voices of the simpsons

delicious

I added a little JavaScript widget to the right side of the blog to show my last 5 del.icio.us posts. If you're really interested in what I'm reading you can subscribe to the rss feed. It seems to be very easy to fill your blog up with useless crap. A common example of that would be 99% of the myspace profile pages that exist. I can't help but want to add things that I think are useful though. What I would really like is to have the whole right side bar disappear until the user moused over a certain icon or area of the screen. Keep it nice and clean until the reader wants to see more. Hmm...

golf?

I never learned how to play golf (except my brother and I seeing how far we could drive on the farm, then using the quad to ride around picking up the balls). My father wanted me to learn how to play because he felt that all the big business deals were made on the golf course. If I didn't learn how to play, he thought I would run into a glass ceiling or something. Every now and then I wish I knew how to play, but I don't think it has effected my career. In related news: Woot (who typically sells techy/geeky/nerdy things) has a driver for sale.

missing gems/plugins

The designer of a project I'm working on decided to use the RedCloth ruby gem in the project we're working on. He installed the gem on his local machine and added "require 'RedCloth'" to environment.rb. Now, since he installed a gem and ruby gems by default are stored in the ruby installation directory, the source repository did not contain the RedCloth library. Unforunately I forgot to get the RedCloth gem. So when I updated my project source from SVN the project broke output in development.log. I eventually figured out that I was missing the gem. So I downloaded the gem, then moved the whole RedCloth folder into the vendor/plugins directory of the rails project. The lack of error messages pointing me to the "require 'RedCloth'" was annoying to say the least. Maybe the require statement should be moved someplace else? Someplace after the logger has been initialized maybe? I wonder if other error/issues in enviroment.rb will make WEBrick die out too. Maybe you can start WEBrick with some advanced debugging for these kinds of situations? Hmm, I guess I should do a little research...

The Sock Gap

Jeff (from Coupling): I mean, where exactly do you take your socks off? My advice is to take them off right after your shoes, and before your trousers. That’s the sock gap. Miss it, and suddenly you’re a naked man in socks. No self-respecting woman will ever let a naked man in socks do the squelchy with her. Youtube link

AIM Phoneline

I signed up for a local phone number via AOL's free voip service. It's supposed to allow you to accept unlimited incoming calls. Combine this with Skype's free outgoing calls and you're all set. The problem is AOL sucks! I signed up for the service, downloaded and installed the latest AIM client and tried calling myself from my cell. The AIM client notifies me that there's an incoming call, but when I click on the Answer button it just sits there trying to connect my call. From the calling end, the line keeps ringing until it goes to voice mail. I tried running it on my work pc and my laptop without sucess. There also seems to be some bugs when you run two AIM clients at the same time and try to answer a call from one. I think it's still in beta, so I guess I can't be too harsh. I would say it's definately worth signing up for a local number incase there's a limit on how many the give out. But I would wait for the service to mature before attempting to use it.

How IT Projects Really Work

Linky

mac ads

I love the mac vs pc ads that apple has created, but I like Ctrl+Alt+Del's take on them more. I won't start on why I don't have a mac yet, but I will say that it seems like a large portion of mac sales are because it's "cool" to have a mac. The mac ads seem to just reinforce the idea that macs are the "cool" thing to have. And the fact that any of the black mac books even sell is just retarded. Computers as a fashion accessory? Ok, I guess that's fine... as long as it doesn't effect performance or future advancements of the hardware and software.

Ingredients for Web 2.0 Success

Awesome presentation: http://notabug.com/w2/

Kitten vs Frontrow

Suddenly I want a Mac and a kitten.

ActionMailer debugging

I started playing around with ActionMailer a few days ago. I followed the wiki tutorial without much trouble. Well, with the illusion of no troubles. When I started testing the code, nothing seemed to work. I didn't receive any of the emails that ActionMailer appeared to be sending. My development.log looked fine, my ActionMailer configuration seemed ok, but still nothing worked. It felt a bit like stumbling around a dark room, stubbing my toes on various peices of furniture, but unable to find a light switch. Well here's your light switch: ActionMailer::Base.raise_delivery_errors = true Drop that line in your development.rb and you'll see all the errors generated by ActionMailer. The wiki tutorial doesn't mention this. The fact that errors are turned off by default seems a little weird to me... I personally would think that errors would be on by default.