For a soon to be announced project I needed to setup a main website/cms with WordPress and then within that same domain also setup a Rails application. This is trickier than it sounds as WordPress on Nginx has some very specific setup requirements in order for pretty URLs to work. There were also lots of tutorials online about how to [...]

I had a great time last Saturday at Raleigh Ruby Camp and met a host of Ruby on Rails developers working on interesting things. One of the discussions that occurred was lead by Mark Imbracio of 37 Signals. I’ve posted the audio below and have linked to some of the topics that came up in the discussion. The audio quality [...]

VMWare Fusion and Parallels have been the two dominant OS X virtualization methods for running Windows (or Linux) inside of OS X. While both are great applications, they each cost around $80 US. Recently, Sun Microsystems (makers of Solaris, big purple servers and pony tailed CEO’s) have unleashed a new virtualization product on the world: VirtualBox, and while it lacks [...]

MacApper is running a contest for the best “switcher” story: someone ditching Windows for the Mac. Today’s entry was interesting, Joe Goh founder of FunkeeMonk a windows programmer turned Mac software developer. Personally, I was less interested in his “switching story”, than in the story of how he got started with his business. As near as I can tell, Joe [...]

Found out about this very interesting application (system enhancement?) called ThisService by WaffleSoftware. Across all operating systems in modern computing there are both command line and GUI programs. While there are some limited ways of getting them to interact it’s usually a big tradeoff: – Command Line apps (of the Unix lineage) are small and allow you to pipe inputs [...]

Another disturbing development from the Mac Shareware front: Garrett Murray developed an application called xPad (stickies, text edit replacement) for OS X and was selling it as shareware. He agreed to sell the website, application and some other bits of intellectual property to Brian Ball of macZOT, a shareware promotion website. Sales apparently weren’t as brisk as Mr. Ball would [...]

I got one of the original MacMini’s when they were first released a couple of years ago. It’s ideal as a backup server / process automation tool. I put together some Automator actions that work with Transmit FTP to automatically download the websites I run, their databases, etc. and then replicate that to a huge removable hard drive I have. [...]

It’s nearly a throwaway line in Robert Cringely’s August 4th “I, Cringely” column, but it jumped out at me: He’s talking about why Apple’s Mac v. PC ads look so good online. the white backdrop dramatically lowers the visual complexity of the frames, allowing room for carrying more visual detail of the actors in the allotted bandwidth, and; those commercials [...]

My development environment has consisted of a Windows Machine, a Mac Mini and a Linux box (running Cent OS) for a while now. With the recent release of MySQL 5, I thought it would be amusing to both begin upgrading my development boxes and also install PHP+MySQL on all of the different machines to play with replication, etc. I ran [...]