Alex Hardy

I’m not going to comment on relative pros or cons of Ruby and Rails, because I’ve never used it - I’ll leave that for others to debate. My experience so far of building data-driven websites is based on a degree of self-taught PHP/MySQL knowledge. My understanding of OOP is limited and I’ve never used a “framework.”

That said, I’ve found this article: Ruby on Rails for the Rest of Us quite enlightening. It offers a well written, unbiased intro to what Ruby and Rails are, their history and some good explanations of what certain concepts like framework, model-view-controller and scaffolding actually mean. It also discusses advantages of using these methods.

Now, I’m no hardcore programmer but I think I’m a pretty intelligent chap. I’ve built some complex projects (in my opinion) in Director, Flash, PHP etc. If I struggle to find a credible, concise introduction to a subject that I can understand without downloading the Matrix into my brain, then something is seriously lacking. Which makes this particular article very welcome.

Let’s face it - joking aside, I’d like very much to get Windows Vista on my Mac with Parallels Desktop. Ian uses Windows XP via Parallels on his first-gen MacBook Pro and it’s a fantastic tool.

The first time you push the hotkey, and your Mac OS X desktop rotates away to reveal Windows XP you can’t help but laugh like a megalomaniac.

The power! Muahahahahaha! *Ahem*

Ian uses it mainly for Visual Mind, Zinc, Internet Explorer testing and presenting our PC-only projects. I have to admit, a spot of Half Life 2 would be nice, too

There’s always been a bit of a fly in the ointment though. You can’t use the Boot Camp partition you created (for restarting under when you need every bit of speed you can squeeze) as a virtual hard disk drive. You’d have to install Windows and your apps all over again inside Parallels, which frankly is a completely ludicrous waste of hard disk space.

But soon no more! Woohoo! Other treats include drag-resize the window and your virtual machine automatically changes screen resolution, drag-and-drop between OSes, “coherency” which apparently displays Windows apps as running processes inside OS X (in the dock and such I assume) and the performance boosts that come with any self-respecting update.

I look forward to getting a MacBook Pro in a year or so with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and Windows Vista Home Premium (MS demand Premium for virtualisation). Ha, maybe I’ll stick Kubuntu in there for a giggle

[UPDATE] Aah.. So this is what coherency looks like. Sweet.

You know, I was going to write a great long post, pouring scorn on Vista and how Windows Mail, Calendar, Music Player, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Media Center, Aero, Flip 3D, Instant Search, Gadgets and IE7’s RSS display (to name a few) are all second rate knock offs of features that the Mac has had for ages, some for the last three years or so.

… but I can’t be arsed. Resistance is Futile, and I’ll be using it every day before long. Enjoy!

I’m seriously thinking about going back to Firefox 1.5 until Mozilla have got an update or two out of the door. I prefer FireFox to Safari, but the time is 12:15 and it has ‘unexpectedly quit’ FOUR TIMES already today.

[UPDATE] 1pm. Six times

I’m using this blog as a bit of a test-bed for the blog that I will have on the ReFresh site. So I’ve made a few changes

• I got rid of the calendar because I’ve decided I didn’t like it much as a navigational device
• I got rid of the search field because with the volume of posts I have at the moment, search is overkill
• I’ve added a “recent posts” list in its place
• I’ve changed to using “pretty” permalinks
• I’ve set up Akismet
• I’ve created a Feedburner account for my blog feed, and I’m using the redirect plugin - it’s a bit of a half-baked solution, but it will do until I start tinkering with the page markup
• I’ve expanded the About me page - a poor workman it is, that blames his tools…

I send an enquiry about Mint from the website, and six hours later I get a reply from the man himself.

Hi Alex,

All of these things sound fine. The only place you might run into trouble is if you developed these integrated applications and were then to sell them - including the original Mint source code. But what you’ve described sounds fine. Thanks for taking the time to inquire.

Cheers,
Shaun
As Mastercard might put it:

Google Analytics: Free

Mint License: $30

Community vibe and personal support from the horse’s mouth: Priceless

S’funny, I’ve been thinking “Mint or Google Analytics, Mint or Google, (daddy or chips?), Mint or Google…” I’ve had a look around though, and obviously they can co-exist perfectly fine. Like here.

So, both then! Mint for it’s luvly interface, live stats, development community and that I can pull data out of it for my own uses. Google for stuff like Adwords and funnel tracking. I imagine you’d check Mint every day, and have a poke around Google once a month.

I’ve corresponded with Shaun Inman myself - very nice fellow, I asked him if I could track events in a Flash movie the way you can with JavaScript the way you can with Google (as we do on the Foundry site). The answer happened to be no, but it has plenty of other features that make it worthwhile.

At $30, it’s like the man said in Lock Stock: “It’s a deal, it’s a steal, it’s the Sale of the fucking Century!” In fact, fuck it, I think I’ll keep it!”

…that Internet Explorer 7 has created problems on some of our older sites, whereas Firefox 2 (available on Mozilla’s FTP server now, ahead of their official launch) makes things (such as Flash movies living alongside Lightbox) work better.

I think Mr Shaun Inman put it well (following a slightly stupid post on the IE blog):

“Are you ready yet?” Are we ready yet? Shouldn’t the browser be ready for the web - not the other way around? Have we really made a career of cleaning up Microsoft’s mess? Sigh.

…Unless you’re a web developer save yourself a restart and just download Firefox or Opera. Seriously.

Seriously, you PC lot should get it, just cos its claws are so deep in Windows you’ll probably improve the performance/stability of your computer, or some sheeit. Just never ever browse the web with it.

I’m using Google to search, Google Mail, Calendar, Docs & Spreadsheets, Analytics and now Firefox Sync.

Which is ace, by the way cos it keeps the bookmarks on the computers you use in sync…

All these years of disliking Microsoft (and I love a bit of M$ bashing as much as the next Mac user) for dominating the landscape, and I’ve happily jumped for another big company that’s well on its way to being for the next twenty years what Microsoft was for the last twenty.

I suppose when all’s said and done, we want our choices to be made simple. We want a one-stop shop. We want to be told what to do.

I’m still not *quite* ready to place all my trust in a remote company to store all my most valuable information, but I’m giving it away bit by bit…

MAMP is a local development server for Mac OS X. It installs very easily (normally installing Apache, PHP and MySQL is a bit of a headache, to put it mildly). You can manage your database with a built-in version of phpMyAdmin, and if you’ve decided you don’t need it any more you can just trash it.

I’ve had some real fun and games in the past getting a local development environment up and running. I’ve knackered an OS install before :*) So this will be really handy…