gnome. Where this was picked up by other bloggers, it was generally reported as Linus trying to fix Gnome and the shortsighted Gnome guys were […]
Here’s a little compatibility note on Vista that might save someone some time. In XP, you could send a tree control a WM_VSCROLL message and it would scroll the tree to the position in the message. However, since the days of Windows 95 Microsoft has recommended using the GetScrollInfo function instead of using what’s in the […]
So Bill de hÓra says that IDEs don’t matter, where the version control system has a first order effect on software. I disagree. I’m more productive with a good IDE than with a bad one, and far more so than with no IDE. If you come from a world where you haven’t had a good IDE […]
A very good article posted by Scott Byer reminded me I wanted to say something about this. There’s this perception that 64 bit is better than 32 bit, the way 32 bit was better than 16 bit, and that it’s just a natural transition the software industry will have to make. But there are some […]
iTunes is lacking one key feature, the ability to delete songs you don’t like when you aren’t letting it manage your music library. The way I use iTunes is I have a network share where my music lives, and the various computers that I use to play music all import the music from there. Letting […]
Curious about how much Vista actually uses the .NET framework, I wrote a little Ruby script that walks the Windows directory looking for managed assemblies. Of the 8969 (*.exe|*.dll) files found, 824 of them have managed code in them, or just over 9%. What makes it worse is that most of the managed code that […]