The tandem of tiny cubes and the paging system is enough to drive one to insanity. Nothing like finally slipping into the zone to get some real work done when everybody leaves for lunch when suddenly there is the blaring overhead, "Will the owner of a black jeep please come to the front desk? Your lights are on."
And suddenly I'm back to square one. I don't even think industrial strength ear plugs could block out most corporate paging systems.
Best new MBP feature ... the screen!
on
MacBook Pro Reviewed
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I got my new 1.83 ghz MBP on Monday, and am upgrading from a 1ghz G4 iBook circa Apr '04.
Okay, the increased performance is awesome. Really, things are just quicker all around.
But the biggest improvement...
The screen. Oh my. It's wonderful. It makes the 12" iBook screen look like it might be broken because of how much brighter the new MBP screens are. It's amazing. It actually may be nicer than my external 17" LCD screen. It makes working away from home positively enjoyable. Really, the screen alone makes the upgrade worthwhile.
Here's a tutorial for getting a completely self contained Rails dev environment ready to go on OS X, without having to worry about the default OS X Ruby install not supporting Readline and such.
As noted on the Ruby on Rails weblog, the author is Mike Clark, who is fairly involved in the Rails community. He's not an Apple employee though. The ADC article just doesn't have his name on it, so it mistakenly seems like this tutorial came from within Apple.
I bought this book with the intention of reteaching myself the "right way" to do web design. I've used CSS for a few years now, but I've never gone the full 9 yards and completely separated all my markup from all my presentation. I always had the occasional deprecated HTML tag in there because it was what I was used to.
After seeing the impressive amount of control you get from moving away from tables and tags to nothing but XHTML and CSS I was ready to make the jump.
The first half of this book won't be anything new to most people, but in the 2nd half of the book I've never seen the box model, div layout, and css explained so clearly. It's made adjusting my web design skills much much easier.
You're only looking in Fort Wayne, IN. 90% of the IT jobs in Indiana (which isn't saying much) are in Indianapolis. Indiana is not a big tech state. I should know, I've been here for 6 years. Sorry.
I'm all for taking advantage of hiring in small town America (I live in Indiana for the record), and quite frankly not having to deal with insane traffic, pollution, and outrageous housing prices is very nice.
But I think this firm might want to first invest in a website that looks like it was designed by more than a 16 year old with a "Learn HTML in 21 days!" book.
But that's just me, thinking people base opinions of companies off of how their website looks.
I lived in Tallahassee for a year, and I can say from personal experience that Publix rocks. Now that I'm back in the midwest I really miss it. They had amazing prices, really friendly employees, and just outstanding service. Sure it was cheaper to go to Walmart, but Walmart didn't have the selection or quality of food that Publix did.
The sad thing is, as a 12" G4 iBook owner, I have to agree. I've seen some of the screens that my friends have on their new'ish (less than a year old) Dell laptops, and their screens seem to be brighter and sharper than mine.
I'd actually consider a non-Mac laptop, but my last experience with getting everything working properly with Linux on a PC laptop was not encouraging.
What, you mean like Apple.com and the Itunes music store? Yes, those highly visited sites are just non-responsive and clunkly.
That's like saying because somebody's first attempt at website that uses JSPs and Tomcat is slow and clunkly must mean that J2EE is a broken architecture.
I gave the Mail/iCal/Address Book combo a shot when I first bought my iBook a year ago, but it just didn't do everything I was looking for and I didn't like having to keep 3 apps open at the same time.
I've been using Entourage since Office 2004 can out for Mac. It's great, the mail client, calendar, to do list, and address book all integrate nicely. It really simplies all the things I need to do to stay organized.
While I'm not sure it's worth the high price of Office, if you can get it through a campus agreement (like I did) for under $20, I'd recommend it.
Rails, great for those fed up with J2EE.
on
Ajax On Rails
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I'm sure many developers like myself have a day job that probably involves J2EE. The first time I did the iniitial tutorials for Rails several weeks ago I was blown away. Connecting to a database is not susposed to be this easy.
