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 have doctored a very unique and fun way for you to do this. By purchasing blocks, you make the actual paper appear.
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!
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, which is still doable. On to the next increase in scale…
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 painful and it reinforces my belief in the sad state of Adobe software. Their products are overpriced and underpowered. I vowe not to use their crap again until they have significantly stepped up their game.
I am installing Pixelmator as I type this. Fuck you Adobe!
I am falling in love with Ruby 1.9 something fierce! There’s a new literal Hash syntax and I am completely smitten!
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.
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 upcoming 1.9 release of Ruby will make things right with a vengeance.
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! Continue reading
