I use a Mac Pro for work and I have a black MacBook for everything else. Managing two sets of keychains, calendars and bookmarks can become a giant pain (“I thought I bookmarked that site…oooh, it must be on the other computer”). Thankfully, .Mac sync keeps the important stuff synchronized between both machines. Mostly. Recently […]

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Bob Cringely wrapped up a three-part series on education this weekend. The series (Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3) provides some salient insights into our current educational system. For example, in the final article of the series Bob points out that the actual goals of the educational system don’t often match up to the […]

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According to this article at Ars Technica the high-tech industry is finally willing to stand up for consumers’ fair use rights:

Earlier this month, the Computer & Communications Industry Association filed a complaint with the FTC alleging that professional sports leagues, Hollywood studios, and book publishers were all using copyright notices that […]

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Microsoft recently announced that they would be spending over a billion dollars to deal with the high failure rate of the Xbox 360. You would think that the bad press Microsoft has been getting over this issue and the high cost of dealing with it would mean that customers who got the “red lights of […]

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I will be attending RailsConf this year. My profile at conferencemeetup.com is here and the sessions I plan to attend are here. If anyone is interested in hanging out at the conference check out the conferencemeetup page or drop me a line at ptoland@fiatdev.com.

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Rudy Giuliani made the following statement last week:

Someone who agrees with me 80% of the time isn’t my 20% enemy.

Politics aside, that is cool. In this industry it is tempting to view others who have made a decision to use technology we don’t choose to use ourselves as “the enemy.” We are […]

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This article discusses a study conducted by Pfeiffer Consulting on user productivity in Windows Vista. The study found that there was more “UI Friction” in Vista than Windows XP, which is worse than Mac OS X.

I find this interesting as I have intuitively felt that there was something about Windows XP that made me feel […]

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Today was my 30th birthday and 11th wedding anniversary. My wife made an awesome Ruby on Rails themed birthday cake and brought it to work after lunch.

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Summary:

Recently the buzz in the Ruby community has been focused around building Web 2.0(TM) applications in Rails. In fact, Ruby can also be used to build good looking desktop applications on Mac OS X using Ruby Cocoa.

Detail:

Recently the buzz in the Ruby community has been focused around building Web 2.0 applications in Rails. However, Ruby’s […]

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An earlier post suggested that reading outside of one’s field of interest is way to sharpen critical thinking (and, by extension, writing) skills. Another good approach is to diversify within a field. For developers this means learning a new programming language or environment.

So, what is a good language for a dyed in the wool Java […]

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