Even when using newer frameworks like Spring, Tapestry and Hibernate (I hate you so much Struts) Rails still manages to be easier.
I highly suggest any developers looking for a change of pace at least give Ruby on Rails a few hours of your evening. While it's not nearly as comprehensive as Java, it's gaining libraries and functionality by leaps and bounds.
And just so I don't get labeled as a Rails fanboy/Java basher: Rails is not perfect, I still would recommend using J2EE for large corporate projects. It's just a much more mature solution with less unknowns. I think Rails needs another year at least before people are ready to really give it a shot in the corporate environment.
Yeah. They left out the ability to easily take your computer with you. All my custom desktop rigs weighted 50 lbs, and the hernia I was getting from carrying them to and from class was getting a bit much. Man, this laptop, with it's small form factor and integrated screen is a godsend
It's called the right tool for the right job. Desktops allow you to customized and upgrade, laptops sacrifice that for portability. Get over yourself and go back to looking at porn on your super l33t custom rig with clear side panel and neon lighting.
This is very true. There's so much going on in the news today that this fact doesn't get a lot of lip service. There are 70 million baby boomers (the first batch set to retire in 2008 or so), and only 45 million new workers to replace them.
Most people think "Great! I'll have no problem finding a job!", the only issue is that with that big a discrepancy it won't so be a hiring frenzy as it will be a more likely chance for some contraction of the US economy.
The guy in New York got $50K for his efforts, which will pay for maybe 9mos living expenses, yet the teams from India that got the higher payouts...that buys a hell of a lot of tech toys and a very nice house in India. Hell, probably several houses.
I own an iBook, I own an iPod, and I've never had any gripes about not being able to buy music online from anywhere else besides the iTMS. Why? Because Apple makes it easy for me to purchase a song and get it on my iPod with very little hassle.
But hey, I'll take Hilary's advice here and navigate over to walmart.com and see what I'm missing by not being able to buy music from there. But wait, what this? IE 5.5 required to buy music? Well, gee, I guess Walmart is the paragon of a quality music buying service, even though I can't use their service because they only support one browser!
This isn't about Apple's lockin with the iPod and the iTMS, this is about Apple's lockin vs. everybody else's lockin on Windows machines.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you have to have an approved player right now just to use Napster as well.
The point is, yes, a barrel of oil contains an amazing amount of energy and makes for really efficient transportation. But too bad it's not a long term solution. Just search for Peak Oil on Google and read about how there really aren't any serious preparations being made in order to deal with the fact that the supply/demand gap for oil is only going to get worse. Of course a bicycle is nowhere near as good as a car for transportation, but I don't need a gas pump to make a bicycle go.
All of us in the US are going to have to get on the alternative fuel bandwagon soon whether we like it or not. If the current oil futures boom is any indication, we're at or very close to the Peak Oil point, and it's only going to get worse from here on out.
Most people fear higher prices at the pump, I welcome them. Anything that gets people out of SUVs and in hybrids/bicycles/walking modes of transportation will at least help give us more time to use oil while it's still plentiful to build solar panels, wind turbines, and the things we'll need to avoid going back to a 100% lo-tech farming nation.
Maybe it's just me, but I thought the whole slew of Mechwarrior games peaked around Mechwarrior 2: Mecenaries. That game ruled. I had more than one quest path to choose from, I got to buy/sell mechs and hire/fire pilots. And I still got to completely customize all my mechs on top of that.
Yeah, too bad MechAssault 2 gave me none of that. Boring linear missions, no choice in what mechs I got to pilot, and no customization. Whee.
I think I'd waste my day too reading Slashdot if I had to deal with Rational Rose all day. ClearQuest is the devil as it is.
Don't Underestimate The Cool Factor
on
Return of the Mac
·
· Score: 1
Yes, mac laptops are more expensive than their pc counterparts.
Yes, pc's still get some things before macs (java 1.5 for example).
But you know what, here's a little unscientific anecdotal evidence.
April 2004, my networking class at Purdue: Some kid walks in with a new toshiba laptop, opens it up, and follows the notes online while the professor talks, no big deal.
