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Archive for March, 2008

Amsterdam Weekly is for sale

  • March 28th, 2008
  • Posted in rails . web

Amsterdam Weekly, the finest English-language cultural paper in the country, is in dire straits. I gave my best years I’ve been involved with the paper since the start, programming their CMS and writing small pieces. Now  one of their investors has pulled out, and they are asking readers to buy pieces of the paper. They [ READ MORE ]

Enjoy my muxtape

Thanks to John Gruber I recently discovered Muxtape – a great app to create and share mixtapes. I’ve created one, naturally, and invite you to listen! [ READ MORE ]

Bemba is really gaining speed

  • March 25th, 2008
  • Posted in tech

Ah … we were so innocent back then! Bemba was just a child and we could tweak to our heart’s content. Not any more! This thing is really picking up speed. It’s even getting quite hard to follow all new links in Explore. Luckily I have just added RSS feeds per topic. Now I can just follow Science, [ READ MORE ]

Adobe Fireworks: license revoked. Adobe sucks.

  • March 21st, 2008
  • Posted in rants

Well there you go. Today, my license to Adobe Fireworks has stopped working. Mind you, this is a product I have purchased quite legally. I have never issued it to anyone. I have even diligently installed it to only one computer. Yet today Adobe has decided that my license has expired/is invalid/has been deactivated/whatever. This is [ READ MORE ]

Ruby 1.9: sexy hashes

I am falling in love with Ruby 1.9 something fierce! There’s a new literal Hash syntax and I am completely smitten! [ READ MORE ]

Improvements to `char` in Ruby 1.9

  • March 15th, 2008
  • Posted in ruby

The new version of the Ruby language brings improvements to characters. There is no `char` concept per se (which is fine), but the implementation now makes a lot more sense. [ READ MORE ]

Ruby 1.9's charsets FTW

  • March 12th, 2008
  • Posted in ruby

I come from a Java background. With all it’s flaws, Java’s support for character sets is very good. All literal strings are UTF-8 and source files can be ASCII, iso or utf as well. Ruby 1.8 is only so-so and the earliest versions of Rails with their iso-8859-1 default were not helpful too. Fortunately the [ READ MORE ]

Sweeter unit tests in Rails 2.0

  • March 11th, 2008
  • Posted in ruby . tech

I have only just now discovered a sweet new feature of Rails 2.0. Unit and functional tests have gotten a lot sweeter. I can now subclass ActionController::TestCase and do away with all the setup cruft that used to be there. Sweet! [ READ MORE ]