Bemba is really gaining speed

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…

Adobe Fireworks: license revoked. Adobe sucks.

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!

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!

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Improvements to `char` in Ruby 1.9

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.

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Ruby 1.9's charsets FTW

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.

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Sweeter unit tests in Rails 2.0

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

Checking if popup windows are opened

Even though I’m not a javascript noob, I still manage to learn something every day. To see if a popup windows has opened, the return value of the window.open call in javascript must not be equal to null. Simple and effective. linky

Annyoing Adobe applications

My Adobe apps are bugging me and I regret ever having purchased them. I will make sure not to purchase one of their slow proggies ever again.
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Myspace captcha is broken

My favorite site (NOT) is bugging me once again. Fix your damn CAPTCHA, myspace! Read more

Language trickery and EJB

Or: why I left Java. Here.