A few days later I do the same thing, only with the new G4 iBook I'd be waiting on for a few weeks. I seriously have a small crowd sitting around me going "holy crap, what is that? is that a mac? wow, it's so cool"...yes, geeks want power and function, but even they want stuff that looks good.
The FCC is going to give them a monopoly so they can grow and increase the size of their network? When has that ever happened? In every case of a monopoly all that happens is that progress stagnates and prices go up.
Examples? Intel: if it weren't for AMD we'd all still be using PII 500's and paying out the nose for them.
Microsoft: we have Apple and Linux to thank for MS even acknowledging that Windows might have flaws that need fixing.
Comcast is the monopoly where I live (Tallahassee, FL), and all that means is that they can afford to do rediculous things like charge an extra $15 for naked cable (more than just getting bare bones local channels + high speed), having crappy service, and inflated prices.
Where's their incentive to improve? I'd love to have other options.
My head hurts from the market speak.
on
The PC Is Not Dead
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I just read that so called op-ed piece and I think my ears may be bleeding from the sheer amount of marketing speak.
Bill may think web services are the next great thing for the PC "ecosystem" (WTF? when did my office become wild planet?), but quite frankly, he needs to worry about making the PC safe, secure, and usable first.
Well, I hope you'll run into some christians that will help change your mind about the christian faith in general. The narrow minded fundamentalists that seem want to put all gay people in a caged pen far away from them just shout louder than those of us who are open minded.
What they really seem to forget is: Jesus would have probably been one of the first people to offer compassion to every gay person he encountered.
Yes, technically you could have all these devices as an all-in-one solution. All these really depend on is a processor that does sound, audio, and video, some memory, some storage, and a reasonably decent display.
The only problem I see is making a decent interface for user input that excels at all these functions.
I can dial my cellphone with one hand. I can navigate my iPod with one hand. Yet these are two vastly different interfaces.
Coming up with a universal interface that allows easy user input and still remaining compact seems extremely difficult.
Slashdot Mirror
The tandem of tiny cubes and the paging system is enough to drive one to insanity. Nothing like finally slipping into the zone to get some real work done when everybody leaves for lunch when suddenly there is the blaring overhead, "Will the owner of a black jeep please come to the front desk? Your lights are on."
And suddenly I'm back to square one. I don't even think industrial strength ear plugs could block out most corporate paging systems.
I got my new 1.83 ghz MBP on Monday, and am upgrading from a 1ghz G4 iBook circa Apr '04.
Okay, the increased performance is awesome. Really, things are just quicker all around.
But the biggest improvement...
The screen. Oh my. It's wonderful. It makes the 12" iBook screen look like it might be broken because of how much brighter the new MBP screens are. It's amazing. It actually may be nicer than my external 17" LCD screen. It makes working away from home positively enjoyable. Really, the screen alone makes the upgrade worthwhile.
Here's a tutorial for getting a completely self contained Rails dev environment ready to go on OS X, without having to worry about the default OS X Ruby install not supporting Readline and such.
Ruby on Rails, Lighttpd, MySQL on OS X TigerIt's also a good tutorial for learning in general how to get the development tools you need and compiling them from source into /usr/local/
As noted on the Ruby on Rails weblog, the author is Mike Clark, who is fairly involved in the Rails community. He's not an Apple employee though. The ADC article just doesn't have his name on it, so it mistakenly seems like this tutorial came from within Apple.
I bought this book with the intention of reteaching myself the "right way" to do web design. I've used CSS for a few years now, but I've never gone the full 9 yards and completely separated all my markup from all my presentation. I always had the occasional deprecated HTML tag in there because it was what I was used to.
After seeing the impressive amount of control you get from moving away from tables and tags to nothing but XHTML and CSS I was ready to make the jump.
The first half of this book won't be anything new to most people, but in the 2nd half of the book I've never seen the box model, div layout, and css explained so clearly. It's made adjusting my web design skills much much easier.
Highly recommended.
