http://philcrissman.com Web Development, startups, entrepreneurship, books, art, and other stuff Fri, 18 Jul 2008 21:00:58 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I've had the opportunity to work with Rails for a good three weeks straight, now. Not just evenings and "spare time", like I might have before, but actually all day. Most of that has been front-end work, views and the like, but enough of that is tied to other parts ... http://philcrissman.com/2008/07/18/startlingly-obvious-truism-becomes-revealed-as-more-true-than-previously-thought So, Joyent has JRuby support. That is all. http://philcrissman.com/2008/07/13/joyent-has-jruby Considered useless, maybe, would be a better title. Of all the various trends that have accompanied the wide range of the "web 2.0" school of applications, the one feature that sticks out, that I really like, is the minimalist sign-up form. Whether they call it signing up, registering, creating an account, ... http://philcrissman.com/2008/06/24/long-sign-up-forms-considered-harmful What if we put a glass of water with water in it at exactly 0.5 ratio to the size of the glass. If we also put a person in the box and give that person a drug with a random 50% chance of turning the person into either a pessimist ... http://philcrissman.com/2008/06/21/schroedingers-glass I'm about to start freelancing and contracting full-time. Or, to start bootstrapping a consulting business. Whichever way you want to look at it, it's starting now. I always used to say I wanted to do something like this, but was waiting for "the right time". Does that mean this is the ... http://philcrissman.com/2008/06/20/its-never-the-right-time-to-start I've been lamenting the loss of Shiftspace silently and sullenly ever since I upgraded to the beta versions of Firefox 3 last year. I really didn't want to downgrade and wait, though, since I was experiencing a few unhappy issues with Firefox 2 on Mac OS which happily disappeared with ... http://philcrissman.com/2008/06/17/shiftspace-for-firefox-30 I was forewarned. Rubygems does require a slight bit of configuration on Ubuntu, it seems. That is, it worked fine once installed... but installed gems were not on the default path. Resolving this is fairly simple; create or edit .bashrc like so: export PATH=$PATH:/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin Ok, you're done. Leave your shell and log back ... http://philcrissman.com/2008/06/12/gems-on-ubuntu You can preorder OpenSuse 11.0 now, but it doesn't seem to be available for download on opensuse.org. I would guess that the latest development version is close to what 11.0 will be, but I could be wrong. http://philcrissman.com/2008/06/11/opensuse-110-is-coming Gmail: Is the alert dialog asking "Are you sure?" really necessary when I decide to delete everything in the spam folder? Regardless that it's full of messages from people who only seem to want to talk about my penis, difficult as it may be to believe, yes I am really sure. http://philcrissman.com/2008/06/11/deleting-spam-gmail There's a reason some people are fanatical about Apple's design; it's because they (Apple) consistently think of new things, pay attention to tiny details, and never stop trying to improve. Maybe this isn't new to the site, but I hadn't noticed it yet; I stopped by Apple's Mac page today, and ... http://philcrissman.com/2008/06/10/apples-labeled-scrollbar