Urban Puddle

I have been using Network Solutions to do my domain registration since they were the only game in town. Sometime after I blinked the entire game was opened up to a slew of registrars such as register.com, godaddy.com, and others. At first I was apprehensive about using one of the other services. Let's face it, you register a domain and invest a lot of time and energy into it. The last thing you want is for something really bad to happen. In this way, Network Solutions plays the role of the IBM PC. Safe. Financially secure. Historically reliable.

Back when I was in college it was easy to get great music. There were no CD burners, no napster, and recording CD's to tapes had lost its appeal. We were relegated to physically walking down to the local record shop and buying a disc that we wanted. It really wasn't that big of a deal to me because chances are that I had a friend who had the disc already and so I had listened to it a few times before figuring that I wanted to own it. With so many like minded people around me, I was exposed to a lot of really great tracks most of which I loved but some I didn't. It was the perfect situation.. Awareness, Trial, and Purchase-only-if-desired. Things are different now though and since my college days are long past, I need a way to get my music without risking wasting money. So where does one go to get free music without resorting to piracy?

I moved back over to the Mac side and, while I still miss my linux desktop, I have been getting along quite fine. As expected there are a few apps that I adore on OS X while there are some that I loathe. In a different category are apps that exist on OS X but just aren't here for the Intel versions. Three in particular I want right now!

I get lots of questions about DNS from the semi-technical and often struggle for ways to describe what it is. I finally came up with a simple analogy that anyone can use to explain the basic purpose of DNS to anyone.

I finally finished my first Ruby on Rails application! It took a little longer to finish than I thought but thanks to some great help from friends and the community, RailFood is now up and running.

Update: May 28, 2008:Check out the update for Hardy Heron

I recently decided to install Dapper Drake on a production machine which is not necessarily a smart thing considering it is in Beta. Still, having worked with Debian and Ubuntu for a long while, I was confident that it would be stable. But, just to be safe, I started off with the server version of Dapper. Getting Subversion working on Dapper is a piece of cake:

There has been a call put out to call Apple and complain about MacBook Pro issues on May 20th. Being a new MacBook Pro owner myself, I can say it's tempting. While I like my MacBook it definitely runs hot and has plenty of software bugs too.

I was initially a little skeptical about this approach but it might actually work. Having spent a few years working at the big fruit, I have been in my share of meetings where we discuss ongoing customer problems with hardware and decide how to remedy it. Recall? Rebate? Case by case? Ignore? Replace? All options. The problem is that it takes weeks for all the data to get filtered from the Customer service reps to Hardware Engineering.

Bad PR might be the only force capable of moving Apple quickly on this issue because I am certain that they were fully aware of all the hardware and software problems before they made the call to ship. If nobody complains then they will continue this strategy of shipping product with problems next time around (they've been doing it for years now..)

Anyway, if you have a MacBook Pro you might as well call. Chances are you are at least within the 90 days support window. Also, might I suggest AppleCare this time around?

Today, in my planner is a quote which is quite nice and idealistic:

"Use power to help people. For we are given power not to advance our own purposes nor to make a great show in the world, nor a name. There is but one just use of power and it is to serve people."

--George H. W. Bush

I think Dubya, and many other politicians for that matter, would do well to listen to such wisdom.

In Part 1 we discussed this cartoon which postulates among other things, that houses have been steadily increasing in size every year and have now gotten too big. I theorized about some of the causes. The quest to have more and to impress those around us have dangerous side effects. One problem is that the real estate in the city is just far too valuable to allow everyone to have 2500 sqaure feet of house and a yard. Inevitably, one is forced out of the city to get houses with the space desired. Further and further they go as developers stretch the meaning of the word suburb.

If you happen to have a blog based on typo ,like yours truly, and have recently upgraded to version 1.1 of Ruby on Rails then you might have noticed that you can no longer post articles.

Fortunately, the fix is very easy if you have your own server.

Step 1: type this command: svn export http://dev.rubyonrails.org/svn/rails/tags/rel_1-0-0 vendor/rails

Step 2: Reboot

Step 3: There's no Step 3..

Enjoy and happy blogging!