You're only looking in Fort Wayne, IN. 90% of the IT jobs in Indiana (which isn't saying much) are in Indianapolis. Indiana is not a big tech state. I should know, I've been here for 6 years. Sorry.
I'm all for taking advantage of hiring in small town America (I live in Indiana for the record), and quite frankly not having to deal with insane traffic, pollution, and outrageous housing prices is very nice.
But I think this firm might want to first invest in a website that looks like it was designed by more than a 16 year old with a "Learn HTML in 21 days!" book.
But that's just me, thinking people base opinions of companies off of how their website looks.
I lived in Tallahassee for a year, and I can say from personal experience that Publix rocks. Now that I'm back in the midwest I really miss it. They had amazing prices, really friendly employees, and just outstanding service. Sure it was cheaper to go to Walmart, but Walmart didn't have the selection or quality of food that Publix did.
The sad thing is, as a 12" G4 iBook owner, I have to agree. I've seen some of the screens that my friends have on their new'ish (less than a year old) Dell laptops, and their screens seem to be brighter and sharper than mine.
I'd actually consider a non-Mac laptop, but my last experience with getting everything working properly with Linux on a PC laptop was not encouraging.
What, you mean like Apple.com and the Itunes music store? Yes, those highly visited sites are just non-responsive and clunkly.
That's like saying because somebody's first attempt at website that uses JSPs and Tomcat is slow and clunkly must mean that J2EE is a broken architecture.
I gave the Mail/iCal/Address Book combo a shot when I first bought my iBook a year ago, but it just didn't do everything I was looking for and I didn't like having to keep 3 apps open at the same time.
I've been using Entourage since Office 2004 can out for Mac. It's great, the mail client, calendar, to do list, and address book all integrate nicely. It really simplies all the things I need to do to stay organized.
While I'm not sure it's worth the high price of Office, if you can get it through a campus agreement (like I did) for under $20, I'd recommend it.
I'm sure many developers like myself have a day job that probably involves J2EE. The first time I did the iniitial tutorials for Rails several weeks ago I was blown away. Connecting to a database is not susposed to be this easy.
Even when using newer frameworks like Spring, Tapestry and Hibernate (I hate you so much Struts) Rails still manages to be easier.
I highly suggest any developers looking for a change of pace at least give Ruby on Rails a few hours of your evening. While it's not nearly as comprehensive as Java, it's gaining libraries and functionality by leaps and bounds.
And just so I don't get labeled as a Rails fanboy/Java basher: Rails is not perfect, I still would recommend using J2EE for large corporate projects. It's just a much more mature solution with less unknowns. I think Rails needs another year at least before people are ready to really give it a shot in the corporate environment.
Yeah. They left out the ability to easily take your computer with you. All my custom desktop rigs weighted 50 lbs, and the hernia I was getting from carrying them to and from class was getting a bit much. Man, this laptop, with it's small form factor and integrated screen is a godsend
It's called the right tool for the right job. Desktops allow you to customized and upgrade, laptops sacrifice that for portability. Get over yourself and go back to looking at porn on your super l33t custom rig with clear side panel and neon lighting.
This is very true. There's so much going on in the news today that this fact doesn't get a lot of lip service. There are 70 million baby boomers (the first batch set to retire in 2008 or so), and only 45 million new workers to replace them.
Most people think "Great! I'll have no problem finding a job!", the only issue is that with that big a discrepancy it won't so be a hiring frenzy as it will be a more likely chance for some contraction of the US economy.
The guy in New York got $50K for his efforts, which will pay for maybe 9mos living expenses, yet the teams from India that got the higher payouts ...that buys a hell of a lot of tech toys and a very nice house in India. Hell, probably several houses.
I own an iBook, I own an iPod, and I've never had any gripes about not being able to buy music online from anywhere else besides the iTMS. Why? Because Apple makes it easy for me to purchase a song and get it on my iPod with very little hassle.
