DigitalHobbit

It’s been a while since I last blogged about any technologies I’ve been playing with, so I figured I’m due for an update. I am going to split this into a two-part series: First I will play catch up and talk about the technologies that I’ve played with over the past 6 months or so. [...]

So I went out and bought Leopard last Friday when it was released. I even got a free T-Shirt for being one of the first 500 customers at my Apple store. This was the first time I can think of that I ever went out and bought an OS on its release day (or any [...]

Before I start blogging about OSX Leopard itself, I have to voice one short rant:

During the installation (I opted for a fresh install rather than an upgrade), I selected “Customize”, and I’m sure glad I did. It turns out that the default installation includes all printer drivers. This in itself isn’t a bad thing (or [...]

A few days ago, I broke down and committed blasphemy: I installed Boot Camp and Windows XP on my MacBook Pro. I was originally going to wait until OSX 10.5 / Leopard comes out, but since I am planning to do a fresh install with Leopard anyway, I figured I’d give Boot Camp a shot [...]

TechCruch’s Michael Arrington posted an interesting (and controversial) article on the future of the music industry: The Inevitable March of Recorded Music Towards Free

Definitely some good points, and an interesting read (although I haven’t had the patience to troll through the numerous comments…). I am not sure I completely agree with the fact that the [...]

For the past half year or so, I have mainly been using my MacBook Pro - particularly for the past few weeks since I hooked it up to my new 22″ widescreen LCD monitor. However, I have still had to keep my Linux PC running as a print- and fileserver (serving, among other things, my [...]

Until recently, I have mostly used my MacBook Pro without an external mouse, but I recently hooked it up to a KVM switch that allows me to share my external keyboard, mouse, and monitor with my Linux box. I always felt that the mouse support in OSX was lacking, even though I wasn’t quite able [...]

For the past 8-9 years, Java has been my bread-and-butter programming language, and to this date it is the language I am most familiar with. However, for the past few years I have developed a growing interest in dynamic scripting languages, and Ruby in particular. To a large extent this was fueled by the elegant [...]

Up till now I’ve never really gotten that much into social networking applications. I joined Tribe.net about 3 years ago but haven’t really checked in for 2 years. I steered clear of MySpace so far…

But yesterday I went on a bit of a social networking spree and decided to sign up for a few services: [...]

Call me a late adopter, but I have finally gotten rid of all CRTs in my house (partially as a space saving measure in preparation for our upcoming move to a smaller house, although this may just be a subconscious way of justifying the expense ). I replaced my 32″ CRT TV with a [...]

Earlier this month, version 1.5 of the OSX Camino browser was released. Camino is based on the same Mozilla rendering engine as Firefox, but unlike Firefox, Camino behaves much more like a native OSX application, without a lot of the overhead (such as the XUL user interface) that Firefox brings with it.

Ever since I started [...]

Today, Google Maps launched the new Street View feature, and I’m very impressed (no, even though I work at Google I had not seen this until now). Street View gives you a 360 degree panoramic view of the chosen location. You can use the mouse to turn around, virtually walk up or down the street, [...]

As I promised, here is the second part of my notes on setting up a new Mac. This time I will focus on development tools for Ruby on Rails.

MacPorts

In theory, Ruby is already installed on the Mac. Unfortunately, the bundled Ruby interpreter has some problems, and even if it didn’t, you’d want to use a [...]

About half a year ago, I started using an old PowerBook at work. Shortly afterwards, I was hooked and bought a MacBook for my wife. Now I finally bought a Mac for myself: a shiny, nice MacBook Pro. One of the great things about the Mac is that it is highly usable right out of [...]

Last week I added a new device to the list of hacked devices in my house, next to my hacked Tivo and Xbox: the Buffalo WHR-G54S wireless router.

My D-Link DI-624 router had been giving me trouble for a while, and since I had heard a lot about the various open source firmware alternatives that are [...]

With relatively little fanfare, Firefox 2.0 was released last week. (Yes, I know, IE 7 was also released recently. Does anybody actually still use IE???)

Firefox 2.0 brings some very nice improvements. My favorite feature is session recovery. Although Firefox is generally pretty stable, it nevertheless suffers the occasional crash. Thanks to session recovery, it [...]

I’ve been working with Ruby (mostly Ruby on Rails) for over a year now, both at work and at home, but I still haven’t settled on a Ruby IDE or editor. Most of my development is done in Linux, but lately I’ve started working in Mac OSX, as I have recently adopted an old PowerBook [...]

I’ve been meaning to post some sample code for a while, and I always wanted to have a nice WordPress plugin to perform syntax highlighting of code. A cursory search of the WordPress website brought up this page, which lists a bunch of syntax highlighting pluging. However, it appears to be a bit outdated, and [...]

Earlier today, David Heinemeier Hansson posted on the Ruby on Rails weblog regarding an urgent Ruby on Rails security patch (Rails version 1.1.5 ). No detailed information regarding the nature of the vulnerability was mentioned in the post, but it does sound very serious.

Originally all Rails versions starting at 0.13 were supposed to be affected, [...]

I came across two interesting pieces of news this morning:

HP is cutting back on telecommuting. By August, most of HP’s IT employees will be required to work from one of HP’s office instead of from home, even though HP pioneered the telecommuting trend starting in the late sixties. Apparently they have found that significant efficiencies [...]