DigitalHobbit

A couple weeks ago, Phusion Passenger (aka mod_rails) was released. I recently tested this at work, on an EC2 instance, and my initial experience was so smooth that I am already planning to use it to deploy our various Rails applications. The benchmarks I’ve seen put its performance on approximately the same level as a [...]

After having signed up for an Evernote beta invite a while ago, I finally received one this week.

Evernote is a next generation note taking service. What sets it apart from similar applications are the numerous ways of entering as well as retrieving notes. First of all there is the Evernote Website. It is simple and [...]

Yesterday I set up Markdown support for my blog, as I was getting tired of typing <li>, <a href=”…”>, etc. I’ve had my blog for almost four years now, and I can’t believe that I have not done this before. It finally allows me to focus on the actual content while I’m writing a blog [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Firefox 1.5 has been released. You can grab it here. Some of the new features are improved popup blocking (I am curious about this one, now that some sites have figured out how to circumvent the previous version’s popup blocker), drag & drop tab reordering, noticeably faster navigation using the Back and Forward buttons, and [...]

Mozilla has unveiled the Lightning roadmap. Lightning is Mozilla’s next generation calendaring application and intended to integrate with the Thunderbird email client. It appears to replace Mozilla’s previous Sunbird calendaring tool. Lightning 0.1, which is scheduled to be released some time in November, will mainly focus on bug fixes and WebDAV calendar support. Improved Thunderbird [...]

Opera Software has decided to offer the full version of their Opera browser (i.e. without ads) for free from now on. I don’t quite I understand how they are planning to make money, but they explain some of the reasons for making their browser free here.

I have used Opera for a while a couple of [...]

Argh… My wife caught a virus on her laptop. It looks like it came in using some IE exploit, and the fact that the latest Windows security updates were not installed probably didn’t help…

I’ve installed a better virus scanner and hope that I can still fix everything without having to reinstall Windows. If everything goes [...]

While browsing Gentoo Portage for some Bluetooth ebuilds, I came across an ebuild for quat, a “3D quaternionic fractal generator”. I had never heard of 3D fractals, let alone quaternionic fractals, so I checked out the website, and it looks pretty interesting.

Here and here are some nice examples of what 3D fractals look like. If [...]

I recently came across XWiki, a relatively new, Java-based Wiki. For anybody looking to deploy a new Wiki, this looks like a great option. It has an extensive feature list and seems to combine the best features of other Wiki engines as well as add a few unique Features of its own, for example scripting [...]

Here is a nice article on Freeware suggestions under Windows. A lot of good stuff in there, as well as in the comments.

I came across a very nice page on RSS Readers. This looks like a very complete listing of RSS Readers, including client-side applications for various operating systems as well as web-based aggregators.

Before I got into blogging (writing but even more importantly reading blogs), I never quite understood the big deal about RSS. Sure, there were [...]

Is it just me, or is there really no good way of sharing bookmarks between Mozilla (or Firefox) and IE?

While I used to browse using IE up until recently, I find myself using Firefox most of the time these days, mostly due to its excellent support for tabbed browsing (does anybody else find it surprising [...]