But hey, I'll take Hilary's advice here and navigate over to walmart.com and see what I'm missing by not being able to buy music from there. But wait, what this? IE 5.5 required to buy music? Well, gee, I guess Walmart is the paragon of a quality music buying service, even though I can't use their service because they only support one browser!
This isn't about Apple's lockin with the iPod and the iTMS, this is about Apple's lockin vs. everybody else's lockin on Windows machines.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you have to have an approved player right now just to use Napster as well.
The point is, yes, a barrel of oil contains an amazing amount of energy and makes for really efficient transportation. But too bad it's not a long term solution. Just search for Peak Oil on Google and read about how there really aren't any serious preparations being made in order to deal with the fact that the supply/demand gap for oil is only going to get worse. Of course a bicycle is nowhere near as good as a car for transportation, but I don't need a gas pump to make a bicycle go.
All of us in the US are going to have to get on the alternative fuel bandwagon soon whether we like it or not. If the current oil futures boom is any indication, we're at or very close to the Peak Oil point, and it's only going to get worse from here on out.
Most people fear higher prices at the pump, I welcome them. Anything that gets people out of SUVs and in hybrids/bicycles/walking modes of transportation will at least help give us more time to use oil while it's still plentiful to build solar panels, wind turbines, and the things we'll need to avoid going back to a 100% lo-tech farming nation.
Maybe it's just me, but I thought the whole slew of Mechwarrior games peaked around Mechwarrior 2: Mecenaries. That game ruled. I had more than one quest path to choose from, I got to buy/sell mechs and hire/fire pilots. And I still got to completely customize all my mechs on top of that.
Yeah, too bad MechAssault 2 gave me none of that. Boring linear missions, no choice in what mechs I got to pilot, and no customization. Whee.
I think I'd waste my day too reading Slashdot if I had to deal with Rational Rose all day. ClearQuest is the devil as it is.
Yes, mac laptops are more expensive than their pc counterparts.
...yes, geeks want power and function, but even they want stuff that looks good.
Yes, pc's still get some things before macs (java 1.5 for example).
But you know what, here's a little unscientific anecdotal evidence.
April 2004, my networking class at Purdue:
Some kid walks in with a new toshiba laptop, opens it up, and follows the notes online while the professor talks, no big deal.
A few days later I do the same thing, only with the new G4 iBook I'd be waiting on for a few weeks. I seriously have a small crowd sitting around me going "holy crap, what is that? is that a mac? wow, it's so cool"
I'd like whatever you're smoking, please.
The FCC is going to give them a monopoly so they can grow and increase the size of their network? When has that ever happened? In every case of a monopoly all that happens is that progress stagnates and prices go up.
Examples?
Intel: if it weren't for AMD we'd all still be using PII 500's and paying out the nose for them.
Microsoft: we have Apple and Linux to thank for MS even acknowledging that Windows might have flaws that need fixing.
Comcast is the monopoly where I live (Tallahassee, FL), and all that means is that they can afford to do rediculous things like charge an extra $15 for naked cable (more than just getting bare bones local channels + high speed), having crappy service, and inflated prices.
Where's their incentive to improve? I'd love to have other options.
I just read that so called op-ed piece and I think my ears may be bleeding from the sheer amount of marketing speak.
Bill may think web services are the next great thing for the PC "ecosystem" (WTF? when did my office become wild planet?), but quite frankly, he needs to worry about making the PC safe, secure, and usable first.
Well, I hope you'll run into some christians that will help change your mind about the christian faith in general. The narrow minded fundamentalists that seem want to put all gay people in a caged pen far away from them just shout louder than those of us who are open minded.
What they really seem to forget is: Jesus would have probably been one of the first people to offer compassion to every gay person he encountered.
Yes, technically you could have all these devices as an all-in-one solution. All these really depend on is a processor that does sound, audio, and video, some memory, some storage, and a reasonably decent display.
The only problem I see is making a decent interface for user input that excels at all these functions.
I can dial my cellphone with one hand.
I can navigate my iPod with one hand.
Yet these are two vastly different interfaces.
Coming up with a universal interface that allows easy user input and still remaining compact seems extremely difficult.