Since 2005 when I switched to GMail, I was living in browser. For better or worse, I learn to put up with issues like speed, lack of hotkeys, UI that is not as responsive as it should be, drag and drop that works most of the time. To be fair, in these five years browsers and GMail UI improved tremendously. It was rational decision to trade all these for simplicity of the UI.
I have find new podcast that I want to share with you. It is called "This Developer's Life" and is produced by well known digerati Scott Hanselman and Rob Conery.
I listen to a lot of podcasts, about 50 % of them produced by Leo Laporte's TWIT Network (This Week in Tech, Macbreak, This Week in Google, FLOSS Weekly and occasional Security Now).
What I like about Leo's network is professionalism of audio production, usually good and interesting panel with topics that are worth listening to. Few other podcasts come even close to the TWIT level of perfection.
It has been one month now that I started to use Windows 7 based Dell Vostro 1320 notebook on daily basis. The hardware parameters of this little thing are: Core 2 Duo 2.26, 500 GB HDD, 8 GB of RAM, 13" screen, Windows 7 Professional (64 bit of course, how else with all that RAM). All this with 3 year next business day warranty for about $1400 CAD - not bad deal at all.
Few weeks ago, first Foursquare application and then my favorite RunKeeper app started to fail. The symptoms were simple:
1) attempt to start
2) wait for for 2-10 seconds
3) exit
Analysis of the crash logs did not reveal anything obvious (see ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/MobileDevice/NAME:
Process: foursquare [374] Path: /var/mobile/Applications/7F37347B-......1663AA5/foursquare.app/foursquare Identifier: foursquare Version: ??? (???) Code Type: ARM (Native) Parent Process: launchd [1] Date/Time: 2009-12-22 12:39:11.260 -0500 OS Version: iPhone OS 3.1.2 (7D11) Report Version: 104 Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV) Exception Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x20294628 Crashed Thread: 0< Thread 0 Crashed: 0 libobjc.A.dylib 0x32668ecc 0x32665000 + 16076 1 CoreFoundation 0x32d83d6a 0x32d4d000 + 224618 2 CoreFoundation 0x32d4fc28 0x32d4d000 + 11304</p> What helped was to delete both applications from the phone, including data and let the iTunes install it back. No data is lost, because both services are cloud based - only minor inconvenience was to re-enter login information.
You know the drill: open browser, new tab, type 'www.facebook.com' and in moment you can see who of your online buddies is up to something interesting. This is exactly what I did. Only I did not end up in well known Facebook page, but on something really fishy:
This is definitely NOT facebook. How come I ended up on 'quiz.us' site when I typed in www.facebook.com. Or did I ? Let's do it again:
I was happy user of the iWork Suite 08 since I moved to OS-X. It somehow better matches the way I am thinking and does much better job than Office to get me from idea to acceptable looking rendering of that idea in the form of document, spreadsheet or presentation.
In past two month I was involved much more interaction with the requirements, business analysis and project management part of the process. Which inevitably means much higher exposure to documents creation, collaboration and exchange. iWork gives you reasonably good compatibility with Office document formats, which means that you can easily import almost every Office document modify it and export it back so that Windows user will see almost all of your changes. Almost everything will be just fine. Unfortunately, almost is not the same as everything: it often breaks fine details of formatting, reviewer comments and does not really work for more complicated Excel spreadsheets. Especially those spreadsheets which project manager-ish people so love to create.
I first time discovered Ruby back in 2006 (yes, I know, I was late to the game), and immediately fell in love with it. The dynamic nature of the language, the consistency, pure esthaetics and practicality certainly changed the way how I saw software development and programming languages.
Since that time, I made several attempts to integrate Ruby into my professional life and make it part of the toolbox. It was cool to play with Ruby in my spare time, but I wanted to use it on projects whose main development language/platform was mainly Java. Use it as scripting, glue language. Use it as toolkit language to e.g. generate test data, access databases, convert files, build projects and maybe even build a piece of Web applications (admin apps for example).
I was aching to blog about this since December 18th, when our system quietly and gently slipped into public visibility. Marked as Beta (thanks, Google for making this a legitimate way how to go live) it comfortably made it through Christmas shopping season into 2009.
Now when the site has been announced and mentioned few times in the media, I guess it's OK to mention it here too.
What is "it" ? A new, fresh eCommerce site selling music. A lots of really good music. Without any DRM or any other nonsense, as plain good high quality (mostly 320 kps) MP3's. The selection is actually very good - starting from several hundred thousands in December to several few million songs when full catalog is loaded. More great music being added every week.
Here is the context: in order to upgrade iLife 08 to iLife'09 (which is very nice, btw), I had to install 10.5.6 upgrade. And according Murphy's law, one of the 2 GB DIMM's in my MacBook Pro went bad exactly during the OS-X upgrade process.
It had two rather unpleasant consequences:
some of the patch files got downloaded and saved in corrupted state The machine did not boot back after restart The second problem was fixed by replacing the bad DIMM, but the first caused that upgrade to 10.5.6 was impossible: the files were downloaded, verification failed, after restart I was back to square one. There was no obvious way how to "undownload" the files.